THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

HORIZONS AND HISTORIES OF LIBERAL PIETY:

CIVIL ISLAM AND SECULARISM IN CONTEMPORARY TURKEY

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO

THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY

BY

JEREMY F. WALTON

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

DECEMBER 2009
Copyright © 2009 by Jeremy Walton
All Rights Reserved
 Table of Contents

Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………v

Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………...viii

Introduction. A Saturday Night Promenade, on both Sides of the Bosporus……………….1

Chapter One. Civil Islam and Liberal Piety in the Context of the Secular and the
Laicist……..………………………………………………………………………………………9
Introduction: A Rare Site of National-Laicist Homogeneity………………………………….9
Rethinking the Ethnography of Secularism and Islam: ‘The Secular’ vs. ‘the Laicist’……..11
Turkish Politics of Piety and the Civil Society Effect……………………………………….19
Liberal Piety, Preliminarily………………………………………………………………......31
Pious Communities and Civil Institutions: A Brief Sociology and Prehistory of Liberal
Piety………………………………………………………………………………………….36
The Nur Community: Quietist Revivalism and the Ethical Centrality of the
Individual………………………………………………………………………………...38
The Gülen Community: Pious Pedagogy and Global Horizons for Liberal Piety………41
Alevism: Civil Society as Means to a Minority Politics of Cultural-Religious
Recognition..……………………………………………………………………………..46
A Brief Note on Methodology and the Organization of the Argument……………………...51

Chapter Two. Liberal Piety as a Genre of Publicness……………………………………….54

Introduction: Pious Publicness as Emergent Practice and Ideal……………………………..54
Conversations in the Evening: The Exemplary Liberal Piety of the Risale-i Nur
Classes………………………………………………………………………………………..64
The Directorate of Religious Affairs: Non-Liberal, Bureaucratic, Statist Islam…………….77
Piety as Mass Spectacle: Partisan Turkish Islam and Public Illiberality……………………84
Conclusion: Liberal Piety in Light of Other Non-Public and Semi-Public Islams…………..93

Chapter Three. Invocations of Tradition, Aspirations to Modernity, and Ideals of

Contemporaneity: The Public Historicities of Liberal Piety………………………………...96
Introduction: Which of These Families is Ready for Europe? Which is Modern?..................96
Pious Historicity as Discursive Tradition and Public Argument……………………….........98
Progressive Tradition, Devout Modernity and the Hermeneutics of Example: The Journalists
and Writers Foundation……………………………………………………………………..106

iii
 İçtihad, a Means to the Wonder of this Age: Bediuzzaman Said Nursi and the Nur
Community………………………………………………………………………………....117
A Curious Cem: Labors of Commensuration and the ‘As If’ of Tradition…………………127

Chapter Four. Pious Aesthetics of Publicness: Making Space and Place Virtuous in
Istanbul………………………………………………………………………………………...134
Introduction: Piety, Liberality, and the Aesthetics of Space and Place…………………….134
Say Çarşaf!: Kemalist Fantasies of Urbanity………………………………………………136
Constructing Pious Space: The Aesthetics of Nostalgic Devotion among the Nur
Community…………………………………………………………………………………141
Asserting Pious Place: Islamic Cosmopolitanism and the Recentering of Istanbul, Seat of
Imperial Neo-Ottoman Glory……………………………………………………………….149
Explicit Contestations of Laicist Space: The Headscarf Controversy………………….…..157
Conclusion: The Achievement, and Limitations, of the Ottoman Chronotope of Istanbul...
……………………………………………………………………………………162

Chapter Five. Confessional Pluralism and Liberal Piety: Aspirations to Legitimate

Religious Difference in Contemporary Turkey……………………………………………...164
Introduction: “Our Brown vs. the Board of Education”……………………………………164
The Kemalist Project of Homogeneity and Aspirations to Legitimate Religious
Difference…………..………………………………………………………………………168
Negotiating between the Difference of the Community and Difference within the
Community: Confessional Pluralism of and for Turkey’s Alevi Civil Society
Organizations……………………………………………………………………………….171
Traditional Coherence and Aspirations to Equality: The Cem Foundation…………….172
Horizons of Liberal Secularism: The Hacı Bektaş Veli Anatolian Culture
Foundation………..…………………………………………………………………….175
The Compelling Marginality of the Ehl-i Beyt Foundation…………………………….177
“Positive Action” (Müspet) as a Principle of Liberal Pluralism: The Nur Community…....183
Neo-Ottoman Liberalism and Pluralist Publicness: The Gülen Community……………….188
Conclusion: Confessional Pluralism as Political Aspiration and Emergent Practice………194

Conclusion. Walking away from the Dershane……………………………………………..197

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………...202

iv
 Acknowledgements

Debt is a somewhat exhausted metaphor, and it only inadequately describes the immense

gratitude I have for the many individuals who made this thesis possible, but I will invoke it

nevertheless. My dissertation committee—William Mazzarella, John Comaroff, Lisa Wedeen,

John Kelly, Hussein Agrama and Martin Stokes—were, throughout the entire process of research

and writing, paragons of support, constructive criticism, and pedagogical rigor; I cannot thank

them sufficiently. As my principal advisor and committee chair, William in particular

supplemented and complemented this dissertation in innumerable significant ways; in spite of

our persistent disagreement over the relative worth of the Rolling Stones’ LP “Some Girls”

within their broader discography, I am inordinately fortunate to be able to call him mentor and

friend. Many other professors and colleagues at the University of Chicago helped to shape both

the general contours of my intellectual sensibility and the specific argument of this dissertation.

Greg Beckett, Amahl Bishara, Brian Brazeal, Cassie Fennell, Victor Friedman, Susan Gal, Andy

Graan, Elina Hartikainen, Laura-Zoe Humphreys, Kelda Jamison, Bea Jauregui, Saba Mahmood,

Joseph Masco, Sean Mitchell, Marston Morgan, Urmila Nair, Mihir Pandya, Ayşe Polat,

Elizabeth Povinelli, Marshall Sahlins, Noah Salomon, Michael Silverstein, Michel-Rolph

Trouillot, Nukhet Varlık, Rihan Yeh, and Malika Zhegal are just a few of the names that deserve

mention. I would also like to thank Kabir, Kelda and Genevra Murray for their incomparable

companionship during the time of our mutual fieldwork in Turkey. As a member of the Martin

Marty Seminar at the University of Chicago Divinity School in 2008-2009, I benefited greatly

from the precise comments of the members of Professor William Schweiker’s seminar. Finally,

many friends and colleagues from further afield were equally generous with their suggestions

v
and criticism; I offer my heartiest thanks to Adam Becker, Varuni Bhatia, Dale Eickelman,

Aykan Erdemir, Kimberly Hart, Yael Navaro-Yashin, Brian Silverstein, Paul Silverstein, İpek

Türeli, Arzu Ünal and Angela Zito, among others.

Attempting to account for the sum of generosity, instruction, friendship and

misafirperverlik from which I benefited in Turkey is a daunting, near futile task. From among

the many institutions that I mention throughout the dissertation, Ayhan Aydın of the Cem

Foundation, Cahit Korkmaz of the Hacı Bektaş Veli Anatolian Culture Foundation, Faris Kaya

of the Istanbul Science and Culture Foundation, Cemal Uşak of the Journalists and Writers

Foundation and Can Alpgünvenç from the Üsküdar Risale-i Nur class deserve special mention

for their guidance and inexhaustible kindness. Among others, I would like to thank Ali Akyıldız,

Fermani Altun, Sedat Altan, Ali Bulaç, Alparslan Ceyhan, Namık Ceylanoğlu, Sadegül Çavuş,

Vedat Demir, Ahmet Dursun, Ali Ercan, Mustafa İşeri, Erol Kızılelma, Talip Küçükcan, Mustafa

Nutku, Fatih Öner, Tahsin Özcan, Mustafa Özkaya, Nazif Öztürk, Necmi Sadıkoğlu, Yani

Skarlatos, Selma Şevkli, Mesut Toplayıcı, Ali Yaman, Nazşfe Yığıt and Mahmut Zengin for

their time and invaluable contributions to my project. My research in Istanbul and Ankara was

supported by the Fulbright-Hayes Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, the Institute of

Turkish Studies, and the American Research Institute in Turkey; Tony Greenwood at ARIT was

particularly forthcoming and generous with advice and aid. Finally, İbrahim Canan, my Risale

teacher from the Istanbul Science and Culture Foundation, was immensely influential and kind to

me—tragically, he passed away in a traffic accident in October 2009, shortly before my

dissertation defense.

