Turkish libido versus Halki Seminary

Writing at the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire, St. Augustine was not just a church father but also a political thinker. In his magnum opus, the "City of God," he underlined a temptation that the "City of Man," i.e., the temporal order of the earthly rulers, often exhibits: "libido dominandi". The Latin term meant "lust for power."

The rulers who suffer from this, according to St. Augustine, would be in a never-ending desire to dominate, control and manipulate everything that they could. So, they would try to govern not only what was the Caesar’s, but also God’s. Of course lust for power can be exercised in the name of God, too. That’s is the hard lesson that St. Augustine did not dwell upon, but we moderns have learnt from centuries of painful experiences with theocratic rule. Yet when we became fully modern, our aversion to theocracy started to blind us to the danger coming from the secular version of libido dominandi. These days, those who are obsessed with the exaggerated fear that Turkey is being "Islamized," and then see the country’s freedom deficit as a result of this perceived tendency, are in that exact error. They don’t understand that the main obstacle to freedom and democracy in this country is the libido dominandi of its much-praised secular republic.

The story of the Halki Seminary, which is on the off-shore Istanbul island of Heybeliada (Halki), is the perfect case study to get this matter right. Do you know who, in the first place, allowed the founding of this important center of Greek Orthodox learning? Secular authorities? No. It was the proudly Islamic Ottoman Empire, under whose auspices the seminary was opened in 1844. Yet more than a century later the might of the secular Turkish Republic would step in. The fateful year was 1971. It was also the year of a "soft" military coup, during which the military forced the democratically elected center-right government to resign and then formed a "technocratic government" that would obediently bow to the will of the generals. The military also started a witch-hunt against political dissidents, and forced the parliament to curb some of the civil liberties that were introduced in the 1961 constitution.

One such measure aimed at disciplining the society was to nationalize and monopolize all forms of education. All colleges of "foreign origin," which were opened during the Ottoman times, were converted into Turkish institutions. The university section of Robert College, which was founded in 1863 as the oldest American high school outside the borders of the United States, was turned into Boğaziçi University.

The basic idea was that the state had to control all education in order to raise "properly guided" (i.e., single-handedly indoctrinated) generations. The Halki Seminary fell victim to this general wave of nationalization. Interestingly it was the all-secular CHP (People’s Republican Party), which put the first nail on the coffin. As it is today, the CHP was in an ideological alliance with the Constitutional Court, one of main guardians of the official Kemalist creed. So, the CHP took the case of the seminary to the Constitutional Court, and the latter decided upon its closure. Halki's Board of Trustees refused to accept the suggested alternative, which was to become part of the University of Istanbul. In short, the seminary’s closure had nothing to do with religious conservatism. It had everything to with secular nationalism.

Nationalist secularism
To date, the scene has not changed. Those who oppose the seminary’s reopening are nationalists, not Islamists. They have two main arguments: the first and more nationalist one is their principle of "reciprocity" between Turkey and Greece. The Muslim Turkish minority in Greece is not fully free either, they say, so we should not give our Greek citizens more than what our kinsmen get on the other side of the border. Well, shame on Greece for its own illiberalism. It does not justify ours. And the Turkish citizens of the Greek Orthodox persuasion are our citizens, for God’s sake, not the fifth column of someone else. The second argument against the seminary’s reopening is a direct product of Turkey’s bizarre conception of secularism. Its proponents simply don’t want to allow any form of religious education. The CHP’s second man, Onur Öymen, put this frankly a few years ago.

"If we allow the Halki Seminary," he said, "then we will have to allow Muslim schools, too." That is perhaps why conservative and Islamic circles often tend to be more sympathetic to the reopening of the banned institution. They, after all, know well that there is a problem with the state’s fervent libido dominandi.