Theocracy, Secularism, and Islam in Turkey

Book excerpt: In this novel and lucid work, Christopher Houston clarifies a particular modern style and practice of politics that he calls anthropocracy. In the name of popular sovereignty, anthropocracies de-legitimize the rule of God(s) even as they re-deploy it to stabilize the rule of the representatives of the people, all the while obfuscating their political conscription of the divine. In distinguishing anthropocracy from varieties of other secular and laicist political arrangements, as well as from theocracy, this book also gives readers a brilliant solution to what it calls the Turkish puzzle, the dilemma over how to best describe and analyze state-religion and state-society relations in the Turkish Republic. This work convincingly undermines two orthodox presumptions about Turkish politics: the claim that Turkish modernity should be considered an example of secularity; and the accusation that the current AKP government should be interpreted as Islamic. On the contrary, it argues that both Kemalism and the AKP continue to institute an anthropocratic Republic.