Symbol over substance

If the current President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, could be compared to Sultan Mehmet II, who made the Ottoman conquest formal in the name of Islam by praying in the Cathedral of Hagia Sophia is a theoretical question. But the outrage and alternate wave of triumphalism after the reconversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque does not signify Islamisation and Ottomanisation of Istanbul as it might have once done. The significance of the recent act of reconversion lies elsewhere. Just as Mehmet the Conqueror, with his interest in forging links with the Roman Empire, was hailed to be very much a man of his time, it might appear today that Erdoğan speaks the voice of the zeitgeist, as the global trend is to revert to authoritarian majoritarianism.

But what is almost certain is that this act of reconversion and consequent declaration of the mosque being open to Muslims and non-Muslims alike is a challenge to the theme of secularism dominant in the history of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic from the early 19th century onwards. It was not until the mid-1920s that the Republican government under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk expressly sought to put an end to the political, social and cultural hegemony of Islamic institutions, over which he sought to achieve a total dominance of the secular State.

It is also significant that because of the nature of Turkey’s secularism being so hard-earned, coming about at the cost of a bitter struggle against a dominant religion – secularism was achieved, to cite two examples, in Quebec in a pitched battle against the Catholic church and in Turkey against Islam in the former caliphate – a certain version of French and Turkish secularism cannot be held to represent a true position of neutrality because of its antagonistic relationship to religion. And that’s how the symbolic act of the reconversion of the iconographic Hagia Sophia into a mosque can be cited, by extension, as a metaphor of the Indian predicament.

The removal of religious elements from government, law, education and culture was fundamental to the Kemalist concept of modernity and his idea of secularism. Nehruvian tradition in India upholds an unrevised Western model of secularism and its upholders seek a stricter separation of religion from political life. The Gandhian tradition that conceives of tolerance as a distinctively Indian model of secularism proved to be more realistic because it does not rule out the role of religion in Indian society. In India, the Nehruvian tradition, by seeking to detach religion from political life, made religionists suspicious of his brand of secularism. The middle space was occupied by proponents of the Gandhian tradition who championed the virtue of religious pluralism (“Sarva Dharma Sama Bhava”) by the dictum of equal respect for all religions, roots of which were to be found in the indigenous traditions of tolerance.

Much in the same instance, many social representations are rooted in different dimensions of the concept of secularism in Turkey. For Turkey, the Kemalist imposition was resented by many since his brand of secularism was not transmitted naturally and implicitly but, on the contrary, was a cultural imposition in the name of modernity which focused on enculturation and forceful assimilation.

Ataturk, who identified himself with the position of the most extreme ‘Westernists’ (garbcılar) of the Young Turk era, failed to harmonise European civilisation (medeniyet) with Turkish culture (hars). However acceptable and agreeable it sounds to an Eurocentric, westernised mind to know that secularism became one of the main planks of Kemalist ideology, scientism and biological materialism (as well as social Darwinism) occupied a more prominent place in Kemalist thinking. It has lessons for us. The gradual withering of the Nehruvian consensus and the rise of the right-wing of India contain germs of the social upheaval experienced by Turkey as it is starkly similar to the erosion of Kemalism there.

Kemal’s famous dictum, “the only real spiritual guide in life is positive science” (müspet ilim), or the passage in his 1933 anniversary speech, where he proclaims that “the torch which the Turkish nation holds in its hand while marching on the road towards progress and civilisation is positive science,” can be compared with Nehru’s assumption that the spread of science and technology and economic development would result in a greater secularisation of Indian society and polity. That this has not happened and the forces of fundamentalism in both the Hindus and Muslims have strengthened and the polity has become more communalised can again be related to the rise of Islam in Turkey.

The alternative of militant Kemalism saw secularism as an order protecting freedom of conscience and religion and made “a distinction between a lay public arena and religiously inspired individuals who should be allowed to function in it and express their religiosity.” It reminds one of the need for moderation, as even a surfeit of good things administered from above and with force on the people of a nation can prove counter-productive.

Erdoğan and Ataturk represent the dichotomy of religion and secularism as much as Modi and Nehru signify the extreme pulls between which the idea of India and Indianness is torn. If the Hagia Sophia is an outcome of competing pasts, so is the most iconic representation of the India belonging to the Mughal past – the Taj Mahal. To forfeit (or underplay) the Mughal past is to forfeit the Taj Mahal, just in case we are not taught to think of it as a temple to the Hindu god Shiva. The impulse of revanchism remains the same, be it in the construction of a Ram temple in India or Erdoğan’s reconversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque, as both acts, in seeking to orchestrate majoritarian movements, prize symbol over substance. The only lesson to draw for India is to accept the multiplicity of her cultural wealth and to save it from the forces of revisionism, and to not to keep on reclaiming it from its imaginary enemies.