Islam, Sovereignty, and Democracy: A Turkish View

In this article, some conceptual and empirical relations between Islam, sovereignty, and democracy will be examined, with comparisons to Christianity. In the first part of the article, the historical conditions of the formation of the dualist (Christianity) and monist (Islam) political theories of the two religions will be examined. This will be followed by a conceptualization of the beginning and end of their respective “middle ages.” It will be argued that the end of the Islamic middle ages was marked, in some Islamic countries, by the following phenomena: the building of a secular state apparatus; the replacement of "religion" by “nation” as the basis of the sovereignty of the new state; the deportation of Islam from the state to society; and the re-birth of Islam in the hands of the social actors as a political ideology aiming at re-capturing the state it had lost. In the final sections, the problematic relationship between secularization and democratization in the Islamic world will be examined, and the experiments with secularization in the Islamic world will be compared with those of France. It will be observed that what made secularization and democracy compatible in France was a combination of historical factors (the existence of the Church that controlled the social manifestations of religion; the state's success in nation-building; the efficiency of the secular judicial system; and the state's satisfactory performance in the area of socioeconomic development), which were largely absent in the Islamic contexts, with the possible exception of Turkey.