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This paper examines the religious policies of two Muslim-majority republics usually described as 'secular,' and argues that they can best be understood within the twin traditions of Muslim nationalism and Jacobinism. Secularism here in no way implies separation of religion(s) and state, but conversely the promotion of a civic religion in Rousseau's sense, built around Sunni Islam. A reinterpretation of these projects in these terms suggests the need to reconsider ideas of the diffusion of 'secularism' from Europe to later-developing states and has implications for projects of forced socio-political transformation such as that underway in Iraq. Despite the radical breach represented by the transition from empire to republic, from Caliphate to 'laïc' state, the religious politics of the early Turkish Republic under Kemal (Ataturk) were significantly influenced by the Sunni Muslim nationalism of the later Ottoman Empire (see, for example, Kemal Karpat, The politicization of Islam: reconstructing identity, state, faith, and community in the late Ottoman state. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 409 et seq). At the same time the Kemalist project drew on the Jacobin tradition of revolutionary and Third Republic France in a project of centralizing control and constructed homogeneity, both ethnic and religious, through legal, bureaucratic, and ideological means. The project labeled itself ‘secular,’ but was more properly Erastian: the construction of a national, republican civil religion based on the existing religion of the majority, but reformed to be compatible with the requirements of the modernizing state, an application of the Jacobin interpretation of Rousseau's ideas. To what extent do these ‘secular’ republics reproduce the Jacobin model of bureaucratization, nationalization, and constructed homogenization of identity? This paper examines the religious policies of two post-Ottoman republics, Turkey and Tunisia. What evidence is there to support the idea that we should most usefully consider these examples of Muslim Erastian states? Is their 'secularism' constructed, like the laïcité of the French Third Republic (at least down to 1905) on the basis of a constructed civic religion? Evidence is derived from a careful comparative interpretation of 1) constitutional documents, 2) elite discourse, and 2) national education curricula, including official textbooks. The implications extend beyond the Islamic world, although it is most critical to understand the meaning and processes of political secularization in those countries where the 'clash of civilizations' is most starkly informing the interactions of the West and the rest. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the practices of state management of religion in Turkey and Tunisia as attempts to construct and maintain a civil religion in Rousseau's sense, a modified version of revealed religion or an alternative to it that promotes unity of the body politic, socially useful virtues, and loyalty to the state. Revolutionary France provides the prototype. But arguably Islam provides a more suitable basis for such a civil religion than does Christianity. In my 2007 PhD dissertation I analyzed data from key legal and educational texts—law and education being two privileged media for propagating civil religions of this type—that show the ideological content of these projects including, critically, what national community is evoked in them and what identities and practices are thereby excluded. The limits of state toleration of unofficial or uncontrolled religious expression—"popular" rather than "state" religion, in Sayyid Qutb's terminology—have been tested in sometimes violent action by religious, conservative, and popular forces, a dialectical process that changes the state and its critics alike. Understanding the goals and social engineering technologies of civil religions is as important as understanding radical religious movements in the region and beyond; we cannot truly understand the one without the other. In the second part of this paper I begin to extend the analysis by asking whether the pattern of Rousseauist civil religion which has put down roots around the Mediterranean might also have flourished elsewhere. Post-revolutionary Mexico is discussed as a plausibility probe, on the basis of secondary sources only. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]