Ihsan Yilmaz

Muslim Laws, Politics and Society in Modern Nation States: Dynamic Legal Pluralisms in England, Turkey and Pakistan

This book identifies Muslims‟ current socio-legal situation and their legal attitudes from different perspectives. The main aim of this study is to analyze the conflict between the assumptions of modern legal systems and plural legal realities. While there is a reconstruction of unofficial Muslim laws in the modern and officially uniform secular legal systems of England and Turkey, in the case of Pakistan, where Islamic laws are recognized to a great extent, legal reform attempts in the areas of Muslim family law by the Islamic Pakistani state have so far not been successful and have led to intense clashes. The study shows that Muslims in these countries react to the modern frameworks of legal systems and do not abandon their locally formulated and interpreted Muslim laws. State formulations and interpretations of Islamic law, as in the case of Pakistan, or its more or less total disregard, as in the cases of Britain and Turkey, lead people to reconstruct their own unofficial Muslim laws.In these three scenarios, modern legal systems try to impose official laws, yet face the resistance of unofficial Muslim laws. The study argues that Muslims recreate, reconstruct, redefine and restructure their Muslim laws as unofficial laws even within a secular or modern framework and thus undermine and obstruct, in various ways, the claim of official law to be the unique regulator of human behaviour in any given social field. The main objective of the study is to show that there will always be dynamic legal pluralism stemming from unofficial Muslim laws.

The AKP after 15 years: emergence of Erdoganism in Turkey

Abstract In recent years, several observers of Turkey have recognised a novel development in Turkish politics: the rise of Erdoganism. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s personality and style have come to embody the Turkish nation, the state and its economic, social and political institutions. But what is Erdoganism? What are its main attributes? Is it a mere ideology or the name of the emerging political regime in Turkey? While commentators have provided several observations of Erdoganism, it has not been duly examined on its own in the academic literature. This paper’s main premise is that in Turkey, a new political regime has emerged in recent years which can best be defined as Erdoganism. Erdoganism has four main dimensions: electoral authoritarianism as the electoral system, neopatrimonialism as the economic system, populism as the political strategy and Islamism as the political ideology. We first explain why we think Erdoganism is a better concept to define the emerging political regime in Turkey. We briefly discuss Sultanism, Khomeinism and Kemalism in order to produce a set of references for our discussion of Erdoganism. We then provide a thorough analysis, explaining the ways in which Erdoganism manifests itself through electoral authoritarianism, neopatrimonialism, populism and Islamism.

Instrumentalizing Islam in a ‘Secular’ State: Turkey’s Diyanet and Interfaith Dialogue

ABSTRACT This paper analyses how interfaith dialogue was interpreted by the Turkish state’s Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) over several administrations. Mirroring changes in attitude within the state, the Diyanet began promoting interfaith dialogue in mid-1990s. The Islamist-inspired AKP administration continued this stance after its election in 2002. However, as the AKP leadership adopted a more authoritarian and anti-western tone after 2011, they changed their policy on interfaith dialogue. Through a political analysis and a content analysis of Diyanet texts and Friday sermons, this paper will discuss policy on interfaith dialogue to show how Islam has been used for social engineering by the nominally secular Turkish state. This paper contributes to literature on secularism by examining how an aggressively secular state has instrumentalized religion to meet its political needs.

Liminality and racial hazing of Muslim migrants: media framing of Albanians in Shepparton, Australia, 1930–1955

ABSTRACT This article is a historical empirical study of the Albanian Muslim migrant community of Shepparton. Through analysing newspaper reports, the authors discuss how these migrants were portrayed as liminal between their first arrival and acceptance as Australians a generation later. This is characteristic of a practice which the authors term “migrant hazing”, where a migrant group is demonized as a threat to the society during the liminal phase. Migrant hazing occurs in public discourse, particularly the media, and ceases with the replacement of the group by newer migrants, who are subjected to the same process. Furthermore, migrant hazing remains present in contemporary depictions of Australian Muslims. In this longitudinal study, media reports on Albanian Muslims revolved around three persistent themes: their supposed criminality, the wrongful use of land and the threat of dual-loyalty. These three items constituted the main weapons of the media in hazing the first, liminal generation.