Last but not least, the encouragement, advice, love, and occasional forebearance of

countless friends and my family demands special recognition. Veronika Hartmann, her daughter

vi
Sophia, and her husband Erdinç Tağaç were my family in Istanbul; I doubt that I would have

managed to obtain my residency permit without the privilege of using charming nine-month-old

Sophia as a prop in the Istanbul General Police Station. Altan, Arzu, Barkın, Cahit, Ceyda,

Genee, Orçun, Özan, Selma, Tuğba and many other friends in Istanbul and Ankara were

indefatigable in their assistance. Allan, Andy, Avi, Cassie, Dianna, Elina, Kelda, Kabir, Noah,

Peter, William, and, most especially, Ariel oversaw the final days of the dissertation in Chicago

and New York. And finally, my mother Phyllis, my father Robert, and my brother Jonathan

loved and supported me tirelessly, often in unexpected ways, throughout the many years of

graduate school and research. I can only hope that their time in Istanbul allowed them some

sense of my own love for the place—I dedicate this dissertation, above all, to them.

vii
 Abstract

Ethnographically and conceptually, this dissertation is concerned with the discourses and

practices through which a panoply of civil Muslim actors and institutions articulates a coherent

mode of liberal piety in relation to both the imperatives of Turkish secularism and other

definitions of Islam that maintain currency in contemporary Turkey. In the most schematic

sense, I am interested in how liberal publicness, secular laicism, and the practices of piety act

upon one other in mutually creative, as well as constraining, ways. Through a fine-grained,

‘thick’ description and analysis of civil society institutions associated with Turkey’s Nur

Community (Nur Cemaatı), Gülen Community (Gülen Cemaatı) and Alevi Community (Alevi

Cemaatı, Aleviler), I examine how questions of history and tradition, space and place, and

religious and political pluralism articulate liberalism and piety as both means to and ends of each

other. A second central concern of my argument is to delineate the different implications and

effects that liberal secularism and laicist, Jacobin secularism have upon practices and definitions

of piety themselves—as I demonstrate, public piety in Turkey is defined against the horizons of

both liberal and illiberal/laicist secularism. This double emphasis on the creative relationship

between liberality and piety and the differential effects of distinct secular programs upon religion

places my dissertation at a productive angle to recent anthropological work on secularism, which

has tended to focus on the constraining and hegemonic character of liberalism, especially in post-

colonial contexts.

Keywords: (Ethnography of) Secularism, Civil Society, Publicness, Piety,

Pluralism/Multiculturalism, Historicity, Spatiality; Islam, Turkey

viii
 Introduction
A Saturday Night Promenade, on Both Sides of the Bosporus

Each Saturday evening, as the sun traced its slow descent over the rooftops of Kasımpaşa,

reflecting obliquely off of the Golden Horn in the distance, and gradually disappeared over

Istanbul’s distant Western suburbs—Alibeyköy, Gaziosmanpaşa, Küçükçekmece,

Büyükçekmece—I would prepare to leave my fifth floor apartment on Değirmen Sokak, Mill

Street, a narrow thoroughfare in the neighborhood of Eskişehir, just downhill from the primary

boulevard that bifurcates the district of Kurtuluş in European Istanbul. As I descended the

apartment building’s spiral staircase, I would often stop to chat with Nermin Hanım—a pious

housewife and mother of four painfully charming children—or Ziya Bey, the cantankerous,

aging Leftist always happy to regale me with stories of the turbulent Seventies. Leaving the

apartment building, I would turn immediately left to make my way downhill into the valley of

Dolapdere. Halfway down the hill, just across the way from the Kurtuluş mosque, where several

heavily-paunched men already gathered in preparation for the evening prayers, or akşam namazı,

I habitually stepped into the Erzincanlılar Bakery to purchase a bite to eat for the road—a simit,

usually, or a poğaca, perhaps, accompanied by a small green bottle of mineral water, of the

brand Uludağ or Kızılay. Over time, I came to comprehend the baker’s thick Erzincan accent—

like most neighborhoods in Istanbul, Kurtuluş is inhabited primarily by migrants from a single

region of Turkey, in its case Erzincan, a relatively poor and mountainous province in the

northeast—which always struck me as sibilant, imprecise. Continuing down the steep hill

toward Dolapdere, I would pass the open doors of sweatshops and smithies, where Iraqi and

Nigerian immigrants work late into the night. At the bottom of the hill, I could depend upon

seeing the mountainous Roma woman sitting outside of the İşkembe Salon, which specializes in

ix
tripe soup, trading insults with the street vendor of goats’ head soup across the way, who was

constantly harried and harassed by Dolapdere street cats angling after the collection of hircine

skulls encircling his pushcart. From the nadir of Dolapdere, I would ascend slowly up the

opposite side of the valley, past auto-repair shops and one large garage for funerary hearses,

eventually rising toward the Ottoman-era wooden homes and massive Armenian hospital, Sırp

Agop Hastenesi, of Elmadağ, Apple Mountain. Suddenly, the narrow passage up the hill would

emerge upon the frenetic light and sound of Republic Boulevard, Cumhuriyet Caddesi, and I

would turn right toward the bustle of Taksim Square early on a Saturday night. Individuals of

every imaginable countenance—the beautiful and disturbing farrago of the global metropolis—

greeted my eager eyes: the perpetually hunched and deeply-fissured faces of cobblers and shoe-

shiners, the platinum blonde artifice of Slavic-speaking prostitutes, the haute fashion of Nişantaşı

and Etiler kızları out to dine at their favorite meyhanes before slumming through the Beyoğlu

clubs until morning, the curious and slightly nervous smiles of wealthy Arab tourists, seated

outside at the single Falafel restaurant in Taksim, opened by a Palestinian man from Hebron…

Leaving Taksim’s distractions and delights in my wake, I hurried toward the massive bus

stop just across from the statue commemorating Atatürk and the War of Independence at the

heart of Taksim Square. Occasionally, I would hear the first lugubrious sounds of the evening

ezan, or call to prayer, issuing forth from the miniscule mosque on the southwestern corner of the

square, and I would sprint down toward the dolmuş stand in Gümüşsuyu, already late for my

weekly appointment. While the city bus or dolmuş careened down the hill of Gümüşsuyu, past

İnönü Stadium—where, on many Saturday evenings, the Beşiktaş boosters and hooligans would

already be gathered, their weekly jubilee spilling into traffic—and toward the Bosporus, my

fingers glided over the keypad of my cellular telephone, sending a message to Ömer or Can

x
Hoca, assuring them that I would arrive at the class shortly. As soon as we had passed the

ramparts of Dolmabahçe Palace—both a monument to the European aspirations of the late

