The Governance of Islam in Two Secular Polities: Turkey’s Diyanet and Indonesia’s Ministry of Religious Affairs

Abstract

Turkey’s particular form of secularism, laiklik, does not entail the separation of state and religion but the disestablishment of all independent religious authority and subjection of the religious sphere to state control. The chief instrument through which the state exerts its control, Diyanet, has grown into a vast bureaucracy, especially in the wake of the 1980 military coup. The only other Muslim-majority country that has a similar large bureaucratic apparatus for the administration of Islam is Indonesia, also a secular republic though of a different kind. In both countries, secular elites attempted to enlighten and modernise the ‘backward’ pious segments of their populations through policies of social engineering of religion. In doing so, they presided, wittingly or unwittingly, over the consolidation of Sunni orthodoxy and the imposition of conservative religious attitudes, at the expense of popular, radical, or progressive forms of Islamic religiosity. In both countries too, parts of the groups that were the chief targets of these social engineering policies have succeeded in wresting control of these bureaucratic apparatuses. The modalities of the process were different, however, and a comparison of these two cases may bring out the specifics of each more clearly.