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Out of 50 Muslim-majority countries around the world, only six are electoral democracies. This problem has multiple material and ideational causes. This essay focuses on one ideational factor: the dominant method of Islamic law. The essay explains how this method became dominant after the eleventh century and why it causes the incompatibility between sharia (Islamic law) and democracy. The essay suggests further research to be published in Muslim Politics Review and other journals about how to develop alternative Islamic legal methods, which would be open to rationalism and empirical observations.

There exist severe restrictions over religious dissent in most Muslim-majority countries. This problem is associated with the alliance between religious and political authorities in these cases. I argue that the alliance between Islamic scholars (the ulema) and the state authorities was historically constructed, instead of being a characteristic of Islam. Hence, the essentialist idea that Islam inherently rejects religion-state separation, whereas Christianity endorses it, is misleading. Instead, this article shows that the ulema-state alliance in the Muslim world was constructed after the mid-eleventh century, as well as revealing that the church-state separation in Western Europe was also historically institutionalized during that period. Using comparative-historical methods, the article explains the political and socioeconomic backgrounds of these epochal transformations. It particularly focuses on the relations between religious, political, intellectual, and economic classes.

In this ambitious and impressive book, Ozgur Koca successfully analyses eminent Muslim thinkers’ views about causality in terms of the relationship between God, humans and nature from the mid-eight...

Why do foreign aids, which are planned to promote democratization, lead to opposite results in certain cases? Some scholars have a deterministic answer to this question: they categorize foreign aid...

Why did Turkish policies toward Syria and Egypt in 2011–15 largely fail? At the individual level, the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdogan was plagued by populism in the sense that he uses foreign policy issues for the sake of domestic party politics without pursuing long-term international strategies. At the state level, Turkey's military and diplomatic capacity was not sufficient to shape the political transformations in Syria and Egypt. At the international level, Turkey could not effectively respond to the challenges of the Iranian-led and Saudi Arabian–led blocs. The former supported the regime of Bashar al-Assad and the latter backed the military coup in Egypt. Turkey needed the support of its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies against these two rival blocs. However, Erdogan's populist discourse and tendency toward Islamist authoritarianism further deteriorated Turkey's relations with its Western allies.

Islam has increasingly become an internal affair in several western European countries, where the Muslim population has grown to ten to fifteen million. In recent years, the European public has intensely discussed Muslims and Islam on several occasions, from terrorist attacks in London and Madrid to the debates on Danish cartoons. In short, there is today a "Muslim question" in the minds of many European politicians when it comes to the issues of immigration, integration, and security. European states have pursued diverse policies to regulate their Muslim populations. The most controversial of these policies is France's recent ban on wearing Muslim headscarves in public schools, which has been discussed in France and abroad since 1989. Other European countries, however, have taken Muslim students' headscarves as a part of their individual freedom and have not prohibited them. A survey of twelve major French and British newspapers between 1989 and 1999 shows how controversial the issue was in France, in comparison to Britain. According to the survey, the number of articles on the headscarf issue in French newspapers reached 1,174, whereas the British newspapers carried only eighteen.) As a result of this debate, a bill was passed in the French assembly and the senate and signed into the law by President Jacques Chirac in March 2004. The first article of the new law

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Islam has generally been represented in the media as a political ideology and some academics have over-emphasized this political image of Islam. These are not baseless speculations; there are several political Islamic groups worldwide. However, there are also many apolitical Islamic groups. This article analyzes one of the most influential apolitical Islamic movements in the world, the Nurcus, and its founder, Bediuzzaman Said Nursi. Nursi, the author of the Risale-i Nur collection, emphasized the ascetic aspect of Islam: ‘Ninety-nine percent of Islam is about ethics, worship, the hereafter, and virtue. Only one percent is about politics; leave that to the rulers.’ He also added, ‘I seek refuge in God from Satan and [party] politics.’ Through the analysis of Nursi's thought and activism, the article will try to answer the following questions: Was Nursi a Sufi? What are the theological and structural bases of Nursi's apolitical interpretation of Islam? What ...

