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Turkey, a "Secular" State?: The Challenge of Description

The analytical reason for suggesting that what is known as secularism in Turkey be understood and consistently redescribed as laicism, indeed as a limited, inconsistent, and ambivalent form of laicism, is that secularism and laicism are not two different words for the same institutional arrangement, but rather two distinct, complex, varied, contested, and dynamic possibilities in the range of nontheocratic politics. In this essay, I review the conceptual, empirical, and normative-theoretical bases for this suggestion and examine some of their consequences for the study of Turkey and the politics of secularization and laicization. As concepts, secularism and laicism, while synonymous in some limited senses, have different etymologies, institutional histories, and normative theoretical implications. Secularism derives from the Latin saeculum, meaning generation or age, and originally meant ‘‘of the world’’ as opposed to ‘‘of the church.’’ Laicism, by contrast, derives from the French word lai (or laïque, in contemporary usage), meaning ‘‘of the people’’ as distinguished from ‘‘the clergy.’’ Secular thus originally conveys the early