One cannot escape the fact that freedom of religion is limited in Turkey, for Alevis and other religious minorities.
—Ali YamanFootnote 1The whole notion of majority/minority in religious terms must be categorically dismantled and overcome.
—Hamid DabashiFootnote 2INTRODUCTION
In the wake of ongoing political transformations in the Middle East and North Africa, the fate of religious minorities is in the spotlight. Proponents of minority rights have called for urgent measures to protect the Copts in Egypt, the Ahmadiyya in Pakistan, and the Baha'i in Iran, Egypt, and elsewhere. Legal protections for religious freedom have become a “go-to” solution for supporting religious diversity, shielding minority populations from discriminatory practices, and preventing religious violence. Everyone seems to be in on the act: enshrined in international agreements and promoted by a small army of global experts and authorities, legal protections for religious minorities are presented as the solution to the challenges of living with social and religious diversity.Footnote 3
This article explores a specific example of the perils and pitfalls of adopting “religion” as a category to draw together individuals and communities as corporate bodies that are depicted as in need of legal protection to achieve freedom. Ongoing uncertainty about the legal and religious status of the Alevis in Turkey opens a space in which to explore claims to the category of religious minority, constructs of religious freedom, and the implications of contemporary legal approaches to managing religious difference. This article begins with a short introduction to the Alevis, a social group that was formally constituted as a single community relatively recently as part of the Turkish nation-building project. It then evaluates two legal definitions of Alevism by the Turkish state and the European Court of Human Rights.Footnote 4 These distinct institutional contexts produce very different constructions of Alevism with significant legal and political implications for arbitrating major social issues in Turkey, such as who is a Muslim, who is a minority, and what is religion. Both the Presidency of Religious Affairs and the European Court overstate the uniformity and obscure the deep multiplicity of Alevism as a lived tradition, while reinforcing the state's capacity to classify and govern its citizens as religious subjects. The point is not simply that Alevi identity is indeterminate but rather that legal constructions of Alevism as a religious tradition and Alevis as a religious minority shape Alevism and the Turkish socio-political landscape in specific ways.
The Presidency of Religious Affairs, or Diyanet Isleri Baskanligi (hereafter Diyanet) is the Turkish state agency charged with regulating acceptable Turkish religion at home and abroad. It is the primary government agency in which conflicting Alevi claims for recognition and religious agency are aired and contested. The Diyanet, as well as the Turkish Ministry of Education, which directly oversees religious education policy, both treat Alevism as a heterodox or “mystic” interpretation of Sunni Islam that departs from the mainstream.Footnote 5 This precludes Alevi claims for legal privileges granted by the state to Sunni institutions and practices, while also denying to Alevis the privileges granted to officially recognized religious minorities, including Christians and Jews. Neither fish nor fowl, the Alevi exist in a kind of legal limbo.
This interpretation of Alevism has had adverse implications for Alevis due to a lack of official recognition for communal practices. It has also had an impact on other domains such as property rights, educational policy, and access to courts. A range of Alevi associations and foundations has challenged the state's official interpretation of Alevism and institutionalization of Turkish secularism (laiklik). While most Alevis regard Alevism as a non-Sunni variation of Islam, some claim that Alevism is not part of Islamic tradition, and others insist that it is not a religion at all. The Diyanet's move to incorporate and subsume the Alevis under Turkish religious (that is, Sunni) orthodoxy effaces this ambiguity and contestation.
The European Court of Human Rights, on the other hand, defines Alevis as a collective non-Sunni Muslim subject of minority rights guaranteed by the Turkish state and international law. The Court's approach to Alevism in the Zengin opinion, discussed below, reflects the assumption that religious majorities and minorities are stable, well-defined groups that exist prior to law and politics. To refuse identity-based recognition for such already-existing groups, in this account, is to obstruct democratization and hinder the emergence of tolerant legal regimes for managing religious difference. The Court's inclination to support legal protection for Alevis and other “religious minorities” abroad is founded in a long and contested history of support for minority rights in the Middle East.Footnote 6 European attempts to defend an Alevi “religious minority” in Turkey are one element in a broader European- and American-sponsored set of international initiatives to institutionalize the right to legal personality for minority religions, create tolerant and democratic religious subjects, and promote a right to freedom of religion or belief globally.Footnote 7 An example is the EU Guidelines on the Promotion and Protection of Freedom of Religion or Belief, adopted in June 2013 by the Council of Foreign Affairs of the European Union.Footnote 8
Held up against the Diyanet's choice to fold Alevism into Sunni Hanefi interpretations of Islam, the European Court appears to offer an appealing compromise. Granting a degree of autonomy to the Alevis as a non-Sunni Muslim minority would seem to avoid trampling on Alevi collective agency and identity under the Diyanet's de facto Sunni majoritarian establishment. Rather than serving as a vector of religious liberalization and religious freedom, however, the Court's attempt to fix a collective Alevi minority subject in law serves to distinguish Alevis officially from non-Alevi Turkish citizens in religious terms. This distinction has consequences not only for Alevis' official legal status in Turkey, but also for the practices associated with Alevism. Like all traditions, Alevism is shaped in particular ways when it is defined legally in religious terms. As Pamela Slotte explains, “when analyzing the case law of the Court, we are not just studying a legal vocabulary. We analyze a way to imagine human life that governs conduct. How does human rights law affect the way we think about religion, and how does it regulate the space in which people are given the opportunity to live out their faith?”Footnote 9 Efforts to secure legal recognition for Alevis as a static, collective object of minority (religious) rights, guaranteed by international authorities and recognized in state law, create specific kinds of spaces in which Alevis can “live out their faith.”Footnote 10 These efforts prescribe a particular kind of social order that renders “specific notions of freedom and unfreedom possible and imaginable.”Footnote 11 Legally designating groups of people as “Alevis,” as “minorities,” and as a “religion” has important consequences for the people grouped together under these designations. Like all legal approximations of religion, the international religious rights “solution” formalizes and entrenches forms of social and religious difference that, while distinct from the forms and categories imposed by the Diyanet, also limit the spaces in which Alevis can individually and collectively articulate alternate forms of subjectivity, agency, and community. It stabilizes Alevi collective identity in religious terms, fixes its relationship to Sunni tradition, and reinforces a conventional Turkish statist approach to governing religion.
