How political Islam corrodes religious authority
The reports are grim. The streets of Tehran, they say, are soaked in blood. The body counts vary, but the regime is believed to have killed thousands of people. The regime may just survive this, but it’s clear that the people no longer see it as legitimate.
The Islamic Republic of Iran, of course, is a theocracy. Islam is baked into the regime as the central source of authority. What then, does this mean for the legitimacy of Islam — and perhaps religion as a whole — as a source of political legitimacy?
I want to muse on this question a bit, starting with Iran, moving on to the Western world, and landing on my native Turkey. In short, I think religion is quickly waning as a source of political legitimacy, and that this is especially visible in places like Turkey and Iran, so the non-Arab Muslim world.
Iran isn’t a place where you can easily run surveys on religiosity, but there are a few. There is a 2020 online survey in which 47% of participants reported to have lost their religion, and 60% said that they did not perform daily prayers. A leaked study in Iran’s ministry of culture has revealed similar trends. Most importantly, regime officials have been expressing distress about what they see as godlessness and the rejection of state authority. This is why the various waves of protests in recent years have all been secular in character.
But, I hear you ask, is Islam’s authority withering because the regime is getting weaker, or is the regime getting weaker because Islam is withering?
How tedious of you to ask.
Surely there are a million reasons why it didn’t work out for the mullahs, and it would be reductionist to say that this is the one reason why the regime is failing.
I don’t mean to be scientific about this here, but it’s clear that if you want to have a successful theocracy, you need mainstream religion (Shia Islam) to have political authority. Now, religion has worked as a reactionary force in Iran. When people rose up against the Shah, the clerics were able to ride out the protest movement and seize power in 1979, and they entrenched themselves through the brutal war with Iraq until 1988, but they clearly couldn’t make it stick in the long run.
Let’s take a look at Turkey, an example I’m more intimately familiar with.
Turkey isn’t a theocracy, but it’s a regime that has tried to rebuild religious authority as the basis of legitimacy. The results have been similar.
I was born in 1988, and in the 1990s, I remember how I equated individual religious practice with morality. This is probably a matter of upbringing. The people I looked up to the most in life: my parents, grandparents, and other relatives, were fairly religious. My grandfather took us to Friday prayers and encouraged us to lead lives of faith. Individual virtue was deeply intertwined with religious practice.
From that point on, it was not a stretch to equate public morality with public spirituality. I vividly remember how one relative explained to us that the AK Party was founded by religious people, and that this meant that it was inherently moral. It seemed like a no-brainer that everyone should support these people. Infusing religion into public life meant corruption-proofing the state.
Who wouldn’t want that?
There was also a sense at the beginning of the AK Party that they were tapping into a reservoir of latent public morality. Turkey was “99% Muslim” as people like to say, and lifting that “Anadolu irfanı” (Anatolian wisdom) into government would create a virtuous cycle.
So the equation, as I see it, was:
Islamic practice = individual morality
Islamic politics = public morality
Fast forward to today. Erdoğan has now created a new regime inside the dead husk of the old. This new regime is built on a religious elite, and is deeply invested in creating a “religious generation” as Erdoğan always says.
As with Iran, there is an increase in secular practices and a precipitous decline in religious observance. Volkan Ertit has written on this extensively, documenting how mass urbanization, technological development, and mass media have made people in Turkey much more secular and much less religious. I’d say that up until the 2010s or so, people still pretended to be religious, meaning that religiosity had high status. I don’t think that’s the case anymore.
There are many, many surveys that have documented the decline of Islamic adherence across Turkey. In most surveys, atheism is about 2 percent in the 2000s. It’s now close to 10%. Official state clerics have lamented that the “youth is sliding towards deism,” meaning that they vaguely believe in God, but reject established religion.
Erdoğan’s state apparatus has long tried to prevent this because they think that religious practice creates adherence to the state. The idea is best encapsulated in the phrase “Vatan sevgisi imandandır,” meaning “love of the homeland comes from faith” (حب الوطن من الإيمان). This is sometimes said to be a hadith (sayings of the prophet Muhammed, that aren’t in the Quran). It probably isn’t a “real” hadith, but clerics still widely embrace it as being appropriate.
In recent years, the Ministry of Education has carried the phrase into the education system. Here’s an example of kids putting together a panel at a school:
It’s pretty straightforward: patriotism — and therefore obedience to the state — comes from religious faith. The mainstream religion is Sunni (Hanafi-Maturidi) Islam.
Therefore, in the new regime that Erdoğan has built, Islamic religiosity is supposed to be the basis of public order.
This at least, is how the new elite is thinking about its rule. Bilal Erdoğan, the president’s younger son and possibly heir apparent, made waves last week when he touched on this in a speech. I’m going to quote at length, because there are interesting ideas in here:
But we believe the path to this lies in better servitude [to God]. Because our ancestors said, ‘Fear the one who does not fear God.’ According to our vision and experience, when you instill the fear of God in a person, that person makes fewer mistakes. That person becomes a better person; they do good to others, and others feel safe from their hand.
So this equating of religious practice with individual morality is very much alive in this line of thinking.
Therefore, we will not waver regarding these references. We will never be in pursuit of trying to look ‘cute’ [appealing/pleasing] to anyone. We will appeal to everyone, and we will appeal to our own identity.
But what is the goal? We must once again strengthen the judgment in this society that ‘a religious person is good.’ The way to end the discourse of ‘Oh, we know what those religious people are like,’ ‘We know those who pray,’ ‘We’ve seen those hajjis and teachers’—the way for us as Muslims to correctly represent our religion lies in certainly and definitively establishing the perception that the source of goodness in this society comes from Muslim people and from religious people.
This is the bit that made the news. Let me unpack it, because here Bibal Erdoğan is expressing a genuine impression in the public at large.
When he’s quoting people about how “oh we know what those religious people are like,” a more explicit version of that would be “we know that it’s the religious people who are the actually immoral ones.”
The idea that religious people are immoral would have been somewhat counterintuitive 25 years ago. Today, it is mainstream knowledge. The public has come to equate Islamic practice not with virtue, but with Machiavellian guile. It used to be that someone who made a show of praying, fasting, or giving zakat, was considered to be “virtue signaling,” to use today’s language. Now such people are signaling political power.
Note also that, even when speaking candidly, Bilal Erdoğan doesn’t say that this is an actual problem inherent in the conduct of religious people. He’s saying that it’s a problem of perception. He says the problem will be fixed when religious people have better representation.
Where does this leave us in terms of politics? Is religion really the basis for adherence to the state in Turkey? Is its absence a real problem for the ruling elite?
I guess that there are two options here.
First, we could say that the elite doesn’t actually think that religious adherence is all that important, and that its rule (and legitimacy) is guaranteed by other things (economic distribution, coercion, etc.) If the Erdoğans (for lack of a better term) are smarter about these things, perhaps they can still achieve their goals in an environment where the status of Islamic practice is declining.
Or we could say that religious practice, and the status of religion in society, really does constitute a major part of the ruling elite’s legitimacy, which would probably mean that they’re in trouble in the long run.