Evolution of Unofficial Muslim Family Laws to Islamist Legal Pluralism in Erdogan’s Turkey

Civilising Kemalist elites of Turkey in early twentieth century employed state law as an ideological apparatus of top-down social engineering to construct a new secularised Muslim Turkish citizen identity. Unlike other Muslim countries in the world, they decided to completely get rid of Islamic laws by transplanting the Swiss Civil Code and by criminalising centuries of old Islamic laws. However, this has paved the way for the emergence unofficial (informal) Muslim legal pluralism as a result of resistance from some sections of the people. Thus, as a result of the dynamic interactions between official and unofficial laws, new hybrid official and unofficial laws are being continuously constructed. By looking at the available case law, statistical data, official reports, surveys and field research on age of marriage, registration and solemnization of marriage, polygamy and divorce, this chapter aims to present the current socio-legal picture. Moreover, it will also look at another phenomenon, i.e., state-sponsored informal Islamist legal pluralism under the rule of the Islamist populist authoritarian regime of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP (Justice and Development Party) in Turkey.