FROM KIZILBAŞ TO ALEVIS: CONSTRUCTING AND CONTESTING ALEVISM
Defining Alevism is tricky. Though frequently described by academics and journalists as a syncretic and heterodox cultural and religious tradition drawing on elements of pre-Islamic shamanism, Sufism, and Shi'a Islam, there are many views on the subject and little agreement. As Elise Massicard explains:
Some define Aleviness as a religious phenomenon—as the true Islam, or a branch of Islam tinged with Shi'a elements and Turkishness, as a religion in its own right, or even as the essence of secularism. Others see it as a primarily political phenomenon—which can range from a philosophy of struggle and resistance against injustice, to a tolerant way of living or even as the epitome of democracy. Yet others emphasize its shamanistic (Turkish) or Zoroastrian (Kurdish) elements in order to define Aleviness in accordance to ethnic aspects . . . Aleviness would seem to be an overarching way of life of groups who were rural for a long time: a religion, culture and affiliation to a group with its own rules, all at the same time.Footnote 12
Media representations of the Alevis also reflect this lack of agreement. Gareth Jenkins notes,
The Alevis are often described as a branch of the Shia Muslim tradition. This is misleading. Although they share with Shiites veneration for the Prophet Muhammad's nephew Ali, Alevism is not so much a form of Shia Islam as a syncretic, pluralistic tradition, including elements from Islam, shamanism, Christianity, and the pre-Christian religions of rural Anatolia.Footnote 13
The Turkish daily Hurriyet describes a diversity of understandings of Alevism, noting that, “some Alevis perceive themselves as a sect of Islam, other Alevis see themselves as a different religion while others reject the notion that Alevism is a religion at all.”Footnote 14
The term Alevism (Turkish: Alevilik) is a relatively recent innovation. Though used sporadically in the last decades of the Ottoman Empire (in the late nineteenth century) among the Kızılbaş to indicate loyalty to or descent from Ali, the term only became prevalent in the early twentieth century to refer to “a new trans-regional identity linking previously only partially connected groups which shared similar narratives, beliefs, as well as social and ritual practices.”Footnote 15 As Markus Dressler points out, the creation of Alevism as a category is inextricably bound up with the construction of Turkishness and the project of Turkish nation building:
Those groups that are today labeled Alevis in Turkey were historically referred to as Kızılbaş, “Redhead.” What is important is that the name change came with a new signification. The heterogeneous Kızılbaş communities were, until the late Ottoman period, generally considered as heretics who were only, if at all, superficially Muslim, and not yet in any way associated with Turkishness. The concept Alevism homogenized these groups, connected them to Turkish culture, and integrated them into Islam, while at the same time asserting their “heterodoxy.”Footnote 16
Definitions of Alevism as “heterodox” or “syncretistic,” then, rely on an implicit normalization of legalist Sunni Islamic orthodoxy. This not only marginalizes Alevism in relation to Sunnism but also perpetuates a powerful myth purveyed by the Turkish state and others that Sunni Islam is a homogenous, stable, and fixed tradition with clearly defined boundaries. As Dressler explains, “the modern othering of the Alevis is dialectically related to the normalization of a Sunni-Muslim identity, just as in the 16th century the Kızılbaş question played an important role in the consolidation of Sunni Ottoman and Shiite Safavid doctrines, respectively.”Footnote 17 The emergent Turkish state established a foundational connection between Sunni Muslim identity (itthad-ı anasir İslamiye, or “union of Muslim elements”) and Turkish national identity in part through distinguishing both from something called “Alevism.”Footnote 18
Today those groups distinguished as “Alevis” are estimated to comprise 15 to 20 percent of the Turkish population, of which approximately one-third speak Kurdish dialects (Kurmanji or Zazaki). Most do not attend mosques, but many hold rituals known as cem, which are held in cemevi, or meeting houses, presided over by dede, or Alevi holy men. The cem ritual involves praying to Ali, recalling the names of the first twelve imams, and mourning the martyrdom of Hüseyin. Prayers, funerals, marriages, and other blessings draw not only on the Turkish prayers of the cem but may also involve a Sunni mosque hoca.Footnote 19 Turkish Alevis are sometimes confused with Arab Alawites, who live principally in Syria, with a significant number also in Turkey's Hatay province.Footnote 20
In the 1980s a diverse set of social movements emerged that became known in Turkey and abroad as the “Alevi revival,” a flowering of public activism and advocacy that attracted the attention of the EU and the international human rights community. A wide spectrum of Alevi organizations participated in the revival, ranging from the Pir Sultan Abdal Association, which approaches Alevism as a socialist resistance movement, to the Cem Foundation, which views Alevism as a Turkish interpretation of Islam, to the Ehl-i Beyt Foundation, which approaches it as a Shiʿa interpretation of Islam.Footnote 21 Among other activities, some of these advocates began to lobby in favor of recognition of Alevism as a minority sect or religion understood as either a variation of Islam or, less frequently, as distinct from Islam altogether.Footnote 22 The diversity of interpretations of Alevism in relation to Islam among these groups is striking; as Talha Köse explains, those who believe that there can be ‘Alevilik’ without Ali (Alisiz Alevilik) consider Ehl-i Beyt or the family of the Prophet Mohammed and Islamic sources as minor components of the syncretic tradition of Alevism while others argue that the Alevilik is the essence and/or Turkish interpretation of Islam.Footnote 23