Ottoman Tanzimat era and, later, the site of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s deathbed—I would jump

forth from bus or dolmuş and race toward the ferry boats and water taxis at the pier, which

constantly shuttle commuters, revelers, migrants workers, and all other manner of urban dwellers

to and from Beşiktaş, on the European side of Istanbul, and Üsküdar, on the Asian side. If time

allowed, I would purchase a newspaper—always Zaman, never Radikal or Cumhuriyet—at one

of the many kiosks near the pier. On the ferry itself, tea warmed me in the winter, and fresh-

squeezed orange juice cooled me in the summer; depending upon my mood I would sit on the

north side of the boat, facing the Bosporus Bridge, a constellation of Ottoman palaces and

mosques, and the silent buttresses of passing Russian, Georgian or Romanian tankers, or,

alternately, on the south side, where the sun still maintained its Orientalist script, its last light

silhouetting the famous skyline of Sultanahmet, the needle-like minarets of countless imperial

mosques and stouter profile of the Fire Tower at Istanbul University. Finally, arriving at

Üsküdar, I would stride briskly through the crowds near Mihirimah Sultan Mosque—notably

more conservative in dress and segregated by gender than those in Taksim, though not

particularly more so than pedestrian groups in my own neighborhood of Kurtuluş—and glance

with mild curiosity at the early evening diners in the Adıyaman Çiğ Köfte Salonu, the

McDonalds, and the famous Ottoman-style Kanaat Lokantası. Just past the Kanaat, I would turn

abruptly to the left, and up a narrow flight of concrete stairs lined by anonymous apartment

buildings. After approximately thirty steps, I turn again to the right, and enter an unmarked

apartment building, indistinguishable from any of the others—my destination, the dershane,

literally, “house of study”. I flick the light on in the foyer, climb to the second story, remove my

xi
boots, ring the doorbell, and am greeted with the warm, collective refrain of approximately thirty

men and boys, ranging in age from ten to ninety: “Jeremy! Late again! Where did you come

from this time? America, or just Kurtuluş?”1

In a landmark essay interrogating the relationship between the quotidian practices of

space and the construction of place in the modern city, Michel de Certeau (1984) extols the

subversive and counter-hegemonic effects of urban walking. De Certeau initiates his

meditations on walking in a curious way, by adopting the quasi-omniscient perspective of an

individual (a tourist, perhaps?) gazing down upon the labyrinthine expanses of Manhattan and

Brooklyn from the World Trade Center. From this omniscient, Olympian vantage—all the more

ironic, now that the aerie of the WTC no longer exists—de Certeau gradually descends, “into the

dark space where crowds move back and forth, crowds that, though visible from on high, are

themselves unable to see down below (1984: 92).” In stark contrast to the totalizing, panoramic

vision from above, the pedestrian bustle of urban space, defying the singular logic of a given

‘place’, is both a metaphor and a means:

The ordinary practitioners of the city live ‘down below,’ below the thresholds at
which visibility begins…these practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be
seen…it is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized
by their blindness. The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose
a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of
trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains
daily and indefinitely other (1984: 93).

Here, de Certeau’s musings over the contrast between the panoptic vision that seeks to contain

and to represent New York from above and the quotidian, ‘invisible’ practices of walking that

defy the imperative of representation bring to mind Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk’s reflections

1
Yine geç kaldın sen! Nereden geldin bu sefer? Amerika’dan mı? Yoksa sadece Kurtuluş’tan?
All translations from Turkish are my own, unless otherwise noted.

xii
on the obdurate heterogeneity of Istanbul, the city of his birth and object of his authorial gaze. In

a deeply romantic vein, Pamuk writes that “there are images and symbols that unify all cities—

an urban silhouette is just such a symbol. There are also places, often above the urban bustle

itself, that unite a city, places that everyone can see and through which everyone feels that they

live in that city—but there is no such place in Istanbul (Pamuk 1999: 84, emphasis in original).”2

Reading Pamuk’s reflections, one is left to wonder whether there is something peculiarly

heterogeneous about the urban space of Istanbul that denies the very sort of integration and

panoptic ideologization that de Certeau bemoans.

Ethnographically and conceptually, this dissertation is concerned with the discourses and

practices through which a panoply of civil Muslim actors articulates a coherent mode of liberal

piety in relation to both the imperatives of Turkish secularism and other definitions of Islam that

maintain currency in contemporary Turkey. In the most schematic sense, I am interested in how

liberal publicness and the practices of piety act upon each other in mutually creative, as well as

constraining, ways. Through a fine-grained, ‘thick’ description and analysis of civil society

institutions associated with Turkey’s Nur Community (Nur Cemaatı), Gülen Community (Gülen

Cemaatı) and Alevi Community (Alevi Cemaatı, Aleviler), I examine how questions of history

and tradition, space and place, and religious and political pluralism articulate liberalism and piety

as both means to and ends of each other. A second central concern of my argument is to

delineate the different implications and effects that liberal secularism and laicist, Jacobin

secularism have upon practices and definitions of piety themselves—as we will see, public piety

in Turkey is defined against the horizons of both liberal and illiberal/laicist secularism. This

double emphasis on the creative relationship between liberality and piety and the differential
2
Bütün şehirleri birleştiren imgeler vardır; siluet bunun gibi bir şeydir. Bir de şehri birleştiren,
herkesin gördüğü ve herkesin o şerhirde yaşadığını hissetiği yukarılarda bir noktası vardır.
İstanbul’un böyle bir yeri yok.

xiii
effects of distinct secular programs upon religion places my dissertation at a productive angle to

recent anthropological work on secularism, which has tended to focus on the constraining and

hegemonic character of liberalism, especially in post-colonial contexts (Asad 1999, 2003;

Mahmood 2003, 2005, 2006).

Given this focus, it may strike the reader as odd that I have chosen to begin my account

with a long narrative of my weekly journey from my apartment to one of the several weekly

Risale-i Nur classes3 that I attended in Istanbul, complemented by de Certeau’s philosophical

praise of the antinomian effects of walking in the city. I have made this choice for two distinct

reasons. On both a conceptual and ethnographic level, the preponderance of this dissertation

focuses on the public practices of politics and the politics of public practices. Above all, I am

concerned with the myriad ways in which pious civil society organizations organize and marshal

affects and ideologies in relationship to relatively hegemonic definitions of religiosity, both

laicist and liberal. To adapt de Certeau loosely, I trace how liberal piety becomes a visible object

from a particular empyrean vantage, in both overt and implicit dialogic relationship to other

public definitions and practices of religion. In spite of this general, abstract focus, however, I

also remain attuned to the fact that piety is not fully exhausted or encompassed by public

articulations. Again in de Certeau’s particular language, piety is a nexus of practices below the

“threshold of visibility,” as well as an object of panoptic public vision. My inaugural reflections

on my own pedestrian path through Istanbul serve as a heuristic reminder of this doubleness of

piety, as indeed walking itself did for me while throughout my fieldwork.

Beyond demarcating the conceptual peripheries of my research, walking also serves a

methodological purpose for my argument: I would like to gesture toward the practice of the

3
I discuss the institutional form and constitutive practices of the Risale-i Nur class at various
junctures in Chapters Two, Three and Five.

xiv
urban ethnographer himself as a sort of poetic walking in de Certeau’s sense. By the very virtue

of the atypical, discontinuous place that an ethnographer inhabits within urban space—ranging

freely and occasionally naïvely across economic and sociocultural domains that otherwise

maintain strict segregation from one another—the urban anthropologist initiates the types of

miscegenation that are exemplary of de Certeau’s antinomian pedestrian. The antinomian lines

of flight of this ethnographic pedestrianhood are all the more important for anthropologists to

acknowledge precisely because we are also disciplinarily and professionally licensed to produce

relatively totalizing narratives ‘from above.’ Ultimately, my own literal and metaphorical role as

a walker through the city, one who had traveled improbable distances to arrive in Turkey and

Istanbul in the first place, and, more mundanely, my constant shuttle through the city’s

heterogeneous spaces and places, fascinated my informants, for whom I was both an enigma and

a challenge to incorporate within their own geographies of the city and nation. Even as I

dedicate myself to tracing the politics and semiotics of more stable, ‘sedentary’ modes of

publicness and piety in contemporary Turkey, my ethnographic flaneurship will remain a crucial

means for my argument, as I hope the reader will perceive.

