Israel’s 2018 Nation-State Law and Turkey’s 2020 return of Hagia Sophia to the mosque have sparked debates on the power of national identity and religious nationalism. In this timely post, Professor Jocelyn Cesari writes about religious nationalism in both countries. While religious nationalism is often seen as a political tool, Professor Cesari uses these two contexts to explain why religious nationalism must be understood at the community level.
Sultan Ahmed Mosque in Istanbul and the Western Wall in Jerusalem | Photo: Fatih Yürür & Snowscat on Unsplash
With the exception of Faisal Devji’s 1993 book, comparing Israel to Islamic countries is a rare, if not taboo, exercise. But as I argued in a 2018 article, there are benefits to doing so. First, there is an often-overlooked recalibration of religious traditions to fit the contemporary national community. Second, insisting that the appropriate level of comparison is the community rather than the individual allows for a more complex approach to the interplay of religion and politics.
From this community perspective, nationalism is not just an ideology. It is a totality of memories, emotions and values that align a people’s cultural and political identity with a particular territory and institutions. But it is more than an “imagined community”, because this modern political community is based on two principles: equality of individuals and national sovereignty. In other words, what shapes a national community is not only a shared narrative, but also the desire to become a sovereign political entity based on equality among its members. As central features of modernization, equality and sovereignty have profoundly transformed all religious communities by obliging them to rethink their collective identity and loyalty to the secular community. Interestingly, these changes have not been systematically associated with nation-building, even though examples of this process are abundant, the most obvious of which is the King James Bible.
For the Islamic countries, the challenge was to subject Islamic traditions to the homogenization of the national population, that is, to accommodate the concept of one people and one territory. For Israel, the existing sacred concept of one people and one territory was transformed to fit a secular national identity. In both cases, the state played a central role in these reconstructions.
In Turkey, as in other Islamic countries, state-building changed the caliphate-era norm of Islamic institutions and political power being independent of each other. The concept of the umma also changed from one that defined the caliphate’s diverse territory and population to one that represents a spiritual, non-territorial community with shared religious beliefs.
With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the state emerged as the central political institution. It unleashed unprecedented religious and cultural upheaval, which I have argued was the underlying politicization of Islam and the basis for the rise of Islamist movements. The link between belonging to Islam and belonging to the state is a given in most Islamic countries, including the secular Kemalist republics. Even if Turkey is correctly described as the most secular country in the Islamic world, this does not imply autonomy for religious institutions and neutrality of the state.
More than religious behavior, belonging to Islam became key to shaping Turkey’s collective identity. It meant absorbing the dominant Sunnis into the system’s apparatus, employing imams, and simultaneously promoting laïcité as Turkey’s defining feature. In other words, being a Sunni Muslim and being a Turkish citizen were two sides of the same coin, and Islamic signs and practices were privatized to construct a secular public space. As a result, being a legitimate member of the political community depended on accepting the cultural and political homogenization of Turks brought about by Kemalism, which transformed claims of diversity (religious, linguistic, ethnic) into a matter of national security.
The Justice and Development Party (AKP) has built on this basic character to promote a more positive Islamic model of public behavior. The AKP has not overturned the basic blend of Sunni Islam, rajklik, and state, but rather added another dimension by emphasizing social conservatism related to dress code and attempting to moralize in public. More recently, Islam has been used in international policy and regional leadership in the Middle East and the Balkans.
Judaism had to follow a different path to adapt to the national framework. The trinity of “God’s message, people, and territory” is central to Judaism as a divine community, but the settlement of the Jews in Europe transformed this tradition into a modern religion, which meant downplaying loyalty to Zion as a politically independent, revelatory community. Zion remained the center of liturgy and ritual, but belonging to modern European society became a legitimate social pursuit. The 18th century hashkalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, provided theological justification for integration into the secular national community, while Jewish religious practice came to be seen as separate from the effort to return to Zion (except in a messianic sense).
However, the Dreyfus affair (1896-1906) showed that such adaptations and belonging to a secular community did not weaken anti-Semitism, leading to the rise of modern Zionism. Theodor Herzl’s political project was not a return to the Holy Zion, but the adoption of the modern concept of a “state for the Jewish people” as an independent sovereign community based on the equality of peoples. This political project triggered an endless debate on the status of Judaism in a secular nation-state, which was exacerbated by the creation of the State of Israel and its conflict with the Palestinian state. In this light, the controversial 2018 Basic Law “Nation-State of the Jewish People” is an attempt to put an end to this ambiguity. For the first time, a constitutional clause defined the State of Israel as a nation-state exclusively for the Jewish people, thereby downgrading the legitimacy of other religions and the previously separate national language, Arabic, and jeopardizing the legal equality “in theory” granted to all minorities.
Political tensions over religion relate to the conflation of religion and national identity in Israel, while in Turkey, all parties agree on Turkey’s ties to Islam but are divided on the alignment of religion and political action, mirroring tensions in American politics over abortion, birth control and white supremacy.
The intertwining of state and religion also makes religious behavior a site of contestation. From this perspective, public morality and the status of sexual minorities are contested in both countries. The state is expected to regulate and mediate conflicting interpretations of what it means to be a good Muslim or Jewish citizen. In other words, religion is transformed to fit the national culture, and civic and national belonging is linked to religious belonging. That is why religious nationalism cannot be analyzed solely as the instrumentalization of religion by the state or some religious groups. More importantly, religious nationalism is a defining characteristic of citizenship, independent of the individual religious beliefs and practices of citizens. Although the assessment of the role of religion in society is often carried out at the individual level, it is important to analyze religion and politics at the community level as well.
Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Religion and Global Society blog, nor of the London School of Economics.