Alevi representatives are also divided over the advantages and drawbacks of being classified as a minority religion or ethnicity.Footnote 24 Some seek to legally entrench a form of communal identity through the Turkish legal system,Footnote 25 while others see minority status as a political liability to be rejected.Footnote 26 For historical reasons minority status in Turkey is connected at the most basic level to non-Muslim status—such that to be classified as a “minority” raises immediate questions about religion, and specifically one's relation to Islam and the Turkish nationalist project. As an Alevi from Yenibosna Cemhouse interviewed by Esra Özyürek explains:
I think being a minority is a bad thing in this country. We are not like Armenians or Jews. There is pressure on us but we also have some freedom. I am afraid that the term “minority” in the European Union report can be used in a harmful manner. If they see us just like the way they see Armenians, it will be worse for us. You know, they may even see us in oppositional terms with nationalism.Footnote 27
This statement reflects the legacy of a suspicion of minority rights that emerged after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, when many Turkish statesmen attributed the Empire's failure to the persistence of millet divisionsFootnote 28 and the inability of reform efforts (ittihad-ı anasır) to create an inclusive formula of Ottoman citizenship and nationality. In this context claims to minority rights came to be seen with suspicion, “not as a matter of respect, freedom, liberty or equality within the borders of a shared polity, but more as the instrument of ethnic dismemberment and as a pretext for external interference.”Footnote 29 The association between official minority status and being non-Muslim, and thus potentially subjected to social discrimination and marginalization, is a legacy of this eraFootnote 30:
In Turkey, minority status, defined by the 1923 Lausanne Treaty, acknowledges only non-Muslim groups such as Jews, Armenians, and Greeks. If people from Muslim ethno-linguistic groups such as Kurds, the Laz, and the Circessians make a claim about being minorities and start organizations to promote their rights, they are imprisoned “for challenging the national unity and harming the country by being divisive.”Footnote 31
European powers played a central role in negotiating the Lausanne Treaty, and contemporary European efforts to promote the rights of religious minorities in the Middle East draw their legitimacy in part from a long history of European intervention on behalf of Christians in the region.Footnote 32 Given the complex history surrounding the term “minority” in Turkey and the broader region it is not surprising that both Pir Sultan Abdal Association and Cem Foundation prefer the term asli unsur to describe the Alevis—a term used historically to refer to one of the founding constituents or “fundamental elements” of the Turkish RepublicFootnote 33—a classification that, in their view, emphasizes Alevis' status as long-standing and loyal citizens of the Republic.
Lobbying in favor of religious minority status, however, is an active Alevi diaspora, particularly in Germany, where Alevism has attained legal recognition as a religion.Footnote 34 German Alevis tend to be more supportive of the recognition of Alevilik as a separate religion distinct from Islam.Footnote 35 In contrast with the Cem Foundation's support for an “Alevi Islam,” the chairman of the Dede Commission of the Federation of Alevi Communities in Germany, Hasan Kılavuz, has rejected attempts to associate Alevism with Islamic tradition:
Alevilik is a belief (inanç) in its own right. Alevis possess a belief that sees God everywhere in the universe. Alevis performed their worship and beliefs for a thousand years in a modest and extremely pure form; today, some dedes try to decorate this form of belief with fake pearls. These dedes, which are insecure about themselves, which are carried away by a minority complex towards the Sunni Muslim faith, distance the essence of Alevism from our traditions and customs . . . We cannot connect the faith of the Anatolian Alevis with the basic principles of the Islamic religion.Footnote 36
Özyürek attributes the emergence in Germany of a self-definition of Alevism as a publicly expressed independent religion to a 1986 decision by the European Parliament to subsidize associations promoting immigrant cultures and identities. This decision, alongside other factors such as the “minoritization” and “ethnicization” of Alevis through the German Foreigner's Law (Ausländergesetz),Footnote 37 illustrate the extent to which legal and administrative designations have shaped Alevism in particular ways. In this case, these designations incentivized Alevis living in Europe to organize as Alevis rather than along other lines of collective interest or affiliation, such as trade unions or neighborhood associations.Footnote 38 As Ayhan Kaya explains, “Turkish migrants have organized themselves along ethnic lines because the institutional context has made them do so.”Footnote 39 German and European recognition of the Alevis as a religious minority separate from Sunnis, however, has been received with mixed feelings and considerable skepticism in Turkey, where many Alevis do not see minority status as a solution to their problems with the state. Under the Turkish regime of secularism, a minority designation marks them as non-Muslims, thereby excluding them from dominant renderings of Turkish citizenship and potentially subjecting them to increased social marginalization and discrimination.Footnote 40
ALEVISM UNDER TURKISH SECULARISM