Back at the dershane, the congregation of men and boys collectively sigh following the final

rakam, or sequence of ritualized movements, in the evening prayer, wipe their cheeks with both

hands simultaneously and take their places on low sofas and on the floor of the rectangular room.

Can Hoca, the teacher and coordinator of the weekly class (sohbet, also known as a

conversation) asks one of the younger class members to retrieve a copy of the Risale-i Nur, the

collected writings of Said Nursi, and intones the familiar prayer of the Fatiha Sura—

Bismillahrahmanirahim—before beginning the lesson. The conversation on the previous

xv
Saturday evening had emphasized the role of modesty as a proper emotive relation to the

ultimate insignificance of life in this world, as opposed to that in the next world, which will be

determined by the deeds of all humans, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, on the Day of

Judgment (Ahiret). Can Hoca had illustrated the inimitable importance of modesty by way of

comparison with the self-love (kendini beğenme) and pride (azamet) of atheists and non-

believers. After finishing the Fatiha, he indicated that we would continue this conversation on

that particular night. The gathered men and boys, some regular participants, some newcomers,

paid rapt attention, as did I.

xvi
 Chapter One
Civil Islam and Liberal Piety in the Context of the Secular and the Laicist

Introduction: A Rare Site of National-Laicist Homogeneity

On a blustery Aegean day in October of 2006, I found myself lost in the labyrinth of

streets and alleyways that form the old Ottoman district o f Thessaloniki, Greece, frustrated in

my search for the Turkish Consulate, which happens to share its grounds with the birthplace and

childhood home of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the modern Turkish Republic. I had

traveled from Istanbul to Thessaloniki by train with my brother so that he could renew his

Turkish tourist visa, and while briefly in the city we hoped to tour the early crucible of Turkish

nationalism and laicism. Initially, however, we had no luck in finding Atatürk’s birthplace: The

Turkish Consulate is not included on any official city map of Thessaloniki, unsurprising perhaps

given the fraught relationship between the two eastern Mediterranean neighbors.4 Just as we

were about to abandon our quest, however, we turned a sharp corner and encountered a

somewhat surreal sight: Scores of Turkish buses, from all of the major companies—Nilüfer,

Varan, KamilKoç, Metro—parked along both sides of a narrow lane. I spared no time in asking

a somewhat confused teenager from the Turkish city of Izmir where we might find Atatürk’s

birthplace (Abi Atatürk’un doğum evi nerede ya?), and we had soon formed a queue behind a

busload of recent arrivals from Istanbul.

Although it resides in the mildly antagonistic territory of Greece—the diplomatic

relationship between Turkey and Greece is fully normalized now, but an atmosphere of low-

burning animosity still often maintains between Turks and Greeks themselves, complicated and

exacerbated by the obdurate conflict in Cyprus—Atatürk’s birthplace in Salonica (as the city was

4
For a broad overview of the Ottoman and post-Ottoman history of relationships among
different religious communities in Thessaloniki, see Mazower 2004.
known during Ottoman times) remains a primary site of secular-nationalist pilgrimage for many

Turks, second only to Anıt Kabir, Atatürk’s elaborate tomb-complex in the city of Ankara. My

brother and I were an enigma among the visitors to Atatürk’s birthplace on that Autumn

afternoon—we were the only non-Turks, and several of the other visitors with whom I

exchanged niceties stated unequivocally that they could not understand why an American would

visit Atatürk’s birthplace. I smiled in keen ethnographer’s amusement and satisfaction: The

bemused confusion of the secular pilgrims whom I met at Atatürk’s birthplace was a minute

effect and index of many of the tensions and contradictions that inform and coordinate my

research project as a whole.

As a site of secular pilgrimage and, concomitantly, the ritual production of Turkish

nationalism, Atatürk’s birthplace, like Anıt Kabir, strives to enact the synecdochal political

legerdemain of all nationalisms—the substitution of part for whole. In the case of Turkey, the

part that accedes to the privileged position of the whole is Kemalism (Kemalizm, Atatürkçülük),

the statist political project and elite culture of ethno-linguistically homogeneous laicist

secularism.5 I will have much to say about Kemalism, both in this chapter and throughout the

dissertation, but for the moment, I would like to linger on the aesthetics and performance of

nationality and nationalism that were both implicit and explicit at the site of Atatürk’s nonage.

The secular pilgrims who had packed the coaches to Thessaloniki were hardly an accurate

demographic representation of contemporary Turkish society on the whole. Most simply, they

5
In its most concise synopsis, Kemalism consists of six fundamental principles, known in
Turkish as the six arrows (altı ok): republicanism (cumhuriyetçilik), nationalism (milliyetçilik),
populism (halkçılık), étatism/statism (devletçilik), secularism (laiklik), and revolutionary-ism
(devrimcilik). Atatürk first summarized these six fundamental principles in a manifesto published
on 20 April 1931; they were later adopted as a platform by the Republican People’s Party
(Cumhuriyetçi Halk Partisi, CHP), the only party legally established at the time, and eventually
incorporated into the Turkish Constitution (Lewis 1961: 286). Significantly, the six arrows
remain the symbol of the CHP to this day.
were wealthier, more urban and urbane, and more secular than many of their fellow citizens, who

would never think, nor be able, to make the journey to Thessaloniki. Yet most bourgeois

Kemalist elites—a class embodied in a near perfect manner by the pilgrims to Atatürk’s

birthplace—do claim to inhabit and articulate the essential and definitive characteristics of the

Turkish nation. These claims to absolute representativeness have grown all the more vociferous

and frequent in recent decades in Turkey, as the enforced identities of state and society, nation

and people, language, religion and citizenship have become all the more difficult to maintain. It

is precisely this context of an embattled yet still vital, occasionally enforced ideal of Turkish

national homogeneity, rooted in a project of laicist secularism, that provides the mooring for my

specific study of Islamic piety and civil society in contemporary Turkey. While touring

Thessaloniki with my brother, I beamed and chuckled mildly to myself because Atatürk’s

birthplace, ironically excommunicated from the geography of the Turkish nation proper, was one

of the few places I visited during my research where the ideal of Turkish national homogeneity

was not subject to interrogation or creative reinterpretation. As such, Atatürk’s birthplace in

Thessaloniki offers an instructive counterpoint to the constitutive sites and objects of this

dissertation as a whole.

Rethinking the Ethnography of Secularism and Islam: ‘The Secular’ vs. ‘the Laicist’

The enigma of the homogeneous ideal of Turkish identity, with its ineluctable

relationship to questions of religion and secularism, is coeval with the foundation of Republican

Turkey itself. From the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, rent asunder by World War I and the

consequent Allied occupation, Mustafa Kemal and his cohorts fashioned a state premised upon

an ethno-linguistic nationalism that was, paradoxically, both religious and anti-religious at once

(Lewis 1961: 262 ff.; Berkes 1965: 461 ff.; Mango 2002). In the transition from a multi-ethnic
and multi-religious empire to the homogenous Turkish nation-state, Islam—in particular, Sunni

Islam of the Hanafi School of jurisprudence—was taken to be definitive of Turkishness itself

(Lewis 1961: 255). Almost immediately, however, Atatürk’s strong central government in

Ankara began to enact a series of stringent curtailments on practices and expressions of Islam.

