Laizismus in der Türkei – Trennung von Staat und Religion?
Laicism in Turkey – Separation of State and Religion?

Summary/Abstract: The German debate on Turkey’s membership in the European Community is revolving around the Muslim nature of Turkish society. Amongst those who confute the membership, Islam is often perceived as entirely backward, intolerant and prone to totalitarianism. The last terrorist assaults in Istanbul tend to strengthen this assessment of the foreign religion. This contribution argues, instead, for a disjunction between the elementary form of the religion (its lore), and the way it was institutionalised historically and is institutionalised today. The author puts forward that the political situation in Turkey has to be grasped in the frame of an authoritarian nation state that tends to view religion as a constraint for progress and therefore to limit religious freedom on one hand, and – on the other hand – uses Islam as a common denominator to forge a homogeneous nation. Thus, during recent days, Turkish democracy maps a particular period in the development of a modern nation state and does not point at any incompatibility of Turkey with other European nation states.

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