Comparative Analysis of Rawls's Idea of Kazanistan and the Model of Governance in Sunni Islam Case Study: Turkey and Saudi Arabia

In The Law of Peoples, John Rawls seeks to extend his theory of domestic justice to the international level. Accordingly, Rawls divides his theory into two parts: ideal and nonideal theory. In the ideal theory, decent liberal and nonliberal peoples are imagined who can participate in the construction of what Rawls refers to as a “realistic utopia”. Kazanistan is an idea derived from the ideal theory based on which an Islamic country is portrayed where religion and state are not separated and Muslims are appointed to high-ranking positions, yet the rights of minorities are recognized and protected. Kazanistan has a decent consultation hierarchy, in which citizens are not excluded from the public sphere and rulers are accountable to citizens. The main idea of this paper is: “Which of the governance models is closer to the idea of Kazanistan in terms of fundamental political structures, the issue of women and the rights of the minorities? The Turkish or the Saudi Arabian model? In the end, it was found that the Turkish model, due to the Idea of Europeanization, is closer to Rawls’s model of a just society. In terms of methodology, this research is a comparative study.