Although Professor Mardin's intellectual achievements have given him international prestige, some national figures used to dislike and even dismiss him. The reason was his interest in, and fair approach toward, religion. He dared to write an analytical book about Said Nursi (1878-1960), the influential Islamic thinker who created the “Nur” community, and he did not reiterate the usual secularist alarmism about this popular Muslim movement. By such “mistakes,” Professor Mardin has made Turkey's secular fundamentalist quite unhappy. One of their academic citadels, the TÜBA (Turkish Academy of Sciences), coldly rejected to welcome him in their club simply because he was too soft on Islam.

The Shallowness Problem

However, about a year ago, the same ultra-secularists found a reason for the first time to give an ear to the 80-year-old professor. In an interview, he threw the concept of “neighborhood pressure.” The Islamic side of the society might not be destined toward creating an “Islamic state,” he said, but their conservative moral attitude might have psychological influence on the secular citizens. A girl in miniskirt, for example, would not feel comfortable in a “neighborhood” in which most women wear the headscarf and believe that this is the honorable thing to do.

Since then the term “neighborhood pressure” has become a household term. The secularist media turned it into a justification for preemptive state pressure on conservative Islamic lifestyle. Others have noted that “neighborhood pressure” is a two-way street, and veiled women, too, face intimidation in secularist environments. But, as often is the case in Turkey, few people were interested in such nuances.

Perhaps that's why Professor Mardin tried to bring some refinement to “neighborhood pressure” at a recent panel moderated by journalist Ruşen Çakır. Yet while trying to explain what he really meant a year ago, he also said things that would initiate a whole new debate. He argued that, in the past decades, the official ideology of the Republic (i.e., Kemalism) has been overshadowed by the teachings of Islam. Using the “imam” and the “teacher” as symbols for religious morality and secular ethics respectively, he flatly proclaimed: “The imam has won over the teacher.”

This could have been music to Kemalist ears, because it could, at least apparently, have vindicated their alarmism about the “Islamic threat.” But Professor Mardin said something else, too, which made them less cheerful. The reason why traditional religious teachings ascended over the official secular doctrine, he said, was simply that the latter has remained very superficial. While European societies have built a deep secular philosophy on “what is good, right, and virtuous,” he reminded, Kemalism remained very dry on these matters. “You can't find thousands of pages produced by Kemalists on such philosophical topics,” he noted. “Their literature is rather shallow.”

Since then, this imam-versus-teacher debate has become the new bone of contention in Turkish media. Some secularist commentators lash out at Professor Mardin, claim that their doctrine is actually very sophisticated, and insist that it is simply the wicked Islamists and their new “imperialist” friends (such as the EU), which halts their belated triumph. (They, in other words, unintentionally demonstrate what Professor Mardin says about shallowness.) Others are taking a more self-critical line and accept that Turkey needs refined secular thought.

Personally speaking, I very much agree with Professor Mardin that Kemalism has more brawns than brains — or, to put it factually, more officers and judges than intellectuals. Moreover, I would love to see more refined secular thought in Turkey. It will be good not just for the secularist themselves, and the country in general, but for Islam as well. “Secular intellect will always be necessary,” as Pope Benedict XVI. once said when he was still Cardinal Ratzinger, “to curb and to correct some of the toxic temptations of religion.”

Göle's Insight

Yet I wasn't totally persuaded by Professor Mardin's stark dichotomy between the “imam” and the “teacher.” Was it really that black-and-white?

Soon I found a compelling answer in the words of another towering Turkish intellectual: Professor Nilüfer Göle, who teaches sociology at the French …. In last week's interview to CNN-Türk, she elegantly disagreed with what Professor Mardin said: “The Islamic camp has outgrown itself quite remarkably,” she noted. “And, look, now the sons of the imams are becoming teachers.”

Professor Göle, who has meticulously studied “cultural Islam” in Turkey since the early ‘80s, is right. While it is true that Turkish society is still suffering from the conflict between Islamic and secularist camps, these groups do not remain as stagnant and isolated entities. Especially the former side has progressed to a great extent, and has claimed many causes that used to be seen as secular in nature —globalism, capitalism, liberalism, etc. Isn't it enough of an awesome example that the “Islamic-inspired” AKP is also the most enthusiastic party in regards to joining the EU?

The problem here is that the transformation we see on the Islamic side — which has more way to go, to be sure — is unmatched on the secularist side. There are quite progressive secular liberals, of course, but the outnumbering secular illiberals (aka the Kemalists) are frozen within their rigid doctrine. They are trapped in the intellectual shallowness that Professor Mardin points out, for which they compensate by bringing in authoritarian state power.

In other words, in the imam-versus-teacher saga, the imam is doing better and better. Now the more difficult question is how we shall modernize the good-old teacher.