Looking West: Malaysian perceptions of Turkey and Turkish secularism
Sven Alexander Schottmann, Visiting Research Fellow
Monday 22 November 2010
Sven Schottmann is a lecturer and researcher at the Monash Asia Institute, Monash University. His main research interests are religion and political mobilisation in Southeast Asia, and contemporary Muslim cultures and societies more generally.
Political developments in late Ottoman and early republican Turkey aroused great interest among the readers of Malay-language journals in the 1920s and 1930s. Turkey's socio-cultural and political reforms were followed closely by the Malay-speaking Muslims of Southeast Asia, in particular the reform-minded kaum muda or 'modernists'. However, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, a large number of Malaysian Muslim scholars and intellectuals appear to have ceased regarding Turkey as an aspirational model. Even as both Turkey and Malaysia pursued etatist policies with regard to the management of religion, the percieved hostility of the Turkish state towards Islam led many Malaysian Muslims to think of Ankara's laicism as little more than state-enforced godlessness.
In his talk, Sven suggested that the rise of the so-called 'Muslim Democrats' in Turkey - and their successful fusion of social conservatism with economic and political liberalism - have affected the way Malaysian Muslim social actors perceive the Turkish management of religion and modernity.