Why do secular states pursue substantially different policies toward religion? The United States, France, and Turkey are secular states that lack any official religion and have legal systems free from religious control. The French and Turkish states have banned students' headscarves in public schools, whereas the U.S. has allowed students to wear religious symbols and attire. Using the method of process tracing, the author argues that state policies toward religion are the result of ideological struggles. In France and Turkey the dominant ideology is “assertive secularism,” which aims to exclude religion from the public sphere, while in the U.S., it is “passive secularism,” which tolerates public visibility of religion. Whether assertive or passive secularism became dominant in a particular case was the result of the particular historical conditions during the secular state-building period, especially the presence or absence of an ancien regime based on a marriage of monarchy and hegemonic religion.

In the aftermath of the September 11 events, debates raged about the tension between the West and the Muslim world, and between globalization and Islamic movements. Some authors were reminded of the "clash of civiliza tion" thesis arguing an essential cultural incompatibility between the West and the Muslim world.1 Others pointed to an antagonistic relationship between globalization, originating from and arguably controlled by the West, and Is lamic movements, which resist this process. The World Trade Center was tar geted because it symbolized globalization.2 According to this perspective, what we are seeing is a tension between Jihad and McWorld.3 Although these arguments are exaggerations, they are not baseless specula tion.4 There are Islamic movements that oppose globalization in order to pre serve their identities and ways of life. These movements see globalization as a new phase of Western colonialism. Therefore, their resistance to globalization

Throughout medieval times, the Catholic Church was a dominant sociopolitical power in Western and Central Europe. France had special status in this situation as the fille ainee de l'Eglise (elder daughter of the Church). Then, assertive secularism became the dominant ideology in such a Catholic country. The proponents and opponents of assertive secularism have different perspectives to explain this puzzle as Emile Poulat notes: “Our secularism has one history and two memories.” Beyond this ideological division there are two main approaches to the history of secularism in France. Bauberot attaches importance to continuity in his analysis. For him, the secularization of the French state was a gradual process. He defines the postrevolutionary period (1789–1806) as the first threshold of political secularization and the early Third Republic's secularization reforms (1881–1905) as the second threshold. Pena-Ruiz criticizes Bauberot's process-oriented argument and stresses that there were several moments of back and forth, rather than continuity in the French history of secularism. Pena-Ruiz emphasizes the emergence of the secular state in 1795 and the return to close church-state relations by the Concordat of 1801. According to his perspective, secularization reforms (1881–1905) meant a rupture from the Catholic past, rather than a result of an ongoing process. These two actually are not mutually exclusive perspectives. While examining the ideological dominance of assertive secularism, I use the change-based approach and take the early Third Republic (1875–1905) as the critical juncture.

During the presidential campaign in August 1980, the Republican presidential nominee, Ronald Reagan (1911–2004), unlike his rival Jimmy Carter, accepted an invitation to address evangelical Christians in Dallas. To the audience of “10,000 conservative Christians, including 2,500 pastors,” Reagan said, “I know this group can't endorse me, but I want you to know that I endorse you and what you are doing.” That event was an important step forward in Reagan's alliance with the Christian Right led by evangelical leaders, such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. The Christian Right was based on a decade-long activism as a reaction to several court decisions on issues such as the prohibition of Bible reading and organized prayer in schools, the legalization of abortion, and the removal of tax-exempt status of schools that practiced racial discrimination. Reagan's presidential inauguration in 1981 meant the beginning of a new era in state-religion relations in the United States. The conservatives, in general, and the Christian Right, in particular, gained a powerful ally at the White House, though some of them would later be disappointed by Reagan's lack of sufficient support for school prayer amendments and appointment of moderate conservative Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court. Reagan's presidency consolidated the alliance between the Christian Right and the Republican Party.