Most significant in the context of this dissertation, the authority to define the legitimacy of all

Islamic precepts and practices was invested exclusively in the state itself, and, in particular, in

the Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı), heir to the supreme Ottoman

religious authority, the Sheik-ül-Islam (Shankland 1999: 29; Yılmaz 2005: 100; Davison 1998:

139).6 In a schematic sense, the history of Islam and secularism in Republican Turkey can be

understood as the interplay between these two divergent imperatives: privatization and

minimization, on the one hand, and monopolization and homogenization, on the other. These

two contrastive principles are reconciled and united in the political ideology of Kemalism, which

is, in essence, the doctrine of étatism applied to matters of religion. As a laicist ideology,

Kemalism implies that questions of the traditional legitimacy and the publicness or privacy of

religious practices and discourses are subordinate to the legitimizing, and delegitimizing, control

of the state.

Undoubtedly, the schematic, abstract hegemony of Kemalism as an étatist ideology of

secularism has always been hypothetical rather than actual in Turkey, at least to a degree. As

Şerif Mardin (1989, 1991, 2006) and Michael Meeker (2002) have detailed in different ways, the

modern Turkish state’s aspirations to monopolize and enforce the privatization of Islam did not

entirely deny continuities and accommodations on the part of practices, discourses and

institutions with longer histories and more complex sociologies. Nonetheless, the fates and
6
See Chapter Two for an extended discussion of the Presidency of Religious Affairs, its
particular definition of Islamic piety, and the effects that this definition has on ‘alternative’
understandings of Islam.
trajectories of both Kemalism and Turkish Islam have changed radically over the past quarter

century. Since the early 1980s, Turkey has experienced an efflorescence of civil society in

tandem with a neoliberal turn in both domestic economic policies and electoral politics (Heper

1991; Öniş 2004). While the initial interventions of the neoliberal reforms of the eighties were

economic in nature—a large number of state industries were rapidly privatized and protectionist,

import-substitution policies were overturned—reverberations in Turkey’s sociocultural and

political spheres followed closely on their heels. The emergence of new Islamic ‘movements’ in

Turkey must necessarily be understood against the backdrop of this radically altered

sociopolitical context.

One of the aspirations of this dissertation is to provide new, ethnographically-nuanced

purchase on the changing dispensation of Turkish secularism in light of these shifting domestic

and global cultural, political, and economic logics. However, my principal method for achieving

this aspiration is not an examination of the ideologies or history of Kemalism itself. Indeed, two

recent volumes by anthropologists Yael Navaro-Yashin (2002a) and Esra Özyürek (2006) have

already addressed the contemporary purchase and permutations Kemalism in their own right. On

the whole, Navaro-Yashin and Özyürek trace the trajectory that Kemalism has followed in the

context of neoliberal consumer culture over the past several decades; they both argue

persuasively that Kemalism has become subject to the same logics of consumer privatization as

other cultural and ideological forms in contemporary Turkey (and, of course, elsewhere—see

also Hart 1999 and Çınar 2005). As will become clear, my own research and arguments often

draw on and supplement those of Navaro-Yashin and Özyürek—I am especially indebted to their

mutual observation that state hegemony over both religion and secularism in Turkey is no longer

unproblematic or absolute in the manner that it occasionally appears to be at sites such as

Atatürk’s birthplace in Thessaloniki. However, unlike their work, my focus is not Kemalism per

se; rather I seek a fuller comprehension of the manner in which Islamic piety, and piety as

practiced and conceived in the public fora of civil society in particular, has both persevered and

transformed in relation to the changing regime(s) of Turkish secularism.

In general, my approach to questions of secularism and religiosity leans heavily on the

groundbreaking work of Talal Asad (1999, 2003, 2007). Asad’s arguments concerning ‘the

secular’ and secularism—broadly, the post-Enlightenment epistemology and ontology that

separates the sphere of religion from other spheres of social action and affect, and the political

doctrine that depends upon and enforces this articulation and quarantine—are too multifaceted

and subtle to summarize fully here. One overarching lesson of Asad’s intervention deserves

emphasis, however: The anthropology of religion in contemporary contexts —which is to say

modern and postmodern societies—is necessarily an anthropology of secularism as well. In

other words, the enterprising ethnographer can, indeed must, study secularism and the secular by

interrogating their effects on and relationship to religious practices, discourses and ideologies.

Asad’s intervention marked a paradigm shift from the earlier, transhistorical and transcultural

anthropology of religion, especially the ‘symbolic’ approach advocated by Clifford Geertz

(1968, 1973). This earlier sub-discipline, with roots stretching back to eminent forefathers such

as Durkheim (1995) and Malinowski (1936, 1992), proposed a hypostasized, universal definition

of religion as a sui generis sociocultural phenomenon;7 Asad’s reorientation of the anthropology

of religion as perforce an anthropology of secularism as well demands an historicist recognition

7
Of course, 19th Century Francophone pre-structuralist sociology and early 20th Century
Anglophone anthropology are not the only disciplines that articulated religion as a sui generis
category and concept. Minimally, Kant’s argument that religion provides historical scaffolding
for universal ethical imperatives (1960), William James’ detailing of the social and
psychological conjugations of universal religious experience (2002 [1902]), and Freud’s diatribe
against religion as a symptomatic feature of collective neurosis (1928) also warrant mention.
that the abstract category of religion itself emerges in the sociopolitical context of the secular and

secularism. This critical anthropology of secularism has yielded impressive fruits in

ethnographies by Saba Mahmood (2005) and Charles Hirschkind (2006), among others (see also

Agrama 2009); my own project is deeply indebted to his general argument that the ethnography

of religion and the ethnography of secularism are mutually-imbricated.

In spite of the inspiration and inheritance that I draw from Asad and his interpreters,

however, my research departs in significant ways from the Asadian ethnography of secularism,

both thematically and conceptually. On one level, the historical specificity of Turkey, both in

relation to European modernity and to the multiple cultural and political contexts of Islam,

demands a recalibration of the priorities of Asad’s project. The anthropologist Brian Silverstein

underscores the importance of the specificity of Turkish political modernity nicely: “Arguments

about Islam’s allegedly alternative relationship to political modernity need to be nuanced by

pointing out that the latter in Turkey is not a legacy of colonialism (in any direct sense), as it is in

much of the world, but, rather, has its genealogy in Ottoman reform movements (2008: 119; see

also Meeker 2002).” By pointing out that political modernity, and thus secularism, participates in

multiple histories and genealogies, Silverstein draws attention to the frequently hegemonic and

uniform conception of both political modernity and secularism that characterizes Asad’s

arguments. As we will see, this hegemonic understanding of political modernity as simply a

project of liberal secularization does not adequately comprehend the complex relationship

between state power and piety in Turkey itself.

Certainly, Asad’s category of ‘the secular’, the broadly liberal domain of politics and

affect that defines the modern category and concept of religion, is a key factor in determining the

relationship between Islam and secularism in contemporary Turkey. I take seriously Asad’s
point that the imperatives of liberal/secular publicness necessarily exclude illiberal and non-

liberal religious discourses and practices from the purview of the public.8 Moreover, as we shall

see, these imperatives do have important effects on the possibilities of public piety in Turkey.

Nonetheless, I am hesitant to dismiss the creative, productive potential of liberal publicness in

the manner that scathing Asadian critique often does. In the Turkish context, for instance, a

liberal, ‘American’ interpretation of secularism is a significant aspiration on the part of civil

Islamic actors and a foil to Kemalism. Moreover, a pious commitment to liberality and pluralism

does not imply a denigration or dismissal of the pasts of ‘tradition’.