The Turkish state's definition of Alevism is an essential building block of Turkish secularism, known in Turkish as laiklik.Footnote 41 At the founding of the Republic, Nilüfer Göle explains, “secularism underpinned the ideal of a national community ‘free of religion,’ yet simultaneously it implicitly defined this community in terms of a Muslim and Sunnite majority, in counter distinction with non-Muslim minorities of the cosmopolitan empire as well as the Alevites and Kurds.”Footnote 42 The arm of the state responsible for overseeing religious matters and ensuring their separation under law from other affairs of state is the Presidency of Religious Affairs, the Diyanet.Footnote 43 Established in 1924 by the same law that abolished the Caliphate and the Commissariat or Vekyalet for the Sheri'eh and Evqaf, the Diyanet is charged with “the dispatch of all cases and concerns of the Exalted Islamic Faith which relate to dogma and ritual, and for the administration of state foundations.”Footnote 44 The scope of the Diyanet's activities and its budget has changed over the years. In 2012 its budget was approximately $2 billion, larger than that of the Ministry of Interior.Footnote 45 Reporting to the Prime Minister's Office, Diyanet is charged with doing research on Islamic-related matters, administering and maintaining mosques in Turkey,Footnote 46 and appointing and supervising Turkish imams, of which there are over 85,000. It has five departments: the Higher Committee for Religious Affairs (an advisory council), Education (including Qur'an courses for children and adults), Religious Services (services for families, discipleship, mosque services, and social and cultural services with a religious content), and Publications and Public Relations. While muftis and other religious personnel oversee domestic activities, the Diyanet also employs religious counselors, diplomatic attachés, and other personnel to conduct activities overseas.Footnote 47 As of 2011 there were approximately 1,350 Diyanet employees stationed in eighty-one countries, including a permanent representative in Washington, DC.Footnote 48
In contemporary Turkey the Diyanet promotes a version of Sunni Hanefi Islam that incorporates and defines Alevism as an interpretation of Islam. As Andrew Davison explains, “the state contains established relations of what are constituted as oversight, interpretation, service, and supervision for the teaching, training, and employment of all religious personnel and, through the offices of the mosques and publishing houses of the Directorate of Religious Affairs, the promotion and publication of a State Islam.”Footnote 49 The Diyanet does not recognize Alevism as a complex of traditions whose identity is—like all religious traditions—fundamentally indeterminate and contested. Rather, it categorizes and stabilizes Alevism as an “interpretation of Islam” that is linked to the “common share of Islam.” Former president of the Diyanet Ali Bardakoglu makes this clear: “Discussing whether Alevis are Muslim or not is an insult against Islam. All Alevis are Muslim. Nobody should be deceived by the West and claim that Alevism is outside the fold of Islam.”Footnote 50
Alevis are ineligible for special treatment by the state as a religious minority, while at the same time their non-Sunni practices are categorized by the state as “cultural” and not religious.Footnote 51 For instance most cemevi, or houses of worship, are treated as cultural centers. “Houses of worship are not recognized, nor are they provided the free water and property tax breaks that mosques, churches, and synagogues receive. Alevism is not taught in textbooks or in state divinity schools. Alevi prayer and community leaders are not trained or funded by state resources.”Footnote 52 Since 2007 Alevism has appeared in textbooks under the section “Turkish Sunnite Islam,” as discussed below;Footnote 53 nonetheless, the official co-optation and domestication of Alevism authorizes the state “to deny any support for or recognition of Alevi practices by branding them as particularist and thus in conflict with the supposedly impartial position of the state in its monopoly over religion in the public sphere.”Footnote 54
As is the case in all countries that privilege and regulate religion in law, the Diyanet's legal and religious definition and management of Alevism is a critical feature of Turkish nationalist discourse and the Turkish nation-building project. As İştar Gözaydın explains:
The Presidency of Religious Affairs claims that Alevis and Sunnites are not subject to discrimination because, except for certain local customs and beliefs, there are no differences between these two sects as to basic religious issues; and this actually indicates a denial of any separate ‘Alevi’ religious identity . . . The Presidency of Religious Affairs' pretending to be unaware of the religious belief of the Alevi population, and its building of mosques in Alevi villages, is obviously a pressure exerted by the state to implant the Sunnite belief in this section of society.Footnote 55
Challenges to the state's official position on the status of Alevism are met with skepticism not only because they call into question official interpretations of Islam, but also because they destabilize a nationalist project which has subsumed the Alevis under the state's de facto Sunni establishment from the earliest days of the Republic. Today these challenges are proliferating, destabilizing the state's ambitious and continual efforts to reproduce the Turkish nation through the centralized and hierarchical state regulation of its Muslim and non-Muslim citizen-subjects both at home and abroad. Since the 1980s, and particularly since the brief democratic opening in the second half of the 2000s, Alevis have responded to their predicament with a series of demands ranging from “restructuring the role of the dedes' spiritual leadership to employment of the dedes as religious personnel, from planning of cemevis as places of worship to the demand for an apology by the state for all the injustices done to them.”Footnote 56 While some have sought official state recognition and a share of the religious affairs budget (Cumhuriyetçi Eğitim ve Kültür Merkezi Vakfı/Republican Education and Culture Center Foundation and the Ehli Beyt Foundation), others have demanded the outright closure of the State Directorate of Religious Affairs (Alevi Bektaşi Federation). Alevi-state tensions are palpable in disputes over the uncertain status of the Madımak Hotel—the site of the Sivas massacre, where thirty-seven Alevi intellectuals were burned alive in July 1993;Footnote 57 legal status of and state support for cemevis as places of worship; and the content of mandatory religious education courses in public schools.Footnote 58 In 2007 controversy over religious education reached the European Court of Human Rights, which settled on a different legal definition of Alevism.
