Secular Law in an Islamic Polity: The Ottoman Case

Abstract

The aim of this study is twofold. Firstly it puts that long before the foundation of Turkish Republic, the Ottoman sultans from the 18th century on gradually secularized their legal systems through transplanting Western codes and institutions with the exception of civil code. Secondly and more assertively it argues that this secularization process did not evoke a serious struggle between the religious and political authorities as it did in the West thanks to the political conventions and legal characteristics the Ottoman state carried along from its very beginning on. Secularism began to pose serious problems from the first years of Turkish Republic on when the Kemalist establishment set about extending the area of legal secularism and turning it to an ideology which can be called as ultrasecularism or Kemalist laïcité with an aim to socially engineer society in a topdown fashion by legal instrumentalism.

Keywords: Legal secularization, Ottoman Law, Turkish modernization, Kemalism, instrumentalism