The debate between secularists and Islamic groups, a conspicuous feature of Turkish politics for decades, changed in the late 1990s when the political discourse of mainstream Islamic groups embraced secularism. The establishment elite advocate the existing French model of an ‘assertive secularism’, meaning that, in the public domain, the state supports only the ex- pression of a secular worldview, and formally excludes religion and religious symbols from that domain. The pro-Islamic conservatives, on the other hand, favour the American model of ‘passive secularism’, in which the state permits the expression of religion in the public do- main. In short, what Turkey has witnessed over the last decade is no longer a tussle between secularism and Islamism, but between two brands of secularism. Two actors have played crucial roles in this transformation: the Gülen movement and the Justice and Development (AK) Party. Recently the Gülen movement became an international actor and a defendant of passive secularism. Similarly, although the AK Party was originated from an Islamist Milli Görüş (National Outlook) movement, it is now a keen supporter of Turkey’s membership to the European Union and defends (passive) secularist, democratic regime. This paper analyses the transformation of these important social and political actors with regard to certain structural conditions, as well as the interactions between them.In April 2007, the international media covered Turkey for the protest meetings of more than a million people in three major cities, the military intervention to politics, and the abortive presidential election. According to several journalists and columnists, Turkey was experienc- ing another phase of the ongoing tension between the secularists and Islamists. Some major Turkish newspapers, such as Hürriyet, were asserting that the secularists finally achieved to bring together millions of opponents of the ruling Adalet ve Kalkınma (Justice and Development) (AK) Party. In addition to their dominance in military and judicial bureauc- racy, the secularists appeared to be maintaining the support of the majority of the people. The parliamentary elections that took place few months later, in July, revealed that the main- stream Turkish media’s presentation was misleading and the so-called secularists’ aspira- tions were unrealistic. The AK Party received 47 percent of the national votes, an unusual ratio for a multiparty system where there were 14 contesting parties. The main opposition, Cumhuriyet Halk (Republican People’s) Party (CHP), only received 21 percent of the votes, despite its alliance with the other leftist party. Both the national and international media’s misleading presentation of Turkish politics was not confined by the preferences of the vot- ers. Moreover, the media was primarily misleading with its use of the terms “Islamists” and “secularists.” What Turkey has witnessed for the last decade has not been a struggle between secularism and Islamism; but it has been a conflict between two types of secularism. As I elaborated else- where, the AK Party is not an Islamist party. It defends a particular understanding of secular- ism that differs from that of the CHP. Although several leaders of the AK Party historically belonged to an Islamist -Milli Görüş (National Outlook)- movement, they later experienced an ideational transformation and embraced a certain type of secularism that tolerates public visibility of religion. This transformation was not an isolated event, but part of a larger expe- rience that several other Islamic groups took part in. I argue that the AKP leaders’ interaction with the Gülen movement, in this regard, played an important role in the formation of the party’s new perspective toward secularism. In another article, I analyzed the transformation of the AK Party and Gülen movement with certain external (globalization process) and internal (the February 28 coup) conditions. In this essay, I will focus on the interaction between these two entities to explore their changing perspectives. I will first discuss the two different types of secularism that the Kemalists and conservatives defend in Turkey. Then, I will briefly summarize diverse discourses of the Milli Görüş and Gülen movements. Finally, I will examine the exchanges between the Gülen movement and the AK Party with regard to their rethinking of Islamism and secularism.

Le titre du livre, La Nouvelle Asie centrale ou la fabrication des nations, ne reflète pas parfaitement son contenu. L'ouvrage se concentre sur l'évolution de la fabrication des nations en Asie centrale depuis le Moyen Âge jusqu'à présent, et non pas sur la nouvelle Asie centrale. L'analyse des données historiques est en effet indispensable à la compréhension de la fabrication des nations. Le lecteur aurait cependant aimé que la situation actuelle soit plus développée qu'elle ne l'est. En dépit de ces réserves, La Nouvelle Asie centrale ou la fabrication des nations est une contribution de qualité aux études centre-asiatiques et à l'analyse de la formation des identités nationales. A. T. K., Kuru Ahmet t. Olivier Roy La Nouvelle Asie centrale ou la fabrication des nations , 1997. In: CEMOTI, n°32, 2001. Drogue et politique. pp. 347-351.