ALEVISM UNDER EUROPEAN LAW
The European Court of Human Rights treats Alevism as a non-Sunni Muslim minority sect in need of legal protection. This is evident in the Court's October 2007 Zengin v. Turkey decision, which concluded that compulsory religious instruction in Turkish public schools violates the rights of religious minorities.Footnote 59 The opinion reflects an increasingly influential European consensus on the need to protect the rights of religious minorities globally. A central claim of this article is that rather than serving as a vector of religious liberalization and religious freedom, international pressure by the European Court and other outside actors and institutions to guarantee the legal rights of a collective Alevi minority subject reinforces the distinction between Alevis and non-Alevi Turkish citizens in religious terms. This not only obscures cross-cutting ties and affiliations between Alevi and non-Alevi communities but also reinforces the exclusionary connection forged by the Turkish state between Sunni Islam and Turkish nationalism.
The Zengin case involves the compatibility of religious education in Turkey with the right to education in the European Convention on Human Rights. Some form of religious education in public schools is the norm in Europe, though there is significant variation within and among states.Footnote 60 Of the forty-six Council of Europe member states, forty-three provide religious instruction in state schools. In twenty-five of the forty-six, including Turkey, religious instruction is compulsory.Footnote 61 According to the Turkish Ministry of Education, “the aim of the course is to teach students how ‘to put into practice the requirements of the belief individually, without any need of guidance from other authorities,’ and to distinguish religious knowledge from superstitions and traditions.”Footnote 62
Although some Alevi groups have called for the state to abolish compulsory religious instruction altogether, others have sought curricular reform or the right to apply for an exemption to the requirement on a case-by-case basis. As legally recognized non-Muslim minorities,Footnote 63 Christians and Jews in Turkey have since 1990 been permitted to apply for an exemption from the “Religious Culture and Moral Knowledge” courses. However, as Türkmen explains, there has been confusion regarding this rule, and in 1992 the Ministry of Education circulated a memorandum denying the 1990 decision. The latter explained that the courses had been modified to reflect concerns for other religions and would henceforth be mandatory for all Turkish students, though non-Muslim students would not be responsible for the chapters on Islamic practices.Footnote 64 In any event, Alevis remained ineligible for an exemption: “in this decision, only non-Muslims can be exempt from some chapters of the course, whereas Muslims from other sects are not mentioned.”Footnote 65
In 2001 Hasan Zengin filed a complaint with the Istanbul Governor's Office, Istanbul Administrative Court, and the Council of State claiming that mandatory religious education classes forced his then seventh-grade daughter, Eylem, to be inculcated with exclusively Sunni Islamic belief and practice, thereby infringing on her basic human rights. When the Court ruled against him, Mr. Zengin appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, which heard the case in 2006.Footnote 66 While ostensibly focused on whether Eylem's right to education had been violated by the compulsory religious education courses, in the background of the case hovered a broader question of how Alevism should be construed by the court, legally and religiously.
The Court's immediate task in Zengin was to assess the compatibility of the content of Turkish religious education courses with the right to education as outlined in the European Convention, not to weigh in on the relationship between Alevism and Sunni Islam as interpreted by the Turkish state. Judges were asked to determine “if the content-matter of this subject is taught in an objective, critical and pluralist manner . . . [and] whether appropriate provisions have been introduced in the Turkish educational system to ensure that parents' convictions are respected.”Footnote 67 The decision features a lengthy discussion of the content of the religious education courses, noting that, although “the syllabus for teaching in primary schools and the first cycle of secondary school, and all of the textbooks drawn up in accordance with the Ministry of Education's decision no. 373 of 19 September 2000, give greater priority to knowledge of Islam than they do to that of other religions and philosophies . . . this itself cannot be viewed as a departure from the principles of pluralism and objectivity which would amount to indoctrination” because Islam is the majority religion practiced in Turkey.Footnote 68 However, the Court also observes that the Government's contention that adequate information about the Alevis was taught in the ninth grade does not adequately compensate for the “absence of instruction in the basic elements of this faith in primary and secondary school” and that “the instruction provided in the school subject ‘religious culture and ethics’ cannot be considered to meet the criteria of objectivity and pluralism . . . and to respect the religious and philosophical convictions of Ms Zengin's father, a follower of the Alevi faith, on the subject of which the syllabus is clearly lacking.”Footnote 69 It found that the religious education classes, compulsory in Turkey since 1982, violate Article 2 of the First Additional Protocol of the European Convention concerned with the “right to education,”Footnote 70 a violation it attributed to “the inadequacy of the Turkish educational system, which, with regard to religious instruction, does not meet the requirements of objectivity and pluralism and provides no appropriate method for ensuring respect for parents' convictions.”Footnote 71 Turkey was enjoined to make adjustments to the religious education curriculum or make the lessons optional.