Beyond the relationship between ‘the secular’ and piety, Turkish secularism, known

variously as laicism (laiklik) and Kemalism, overtly prescribes and proscribes different types of

Islam in nonliberal, and occasionally illiberal, ways. Rather than the liberal horizon of ‘the

secular’, the category in question here is more accurately conceived of as ‘the laicist’. While

‘the secular’ focuses on the delineation of religion within its own sphere and the commensuration

of religious practices, beliefs and sentiments with the modernist politics of liberal individualism

(Casanova 1994), ‘the laicist’ emphasizes the absolute of sovereignty and authority of the state in

all religious matters. By this definition, for example, the contemporary Iranian state might be

understood as laicist, even as it is clearly not secular. In general, laicism is associated with a

Jacobin belligerence toward religion in all of its forms, but it is important to note that state

control of religion and state-sponsored antagonism toward religion are analytically and

politically distinct projects. Indeed, laicism in Turkey has both Jacobin and non-Jacobin
8
As Asad writes:
When it is proposed that religion can play a positive political role in modern
society, it is not intended that this apply to any religion whatever but only to those
religions that are able and willing to enter the public sphere for the purpose of
rational debate with opponents who are to be persuaded rather than coerced. Only
religions that have accepted the assumptions of liberal moral and political
discourse are being commended (1999: 180).
conjugations, adumbrated by bureaucratic distinctions within the state itself—even as the

Turkish Army and intelligence operations (Milli İstihbarat Teşkilatı, MİT) claim to be the

vanguards of hard-line Kemalism by advocating the most stringent curtailments upon Islam,

another state bureaucracy, the Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı), is

devoted to producing and supporting a certain type of Islam (a point that I expand upon

significantly in Chapter Two).

Conceptually, the dichotomy of ‘the secular’ and ‘the laicist’ closely resembles the

distinction between Foucauldian governmentality (1991) and Gramscian hegemony (1971).

Following Asad, I am interested in how the imperatives of liberal publicness have become

implicit and unquestionable aspects of governance, both in Turkey domestically and globally.

Liberal governmentality9—and here I agree entirely with Asad—provides both the necessary

ground for liberal-secular publicness and delineates the limits of liberal critique, beyond which a

taken-for-granted power nevertheless persists. Liberal governmentality also undergirds the logic

by which the institutions of civil society and practices of publicness are both necessary and

desirable. In brief, then, liberal governmentality corresponds closely to Asad’s category of ‘the

9
It is worth noting that Foucault’s own definition of governmentality does not necessarily imply
liberalism; in Asad’s adaptation, however, this link is presumed. The most thorough definition
provided by Foucault himself is as follows:
(Governmentality is)…the ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures,
analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this
very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as
its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical
means apparatuses of security (1991: 102-103).
Tracing the transmogrifications and iterations of governmentality in a liberal political-economic
context is a worthy project, and one that would help better to define Asad’s category of the
‘secular’, but it is beyond my scope in this project. Minimally, such an inquiry would emphasize
the specific histories by which biopower becomes commensurable with liberal understandings of
the self and the senses, especially in relationship to public action. Asad’s own work suggests
lines of flight for this inquiry, as do recent works by Charles Hirschkind (2006) and William
Mazzarella (2009, 2010a).
secular’, or, rather more precisely, ‘the secular’ delineates the relationship among religiosity,

affect and politics that liberal governmentality presupposes and produces. However, liberal

governmentality and ‘the secular’ do not comprehend the entirety of the politics of piety in

Turkey; the explicit cultural and political hegemony of the state, in Gramscian terms, also acts to

define religion, often at cross purposes to the dispensation of liberal governmentality.10 The

distinction between ‘the secular’ and ‘the laicist’ nicely captures these two axes of the politics

piety, one emphasizing governmentality and liberal bipower, the other focusing on more explicit

regimes of state power.

Put simply, then, ‘the secular’ and secularism are not identical or even commensurable

projects in Turkey—the nexus of ethno-linguistic nationalism that informs and underpins

Kemalism is often at odds with the liberal imperatives of the secular. Moreover, laicist Turkish

secularism itself is not an entirely coherent project—different state bureaucracies seek to control,

delimit, produce, and minimize Islamic piety in different ways. From the perspective of the

anthropology of secularism, this divergence and dissonance between ‘the secular’ and ‘the

laicist’ in Turkey demands a reassessment of some of Asad’s guiding arguments, which far too

often generalize the experiences of Muslims in Western European and postcolonial contexts as

definitive of the relationship between secularism and Islam on the whole. In contemporary

Turkey, the anthropologist must endeavor to think the relationship between practices of piety and

imperatives of secularism in a context in which secularism is a project of incipient liberalism for

some and an ineluctable facet of hegemonic national political identity for others. My own

10
This is, of course, a quick-and-easy, schematic interpretation of the differences between
Foucauldian governmentality and Gramscian hegemony. The concept of hegemony is more
complex than its ubiquitous stereotype; in particular, Gramsci’s discussion of the emergence of
civil society as an effect of the hegemony of the state and political society (1971: 245-246)
suggests the possibility of a productive integration of the concepts of governmentality and
hegemony.
research aspires to achieve this goal by focusing on how piety is practiced and conceived within

the institutions of Turkish civil society—for it is within the sphere of civil society that many of

the most creative articulations and negotiations of the relationship among ‘the secular’, ‘the

laicist’ and Islamic piety now occur. A proliferation of religious civil society organizations,

devoted to a congeries of causes pious and mundane, has been one particularly striking outcome

of Turkey’s neoliberal turn of the past quarter century. Whereas the state had carefully regulated

and often curtailed religiously-oriented civil society organizations earlier in the history of the

Republic (Çızakçı 2000: 86 ff.), the novel economic and political terrain of eighties proved to be

a salubrious context for the rapid expansion of charitable foundations and associations. On the

basis of this institutional efflorescence outside of the full purview of the state, a new, civil Islam

has arisen to challenge the hegemony of both the Kemalist imperative of the privatization of

religious practice and the state-based definition of legitimate Sunni-Hanafi Islam. This civil

Islamic sphere constitutes both the context for and object of my study.

Turkish Politics of Piety and the Civil Society Effect

Recent years have witnessed a groundswell in the study of the “Islamic movement” in

Turkey and its explicit relationship to structures of partisan and state political power. The

relatively new, Islamically-oriented political parties of Turkey have attracted significant

scholarly attention, as Turkish social scientists such as Hakan Yavuz (2003a, 2006, 2009) and

Alev Çınar (1997, 2005) have written extensively on the manner in which Islamic political

parties such as the (now-defunct) Welfare Party (Refah Partisi, RP), and, in particular, the

current governing party, Justice and Development (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AK Parti) both

challenge and achieve reorientation in relation to the institutions of Turkish democracy, the
Army, and the Turkish state more generally.11 In a parallel but distinct vein, the anthropologist

Jenny White (1999, 2002) and the cultural critic Nilüfer Göle (1996, 2000) have seized on the

relationship between the gradual enfranchisement of Islamically-oriented political parties and

questions of publicness and sociality more broadly, especially in consideration of ideologies and

practices of gender and femininity. This inquiry into Turkey’s political-Islamic movement is, in

many respects, part of a broader scholarly reconsideration of Turkish modernity—in recent

years, social scientists such as Martin Stokes (1992, 1999), Ayşe Öncü (1997), Sam Kaplan

(2006) and Çağlar Keyder (1999) have assessed the recent fate of the project of Turkish

modernity in relation to diverse questions of popular music, bourgeois domestic intimacy,

primary school education and urban space (see also Keyman 2007).12

In general, recent social scientific works on Turkish Islam fall into three broad, often

overlapping categories: a) studies that focus on the personalities, micropolitics, sociology and

history of Islamically-oriented political parties such as Welfare and Justice and Development,

exemplified by Yavuz’ and White’s monographs; b) studies of ‘Islamic identity politics’, and the

headscarf issue (başörtüsü meselesi) in particular, exemplified by Nilüfer Göle’s groundbreaking

arguments (1996); and c) studies of Islamic ‘sects’ (tarikatlar), especially Sufi groups such as

the Nakşibendis, as well as the Nur and Gülen communities, exemplified by Şerif Mardin’s

analysis of Said Nursi (1989), Camilla Nereid’s work on the Nur movement (1998), Berna

