Abstract
Charles Taylor has written a history of the origins and evolution of the concept of secularity based in the contingent cultural context of a largely European post-enlightenment trajectory. Yet the influence of the ideas he traces – both through their transplantation and through the reactionary backlashes they have produced – has generated parallel and contemporaneous if not symmetrical processes in some parts of the non-Western world. In this paper, I examine Turkish secularization policies modeled on the West and imposed indigenously and voluntarily (rather than through colonial compulsion). I find evidence of what Taylor describes as “Secularity 1” and “Secularity 3” in the Turkish case, but find that they are intertwined in ways not apparently anticipated by Taylor’s own framework. More generally, the study suggests continuities with the processes Taylor describes but also highlights the incompleteness of his “narrative of secularity,” which offers little analysis of critical encounters between East and West that were constitutive of both. Specifically absent from Taylor’s work is an account of the diffusion of Western models of secularism in non-Western contexts – both through intellectual exchange and through institutional borrowing – and the alternative indigenous expressions of secularity produced through such diffusion. In the Turkish case the borrowed concept of secularity has taken an idiosyncratic trajectory and one that has produced an alternative framing of legal and constitutional debates on the definition and role of secularism.