A 2008 case brought by Alevi parents Ali Kenanoğlu and Hatice Köse led to similar results, with the Turkish State Council agreeing with the European Court decision that the religious education course could not be mandatory. In refusing to comply with these rulings, the Ministry of Education explained that these decisions pertained to earlier course materials and that the textbooks had since been revised in 2007–2008 to include a new chapter on Alevism. Opponents of the new version of the textbook countered that they disagreed with its representation of Alevism as a “mystic interpretation of Sunnism.”Footnote 72 Türkmen describes the role of the Alevis in the newer textbooks as “the constitutive other through which the domination of the Sunni interpretation of Islam imposes its legitimacy.”Footnote 73 On November 6, 2010, one of Turkey's largest Alevi organizations, the Pir Sultan Abdal Cultural Association, staged a sit-down strike in Kadıköy Square in Istanbul to demand an end to mandatory religious education classes.Footnote 74 Activists cited the European Court's decision and the Turkish state's failure to act upon it as a factor in their mobilization.
In reaching a decision in Zengin, the Court appears torn between two alternative approaches to Alevism, both of which are indebted to the criteria of assessment used by the Turkish state in matters of religion: either Alevis are a kind of “religious minority” that deserves special dispensation with regard to compulsory religious education, or they are “Muslims” in the sense promoted by Bardakoglu and the Turkish state. “Muslims” in the latter sense would be individuals whose practices resemble those of the Sunni Muslim Turkish majority, with a particular version of Sunni Hanefi Islam serving as the de facto official religion of the secular Turkish state. Departing from the Turkish government's position that subsumes Alevism under Turkish state Islam, the Court concluded that the “Alevi faith” is “distinct from the Sunni understanding of Islam which is taught in schools” and allowed that the expression “‘religious convictions’ . . . is undoubtedly applicable to this faith.”Footnote 75 Alevism, then, is a “religious” conviction within the meaning of Article 2, and it is distinct from Sunni Islam. Thus the question of whether Alevism should be understood legally as part of Islam as defined by the Turkish state, or as something else, was resolved. The Court went with the latter. Note that the Court joined the Turkish state's efforts to “pin down” a definition of Alevism in relation to Sunni Islamic tradition; it just reached a different conclusion about how to do so.
The Strasbourg Court appears drawn to the emancipatory promise of legally enshrining the Alevis, and other “minorities” in other contexts, as a collective non-Sunni Muslim subject of minority religious rights guaranteed by both state and international law. This reflects the influence of a growing consensus in European and international public policy circles that majority and minority religions are natural groupings that exist out of time and apart from law and politics, and that it is the duty of the international community to guarantee their (religious) freedom.Footnote 76 As Austrian foreign minister and vice chancellor Michael Spindelegger stated in 2012 at the occasion of an “experts' seminar” on the freedom of religion in Brussels, “freedom of religion and the protection of religious minorities are central elements of Austria's human rights policy . . . the events in the Arab World, in particular, remind us that freedom of religion of all citizens is also decisive for peace and security within a society. Religious minorities will therefore have to be involved in the redesign of the societies that is currently taking place in many Arab countries right from the beginning.”Footnote 77 This position is voiced with increasing frequency in European public debates. Protections for minority religions are seen as the key to unlocking democratic reform, ensuring the rule of law, and implementing tolerant legal regimes to manage otherwise unwieldy and recalcitrant sectarian differences that are re-emerging after the fall of authoritarian regimes in the region.Footnote 78 Support for a right to legal personality for minority religions is part of a European and North American commitment to international religious freedom, and denial thereof is categorized as a restriction on the right to religious freedom. According to the EU Guidelines on the Promotion and Protection of Religion or Belief issued in June 2013, the right to freedom of religion or belief includes rights for communities that “include, but are not limited to, legal personality and non-interference in internal affairs, including the right to establish and maintain freely accessible places of worship or assembly, the freedom to select and train leaders or the right to carry out social, cultural, educational and charitable activities.”Footnote 79
In 2004, in part as a result of lobbying efforts by Alevi leaders in Europe, the EU officially categorized the Alevis as a “non-Sunni Muslim minority.”Footnote 80 The Venice Commission has defined the Alevis as a disadvantaged minority in need of legal recognition and protection.Footnote 81 Since 1998 the annual reports of the European Commission have “insisted on the extension of official recognition of the three non-Muslim communities (Armenians, Greeks, and Jews) to the Kurdish, Alevi and Assyrian groups.”Footnote 82 Turkey's accession process is also implicated: the Commission's 2011 “Enlargement Strategy and Main Challenges” Turkey report cites freedom of religion and the protection of minorities (especially non-Muslims and the Alevi community) as areas in which further efforts are required and calls for the establishment of a legal framework in line with the European Convention on Human Rights.Footnote 83 As noted previously, in June 2013 the Council of Foreign Affairs Ministers of the EU adopted the EU Guidelines on the Promotion and Protection of Religion or Belief.Footnote 84 This instrument is said to provide staff in the European External Action Service, EU delegations, and embassies with an “operational set of tools to be used in dealings with third-countries, as well as with Churches and international and civil society organizations, in order to protect all individual believers and religious minorities within its external action.”Footnote 85
As these issues move up the ladder and occupy an increasingly prominent position in the European external relations portfolio, their impact will also be felt in Turkey. The European religious rights approach has its appeal when contrasted with the Diyanet's move to subsume Alevism under Sunni Hanefi interpretations of Islam—thereby marginalizing Alevi voices, practices, and traditions that locate themselves outside the Sunni Hanefi umbrella. Ensuring a degree of autonomy to the Alevis as a non-Sunni Muslim minority appears as a reasonable alternative to trampling Alevi collective identity and ignoring demands for communal autonomy and rights. Rather than serving as an instrument of religious liberalization, however, the European attempt to fix a collective Alevi non-Sunni Muslim minority subject in law serves to distinguish Alevis from non-Alevi Turkish citizens in religious terms. This has important consequences for the politics of religious difference in Turkey.
