Freemasonry in Turkey’s modern history of ideas: A factor of liberalization and individualization?

Abstract

This article provides a brief outline of the impact of Turkish Freemasonry on the development of modern Turkey since the eighteenth century. It draws a short and incomplete history from a qualitative viewpoint, including influential topics, approaches, and camps. As European influences were historically strong in shaping Freemasonry on the Bosphorus, the text makes Turkish Freemasonry a case of Turkish-European exchange and an example of specific currents of modernization, individualization, and liberalization-with all their pros and cons-within Islamic societies. The relevant questions are where and in which frameworks such currents may have been effective, where they perhaps produced the opposite of what they intended, and to what extent they could contribute to mitigating today's torn political climate to all participants' benefit. The article is based on interactions with representatives of Turkey's Freemasonry, mainly of the liberal and progressive strands, making it more a narrative-oriented account of an evolving greater picture than an array of detailed empirical-scientific evidence on single pillars. The goal is to illustrate the complexity of "semi-secular" socio-religious dynamics in a Muslim context and to put the past into some relation to the present. K E Y W O R D S conservatism, Freemasonry, history of political ideas, individualism, liberalism, religion, Turkish-European relations