The decline and resurrection of Turkish Islamism: the story of Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP

Abstract For decades, Turkish Islamists have failed to attract the votes of large sections of society and remained marginal. As a result of this failure to come to power, and due to domestic and international constraints and windows of opportunities, they have declared that they have jettisoned Islamism. Many Turkish Muslims whose religious disposition was shaped by the pluralistic urban Ottoman experience and small-town Anatolian traditionalism, and by the contesting currents of cosmopolitan pluralism and rural social conservatism, voted in favour of these former Islamists who have become “Muslim Democrats”. This paper elaborates on the genealogy of Turkish Islamists and their political trajectories and argues that when the forces and constraints of domestic and external social, political and economic conditions disappeared and the opportunities derived from being Muslim Democrats no longer existed, the former Islamists easily returned to their original ideology, showing that despite assertions to the contrary their respect for democracy and pluralism had not truly been internalised. This paper also aims to demonstrate that similar to other authoritarian populists, Erdoganists perceive the state and its leader as more important than anything else and as being above everything else, which has culminated in a personality cult and sanctification of the state. As long as Turkey’s economy continued to boom, almost everyone was happy that Turkey could readily market the “Muslim Democrats” story to the whole world for a long period as a major success story, or as an “exemplary Muslim country” or “model”. Yet, Middle Eastern elites and Western forces got carried away and learnt the hard way just how naive their view was in perhaps the first great transformation movement of the twenty-first century – the Arab Spring. Likewise, the Turkish Spring turned all too quickly towards autumn and then winter.

The Nature of Islamophobia: Some Key Features

There is an everyday pattern of racist and religious violence against Muslims in many parts of Europe and North America that did not originate with the emergence of extremist groups or crisis events in the Middle East. Rather, much of it is tied to longstanding racism and intolerance in communities where European Muslims live. Islam, and so Muslims, is widely construed as the intrinsic negative ‘Other’ engendering responses of general concern, diffuse anxiety, and in increasing instances palpable fear. Patterns of intolerance and exclusion have been exacerbated in recent years by the reality of violent extremism in the name of Islam, and an increased fear about future acts of serious violence directed at civilian populations in Europe. As part of this political discourse, Muslims as a group are blamed for the marginalisation they feel, even while the discriminatory policies and practices that exclude them from the mainstream are reinforced. Critics of the failure of some parts of Europe’s Muslim population to fully integrate are often also advocates of measures that would further isolate and stigmatise these minorities; they become agents of their own self-fulfilling prophecy. This chapter outlines key features of the nature of Islamophobia in the context of international perspectives arising from the trauma of September 11, 2001.

Semi-official Turkish Muslim Legal Pluralism: Encounters Between Secular Official Law and Unofficial Shari’a

This study provides an account of the current secular Turkish Civil Code, with special focus on family law issues such as consent, age of marriage, registration of marriage, status of religious marriage ceremonies, polygamy and divorce. The study looks at various aspects of the relationship between official law and the Muslim majority’s Shari’a law. Statistics and research have shown that, in connection with certain issues in the socio-legal sphere, Shari’a laws are still operative, in spite of their contravening the Civil Code. This situation has led to some civil courts having to deal with Shari’a issues. This study looks closely at some civil court decisions where judges have taken into account public opinion and local legal postulates concerning the matter in question.

Pakistan Federal Shariat Court's Collective Ijtihād on Gender Equality, Women's Rights and the Right to Family Life

This article argues on the basis of recent case law that the judges of the Pakistan Federal Shariat Court (FSC) have asserted their right to ijtihād and have indeed engaged in collective ijtihād. While in some areas, such as freedom of religion, Islamic law has been interpreted rigidly in a non-human-rights-friendly fashion in Pakistan, in some other areas, the flexibility and pluralism of Islamic law has been used to improve gender equality, womens rights and the right to family life. By using its constitutional powers, with its collective ijtihād, the FSC has been tackling the traditionally illiberal interpretation and application of Muslim laws in these areas. Regardless of the methodology and process of this ijtihādic endeavor, the output shows that the FSC has been either modifying the traditional ijtihāds or coming up with totally new ijtihāds to answer contemporary questions faced by Islamic law. The findings of the article once again challenge the views of scholars such as Schacht, Coulson and Chehata, who have argued that, by the fourth/tenth century, the essentials of Islamic legal doctrine were already fully formulated and that the doctrine remained fixed.