CREATING APOSTATES AND INSURGENTS: THE LEGAL CONSTITUTION OF RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCE
Turkish citizens of different backgrounds have voiced serious concerns about state persecution and discrimination against Alevis. Many have petitioned for public recognition of Alevi identity, collective practices, and historical grievances. For these critics, the Kemalist project—so-called after the first president of Turkey, and the primary framework in which Turkish national identity has been negotiated and legitimated since the founding of the Republic in 1923—is distinguished by a concerted nationalistic attempt to force Alevis, Kurds, Armenians, and others to “abandon their traditional attachments.”Footnote 86 Activists and spokespersons who challenge the exclusionary dimensions of Turkish nationalism counter the assimilationist narrative by calling for a public revalorization of Alevism, alongside other non-Sunni identities and histories, through the promotion of Alevi rights and freedoms. Fueled by external pressure from the EU since the early 2000s and energized by recent EU attempts to prioritize religious freedom and the rights of religious minorities as a European foreign policy objective, this revalorization of Alevism is presented as the antidote to the Kemalist effacement of cultural and religious difference. In 2007 the ruling Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP) initiated an “Alevi opening,” consisting of a series of workshops, in an attempt to address these concerns.Footnote 87 As part of the “opening” the Ministry of Education modified textbooks for the Religious Culture and Ethics courses to include more information on the Alevis, as discussed above; some municipalities recognized cemevis as “houses of worship;” and the state nationalized the Madımak Hotel in Sivas.Footnote 88 According to Dressler, however, these limited concessions were received by Alevis as “falling far short of the general recognition to which Alevis aspire” and as “showing no intention to restructure the current system of state organization and control of religion.”Footnote 89
Despite the important differences between the Turkish state's treatment of Alevism as part of the “common share of Islam” and the European Court's approach to Alevism as a “religious conviction distinct from Sunni Islam,” both approaches share a tendency to erase the profound heterogeneity (and even inconsistency) of practices associated with Alevism while reinforcing the Turkish state's capacity to classify and govern its citizens as religious subjects. To classify the Alevis—despite their substantial internal diversity and the unsettled nature of their identity claims—as a collective subject of religious rights and religious freedom guaranteed by the state and backed up by international legal instruments reinforces a long-standing statist tradition of Turkish secularism in which an implicit Sunni-majority state serves as the official arbiter of religious identity, community, and practice. This is a secular social order characterized by centralized, and at times authoritarian, governance, as Gözaydın explains:
[F]rom the very first days of the Republic, secularism in Turkey has meant safeguarding the state against social forces, as the 1982 Constitution has once again strongly proven. The official conception of secularism in Turkey complements this statist tradition. This tradition is characterized by a denial of the existence of autonomous political and cultural realms within society, regarding these as threats against the existence of the state and advocating that legitimate social practices are limited to practices supervised by the state. The official ideology inevitably approaches religion in line with this statist tradition.Footnote 90
The social forces behind the Gezi protests in Turkey united in opposition to this statist tradition.Footnote 91
When external authorities classify Alevism as a religious conviction that is distinct from Sunni Islam—as a religious “minority” in the Turkish context—this stabilizes an otherwise more indeterminate Alevi collective identity in religious terms, fixes its relationship to Sunni tradition, and reinforces a conventional Turkish statist approach to governing religion. In the name of protecting social and religious diversity, this move occludes the undecidability and indeterminacy of Alevism as a heterogeneous and contested set of practices and traditions that may fade away at the margins, shift depending on time and locale, and even be indifferent to the relationship between Alevism and Turkish or other official “state Islams.”
To depict the Alevis as a religious minority in law and international public policy is to endow an otherwise more open and unstable (religious-ethnic-social-cultural) identity with more pointed religious and legal salience in the eyes of individual citizens (including the many Alevis who are shaped by these legal constructions), the state, and the international community. This “fixing” of Alevi identity presupposes and produces a perception of stable and non-negotiable differences between Alevis, other “minorities,” and (even if unmarked) Sunni Turkish citizens. This is a process that William Connolly describes as the overcoding of the boundaries between groups.Footnote 92 Overcoding religious boundaries formalizes identity in religious terms and contributes to a confessionalization of social and political life. Michael Wahid Hanna makes a related point in reference to US-based Coptic diaspora lobbying on behalf of Egyptian Copts. Hanna suggests that pro-Coptic interventions by external actors risk inflaming Coptic-Muslim relations. Pointing to the internal diversity of the Coptic community and to Copts' diverse life experiences as a result of disparate socio-economic and geographic locations, he concludes that while there may be a place for outside lobbying “it would be perverse if the efforts of Coptic diaspora activists were a further cause of strife and a rallying cry for Islamists who seek to implement a vision of religious supremacy.”Footnote 93 Nukhet Sandal draws an interesting contrast between the respective situations of Egyptian Copts and Turkish Christians. As Sandal observes, “there is no “Christian' discourse or a unified Christian public theology in the Turkish public sphere that is equivalent to the Coptic public theology in Egypt. The Christian communities have defined themselves either by the word ‘non-Muslim’ or by their ethnicity, and focused on their own communities' problems rather than on the problems of the Christian community in general.”Footnote 94 This may change as a stronger European, pro-Christian lobby contributes to creating a more intensely politicized “Christian community” in Turkey and elsewhere in the region.
