Sunday, August 29, 2010

In an article published a few days ago, Turkish journalist Mustafa Akyol wrote that the Turkish government should re-open the Aya Sofya as a church/mosque. The Aya Sofya was originally a Byzantine church but was transformed into a mosque after the Ottomans conquered the city in 1453. Once Turkey was declared a republic in 1923, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk transformed the building into a museum.

Akyol is just trying to be provocative, but the article seemed interesting in connection with the continuing efforts among many Americans to intimidate the people behind the Cordoba Initiative into abandoning their plans to construct a community center within a few blocks of ground zero.

In neither issue is much place given to secularists. In the case of the Cordoba House, I think the Cordoba Initiative people have no choice but to go through with building their community center exactly where they want to build it—the ugly effort that's underway in this country to deny people their civil rights must not be rewarded. Nevertheless, as a secularist I still find it odd to be advocating the construction of a community center with ties to organized religion.

In Istanbul, meanwhile, Akyol presents the Aya Sofya issue merely as an issue between Muslims and Christians. But there are lots of people, both Christian and Muslim, who don't like the increasing sacralization of public space that has been taking place in Turkey since the AK Party's predecessors starting winning elections in the mid-1990s.


The Aya Sofya

Without question, it's important for some people to do things like interfaith dialogue (the Washington Post has a special feature called "On Faith" that has been running for several years now), and that's fine. But in our efforts to engage one another's differences with regard to faith, it's also important, I think, to not forget the faithless or otherwise secular.



Nor should non-faith factors be forgotten with respect to the issues which are thought to divide faith. I'm sure that some people who support the construction of Cordoba House do so because they feel that having such a center close to 9/11 is an important gesture to make regarding interfaith communication—and again, that's fine. But by focusing on interfaith communication as a response to 9/11 I think there's also a risk of unwittingly strengthening the conception that 9/11 had something to do with Islam, rather than with American policy in the Middle East.

The Cordoba House community center has morphed into a civil rights issue, and it's for that reason that I think it's especially important that the center be built at its currently planned location.

In the case of the Aya Sofya, however, I think it's wrong to assume that only a faceless "state" is interested in preserving the secular nature of public space in Turkey. After all, it is this very issue—the regulation of piety in the public sphere—that splits most of the people who are either enthusiastically for or against the AK Party. 

These two cases, Cordoba House and the Aya Sofya, illustrate the different concepts of 'secularism' in the US and Turkey. In the US, where 'secularism' means a separation between the state and religious institutions, all that should matter is whether or not the Cordoba people are violating any local codes. As long as these codes are not being violated, the Cordoba people have a constitutional right to build their community center, and other people are trying to compromise that constitutional right by bullying them.

In Turkey, on the other hand, where 'secularism' means a laicist system of state control over religious institutions, it's elected officials who often decide the extent to which public space will be secularized or sacralized. Back in the 1990s, one of the big plans for some people in Istanbul's Refah Party (when Tayyip Erdogan got his start as mayor of Istanbul) was to construct a huge mosque in Taksim Park. Refah mayors in Beyoglu also tried, for about two weeks, to ban the consumption of alcohol on outdoor tables. More recently, the Ataturk Cultural Center has been closed down and the state theaters have been dispersed from Taksim into various parts of the city—the AKP folks will never, I think, wipe out the secular in Beyoglu, but they've sure tried hard to dilute what makes it special.

It's one thing for a secularist in the US to support the unfettered construction of religious buildings, and I do so mainly because I don't feel like my government is waging a campaign to sacralize public space in my immediate surroundings.

But if I did feel that way, as many people in Turkey do, I probably wouldn't be likely to agree with Akyol's proposal.