Secularism and modernity: Europe, Turkey, and Indonesia (1920s-1940s)

In post-Enlightenment Europe, the paradigm of secularization had become staple of ‘modern’ nation-building, and even though across the Old Continent the separation of state and church had taken different forms, this was to be treated as an axiomatic model in 20th century Asia. The first radical implementation of secularization as active separation of religious and political leadership was pursued in Turkey where Mustafa Kemal, in his endeavour to strengthen his nation socially, economically, and politically, reformed what was left of the crumbled Ottoman Empire. Throughout the 1920s Kemal stripped the Caliph of his political authority, abolished Muslim mystical orders, converted the Turkish language from the Arabic script into a Romanized one, forbade the headscarf for women and the fez for men. Kemalist reforms were deeply rooted in the nature of the Ottoman Empire’s weaknesses, a de facto monarchy, which abused its authority to ensure its own perpetuation; all justified with the religious argument of din-wa-dawla (religion and state). In the meantime, in the Dutch Indies the early nationalist movement had rallied around Islamic groups. A driving force behind the pergerakan in the 1910s and early 1920s, Sarekat Islam was portrayed as ‘an association of Muslims working for progress’, in which Islam was the signifier of nativeness. This paper will address the question of the transfer of ‘secularism’ as a vector of modernity in Indonesia, but as an Asian, Muslim, paradigm already explored by Turkey, rather than as a European model of development.