Turam’s work on the Gülen movement (2007) and parts of Yavuz’ oeuvre (especially Yavuz and

11
Turkey has weathered four coups d’état in its eight-six year history: May 27th 1960, March
12th 1971, September 12th 1980, and the ‘postmodern’ coup of February 28th 1997. Two of these
coups are particularly important in the context of my research: the September 12th 1980 coup,
which spawned from amplifying left-right political clashes and resulted in three years of military
rule, and the February 28th 1997 coup against the Islamically-inspired Welfare Party government
of Necmettin Erbakan.
12
The aforementioned works on contemporary articulations of Kemalist laicism by Navaro-
Yashin (2002a) and Özyürek (2006) also deserve mention in this context.
Esposito 2003).13 Works in this last category often probe the relationship between ‘sects’ and the

institutions of civil society, a theme that animates my own research as well. While the work of

these researchers constitutes a significant backdrop to my own study, my object of inquiry and

analysis is both more abstract and differently located. I aspire to comprehend the relationship

between Islamic piety and civil society, understood both as a nexus of institutions and a political

aspiration, in light of the changing political imperatives and practices of secularism in Turkey.

And though civil Islamic piety and partisan Islamic politics are undeniably affected by many of

the same political dynamic and developments, they are by no means irreducible to each other—a

point that I linger on more thoroughly in Chapter Two.

Of course, the relationship between civil society and Islamic piety, and the related topic

of Islam in the public sphere, are not unknown to the fields of Turkish studies and the

ethnography of contemporary Islam more generally. In the specific context of Turkey, the three

communities (cemaatler) that inform the bulk of my research, the Nur Community (Nur

Cemaatı), the Gülen Community (Gülen Cemaatı), and the Turkish Alevi Community (Aleviler)

have each attracted significant social scientific research in recent years, largely because of their

efflorescence within the sphere of civil society. Furthermore, many civil society institutions

themselves are passionately committed to publishing research about their own activities and

communities, making the line between scholarly examination and institutional propaganda often

difficult, if not impossible, to draw (and, after all, are the two genres necessarily so exclusive of

13
Studies of Alevism, such as those by Shankland (2003) and Melikoff (1998, 2001), and a
collection of papers sponsored by the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul (Olsson, Özdalga
and Raudvere 1998), as well as works by Alevi authors themselves, although akin to the work on
tarikats in many respects, constitute a separate category that, unfortunately, tends to remain at a
distance from serious scholarship on Turkish Sunni Islam. My own study, as well as Kabir
Tambar’s recent dissertation, Stones of Kerbala (2009a), militates against this regrettable gulf.
each other?).14 Beyond this, a series of more theoretical works, published in both Turkish and

English (Göle 2000; Göle and Ammann 2006; Özdalga and Persson 1998; Aslan 1999) have

drawn attention to new ‘Islamic publics’ and Islamic civil society in Turkey more generally.

Finally, both anthropologists such as Robert Hefner (2000; 2005), Charles Hirschkind (2006),

David Herbert (2003), Dale Eickelman and Jon Anderson (2003 [1999]) and Muslim thinkers

such as Abdolkarim Soroush (2000), Hasan Hanafi (2002), Mohammed Khatami (2003) and

Mohamed Arkoun (2005, 2006) have seized on civil society and the public sphere as necessary

concepts for comprehending the global condition of Islam generally.

Interest in the relationship between Islam and the institutions of civil society is

undoubtedly a welcome change from the tenor earlier of scholarship, which often asserted a

necessary incompatibility between the two. Consider, for example, the following passage from

the famous anthropologist of Islam, Ernest Gellner, which was published only fifteen years ago

but reeks strongly of the late 19th or early 20th Century:

If segmentary societies are to be contrasted with Civil Society because the sub-
communities on which they depend are too stifling for modern individualism, then
Islam provides a further contrast. It exemplifies a social order which seems to
lack much capacity to provide political countervailing institutions or associations,

14
A few of the academic titles published by Nur and Gülen institutions or their affiliates in
English include Muslim Citizens of the Globalized World (2007, Robert Hunt and Yüksel
Aslandoğan, eds.), Globalization, Ethics, and Islam. The Case of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi (2005,
Ian Markhan and Ibrahim Özdemir, eds.), Islam at the Crossroads. On the Life and Thought of
Bediuzzaman Said Nursi (2003, Ibrahim Abu Rabi, ed.) and Anatolia Junction (1999, Fred
Reed). While some of these titles are published by presses owned by Nur and Gülen institutions
themselves, such as The Light Press, located in New Jersey, others are compiled by academics
sympathetic to the various communities and printed by university presses (the SUNY press in
particular has produced a significant number of works on Said Nursi and the Nur Community).
Unsurprisingly, I was immediately offered copies of these and other English language titles as
gifts upon my arrival at different foundations; occasionally, the same book would be offered to
me on multiple occasions at affiliated institutions. The Alevi Community, for its part, is equally
devoted to academic research and publication—for example, the Pir Sultan Abdal Association of
Ankara has published Turkish versions of several works by Irene Melikoff, a noted specialist on
Alevism and Bektashism.
 which is atomized without much individualism, and operates effectively without
intellectual pluralism (1994: 29).15

From this type of wholesale caricature of the necessary incompatibility of Islam and civil

society, it is but a brief, slippery slope to the antediluvian Orientalism of Bernard Lewis (1990,

2002) or the paranoid neo-Orientalism of Samuel Huntington (1996). A different iteration of this

neo-Orientalism, represented by neoconservative think-tanks such as the Rand Corporation,

argues that civil society is the ‘missing ingredient’ or catalyst that will allow Islam to shed its

supposedly illiberal and violent ways (e.g. Benard 2003). As Jean and John Comaroff (1999)

have argued with regard to civil society discourse in contemporary Africa, such exhortations to

civil society have the effect of defining their object (Africa, Islam) as necessarily uncivil even as

they adduce civility as a quasi-magical solution to all political and social problems (see also

Mamdani 1996).

Recent anti-Orientalist scholarship (e.g. Mamdani 2004; Ramadan 2004; Asad 2008) has

spared no effort in eviscerating the political projects and presuppositions that drive both

pessimistic hypotheses of Islam’s clash with ‘the West’ and optimistic calls for civil society to

domesticate Islam. Surprisingly, however, much work in an anti-Orientalist vein has reinscribed

the dichotomy between Islam and political modernity/civil society by reversing its political

polarities. For instance, the eminent Turkish sociologist Şerif Mardin has asserted that “Civil

society is a Western dream, a historical aspiration…(which) does not translate into Islamic terms

15
Earlier in the same chapter, Gellner writes, in a similar vein, that “the expectation of some
additional Civil Society, which could hold the state to account, on top of the Umma defined as a
shared commitment to the implementation of the Law, would seem almost impious, but in any
case unrealistic (1994: 28).” Beyond his problematic ascription of a coherent political rationality
to the umma (usually glossed simply as the community of all Muslims), Gellner’s skepticism
over the possibility of an Islamic civil society seems rooted both in a failure of imagination and
profound naïvete of the many contexts in which civil society, even in the early nineties, had
become an aspiration and institutional reality for Muslims the world over.
(1995, quoted in Sajoo 2002).” Even Talal Asad adheres to a similar polemical line when he

writes that

the ideology of political representation in liberal democracies makes it difficult if

not impossible to represent Muslims as Muslims. Why? Because in theory the
citizens who constitute a democratic state belong to a class that is defined only by
what is common to all its members and its members only. What is common is the
abstract equality of individual citizens to one another, so that each counts as one
(2003: 173).
Asad remains mute on the question of what it might mean “to represent Muslims as Muslims” in

any context, liberal democratic or otherwise—after all, does not any act of political

representation simultaneously involve the articulation of an ideal and the partial abnegation of

this ideal? In any case, like Gellner, Asad and Mardin both evince a deep skepticism of the

possibility of commensuration between political modernity and Islam. Of course, Mardin and