To enshrine Alevism legally as a protected minority religion contributes to a perception of social space as structured around an Alevi-Sunni opposition.Footnote 95 Political identity and community defined in religious terms comes to “occupy the full terrain of the thinkable.”Footnote 96 This conceals the ways in which collective needs cut across these contrived divides. It obscures the ways forward that emerge when the focus is not on communities of believers but on shared goals, cross cutting affiliations, and collective visions. These observations apply equally to other groups perched on the threshold of official recognition and naturalization as “religious” minorities, both past and present.Footnote 97 To “religionize”Footnote 98 Alevism risks contributing to the perception that there are “natural” sectarian tensions and divisions between Turkish Alevis, Arab Alevis residing in Turkey, the Sunni majority in Turkey, and (mainly Sunni) Syrian refugees fleeing the violence to seek refuge in southeastern Turkey. This heightens the risk that social tensions emerging from the Syrian war will “jump the border” and be cast as intractable religious or sectarian problems rather than as political, economic, or security-related challenges.
Enshrining Alevism as an official minority religion also catalyzes a series of internal dynamics within Alevi communities. The process of being religionized elevates and empowers particular authorities to represent and speak on behalf of the Alevi “religious” community. The socio-legal transformation of Alevis into official collective religious subjects under state law, and Alevism into an official religion (understood as a variation of Islam or not) sanctifies particular understandings of Alevism as orthodox while marginalizing others. Necdet Subaşı, ministerial advisor and general coordinator of the Alevi Initiative, lists the steps to be taken on the road to Alevi state recognition as including “improvement of the conditions of the cemevis, elimination of the obstacles before the status of cemevis as houses of worship, public acknowledgement and appreciation of the leading Alevi men of faith by the state, and strengthening the role and status of these leaders.”Footnote 99 Dissenters, doubters, and those making claims on behalf of Alevism deemed unorthodox or threatening by “leading Alevi men of faith” are left out of the picture. Those who claim that Alevism is not a religion at all, that it is not a heterodox sect of Islam, or are entirely indifferent to such claims, fall below the threshold of public discourse and political and juridical recognition, nationally and internationally.Footnote 100 To raise Alevis above the official threshold of legal recognition as a minority enshrines particular authorities as the arbiters of religious orthodoxy: Who is a religion? Who decides? Who speaks for a religious community?
In an article appearing in this issue, Paul Sedra discusses Article 3 of the Egyptian constitution, adopted under former president Morsi but retained in the 2014 constitution. Article 3 formally vests power over personal status in the Coptic Church, stating that, “the canon principles of Egyptian Christians and Jews are the main source of legislation for their personal status laws, religious affairs, and the selection of their spiritual leaders.”Footnote 101 Article 3 disempowers and marginalizes Coptic laypeople whose views do not necessarily align with those of the Coptic hierarchy. As Sedra concludes, Article 3 effectively codifies “the triumph of clerical forces over their rivals in the Coptic laity for control of the Church and community. . . . In the face of determined Church efforts to marginalize them, as well as the state's support for these efforts, are Coptic laypeople who want a meaningful say in their community's and nation's future, destined to become apostates and insurgents?”Footnote 102
Adopting religion as a category to distinguish groups that are seen as in need of legal protection changes the lives of those who live under these designations. It creates a world in which citizens are governed as religious subjects. It contributes to the consolidation of a social order in which groups are distinguished by perceived religious differences. It creates apostates and insurgents on the margins of legal religion. And it effaces forms of political agency and subjectivity that fall outside the limits of political constituencies that are defined by religious community.Footnote 103 Legal classifications of Alevism by the Turkish state and the European Court of Human Rights work to define the Alevis and determine how Alevism relates to (purportedly stable and unchanging) dominant renderings of Sunni Islamic tradition.Footnote 104 Both of these classifications impact Alevis directly by transforming the lived experiences, ambiguities, and inconsistencies that attend religious affiliation and practice into something more fast and fixed—nudging and funneling individuals into discrete “faith communities” through which they are legally and collectively defined, overseen, and spoken for.Footnote 105 These designations marginalize multiform, dissenting, ambivalent, and everyday forms of religiosity. They embolden those empowered to speak in the name of orthodoxy.Footnote 106 They obscure the fuzziness, distinctiveness, and diversity within and between communities, submerging their histories and traditions “in the mill of modernist discourses and the homogenizing machinery of the nation state.”Footnote 107 Never fully constituted or captured by orthodoxy, Alevis, Copts, and other modern religious subjects are “eclectic, adaptive, and acculturating,” mixing and borrowing not only from other religious traditions, but also with practices from the broader cultures that surround them.Footnote 108 To fix Alevism in law—whether domestic or international—erases the indeterminacy and heterogeneity of Alevism as a set of lived traditions, while shoring up efforts to regulate acceptable Turkish religiosities in the service of the state.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to Winnifred Sullivan, Benjamin Schonthal, Markus Dressler, Nukhet Sandal, Kadir Yildirim, James Gibbon, Benjamin Bruce, Solange LeFebvre and an anonymous reviewer for the JLR for comments and suggestions on this paper, and to Nazli Ozkan and Kerilyn Harkaway-Krieger for their generous research and editorial assistance.