Asad would almost certainly take strong issue with Gellner’s dismissal of Islamic plurality and

the implicit periodization that seems to locate ‘Islam’ at some historical stage between

segmentary societies and modernity, as defined by civil society. But their anti-Orientalist

impulse ironically leads them to share Gellner’s oil-and-water notion of the incommensurability

of Islam, on the one hand, and civil society and liberal democracy, on the other.16 One of the

panoramic goals of my own research and argument is to question and militate against this

oppositional characterization of Islam and liberal political modernity, regardless of whether the

impetus for such a characterization stems from Orientalist or anti-Orientalist sympathies.

In contrast to both Orientalist and anti-Orientalist readings of the antimony of Islam and

political modernity, and civil society in particular, a significant recent body of literature has

focused important attention on the multiple contexts in which Islam and the institutions of

political modernity mutually configure and reconfigure each other (Zubaida 1989; Salame 1994;

16
For a somewhat lengthier, programmatic statement of this argument, see my recent piece in the
November 2009 issue of Anthropology News (Walton 2009).
Eickelman and Piscatori 1996; Cooper, Nettler and Mahmoud 1998; Abdelkah 2000; Esposito

and Tamimi 2000; Esposito and Burgat 2003; Salvatore and Eickelman 2004). However, in

spite of this substantial social scientific interest in the relationship between political modernity

and contemporary Islam, most work on ‘civil Islam’ has neglected to inquire how practices and

conceptions of piety are themselves shaped and reoriented in the context of the civil sphere.

Robert Hefner’s (2000) work on the history of political and civil Islam in Indonesia, for instance,

treats civil society as merely one site of Islam among many; although Muslims active within civil

society might inhabit more liberal political positions than Muslims attached to the project of the

state, Islam itself is taken to be a coherent, single entity across the domains of civil society and

state. This conception in civil society as an ‘opportunity space’ for Islamically-inspired political

and social movements is characteristic of much recent literature on Islam and political

modernity, especially with regard to Turkish Islam (e.g. Yavuz 2003a, 2004). While an

understanding of civil society as an ‘opportunity space’ is valuable up to a point, it can have the

unfortunate effect of foreclosing a more thorough, detailed analysis of the ways and means by

which piety becomes civil and civility pious.

In the context of my project, civil society takes on two separate, though related,

meanings. On a somewhat obvious, organizational level, civil society is a legally-circumscribed

institutional domain that is both separate from and monitored by the state. Within Turkey, the

institutions of civil society are legally distinguished in two categories: foundations (vakıflar) and

associations (dernekler). Without delving too deeply into the subtleties of the legal distinction

between foundations and associations—a worthy project, but not my own—the difference

between the two can be summarized, in the words of one of my informants, as “a union of

property vs. a union of persons.”17 In other words, a foundation is defined as a material sum of
17
Vakıf bir mülk topluluğudur, dernek bir insan topluluğudur.
property—usually money, securities, and/or real estate—devoted to a particular goal or cause,

which is specified by the foundation charter. As such, foundation monies can be invested in

financial markets and real estate can be purchased in the foundation’s name. An association, on

the other hand, is merely a union of like-minded individuals that has no right to own property of

its own. Foundations and associations are monitored by two different organs of the Turkish state

—while every foundation is regulated by the General Office of Foundations (Vakıflar Genel

Müdürlüğü, VGM18), a branch of the Prime Ministry (Başbakanlık), associations were, until quite

recently, under the authority of the General Office of the Police (Emniyet Genel Müdürlüğü).

Partially as a result of Turkey’s bid for European Union membership, regulatory control over

Turkish associations was passed from the Turkish police to the newly-created Department of

Associations (Dernekler Dairesi Başkanlığı), a branch of the Ministry of the Interior (İçişler

Bakanlığı) in 2003. By all reports, associations are no longer as easily harassed or shut down as

they were when the Turkish police had responsibility for their regulation, but foundations still

remain most institutionally stalwart and politically stable type of civil society organization in

Turkey. Most significantly, the number and diversity of both foundations and associations,

especially those devoted to pious causes, has skyrocketed in the twenty-five years since the

neoliberal reforms of the 1980s.19 With only a few exceptions, all of the institutions that I

discuss in this thesis were established after 1983. Finally, it is important to note that

foundations, unlike associations, have a long and esteemed history within Islam in general. The

Turkish word vakıf is derived from the Arabic waqf, for pious, charitable endowment.

18
The General Directorate of Foundations was established on 2 May 1924 as the replacement for
the Ottoman-era Department of Shari’a and Foundations (Şer’iyye ve Evkaf Vekaleti) (Bilici
1994: 12).
19
The efflorescence of association (dernekler) since the 1980s is particularly notable,
considering the fact that all associations were illegalized after the 1980 coup and only allowed to
open again following the return to civilian government in 1983.
According to a strong hadith narrated by Abu Hurairah, the Prophet Muhammad authorized the

institution of the waqf himself through his praise (Çızakçı 2000: 6)20, and endowments have a

long history within both Sunni and Shi’a Islam as a theologically-sanctioned form of charity

(sadaka) and good deed (sevap, hayır, hizmet).21 As I will discuss more thoroughly in Chapter

Five, many actors within Turkish-Islamic civil society glorify this pious history of the institution

of the foundation and consider their own activities as a continuation of this history.

Such, then, is the specific institutional context of Turkish civil society within which the

organizations of my study exist and navigate. On a second level, however, civil society also

constitutes an aspiration and horizon of political possibility for the actors of Turkey’s pious

foundations and associations. To adopt a fitting phrase from Jean and John Comaroff, civil

society “captures otherwise inchoate—as yet unnamed and unnamable—popular aspirations,

moral concerns, sites and spaces of practice (1999: 3).” One of my own overarching ambitions

throughout this dissertation is to delineate how civil society, as a Comaroffian nexus of political

aspiration and moral sensibility, articulates with the histories, historicities, ethical imperatives

and aesthetic sensibilities of Islam in Turkey. How are civil society and its frequent cognate,

publicness, achieved by pious Muslim actors and Islamic organizations? In other words, what is

20
The hadith reads as follows: “Abu Hurairah reported Allah’s messenger as saying: When a
man dies, all his acts come to an end but three: recurring charity, or knowledge (by which people
benefit), or a pious offspring, who prays for him (Muslim, 1992: bab3, hadith 14, cited in
Çızakçı 2000: 6).
21
For further discussions of the Islamic history of the waqf/vakıf and the relationship of this
history to contemporary Turkish civil society in particular, see Çızakçı 2000; Bonner, Ener and
Singer 2003; Öztürk 1994; Bolak 1994; and Zarcone 1994. An interesting subplot to the
institution of foundations in Republican Turkey is the transformation of minority rights from the
millet system of the Ottoman Empire to the foundation system of the early Republic. Following
the Turkish War of Independence, the three minority religious communities recognized by the
Treaty of Lausanne—Greek Orthodox Christians, Armenian Christians and Jews—had their
properties transformed into the legal institution of the foundation, a system that remains in place
today. For a thorough account of this history in Turkish, see Öztürk 2003.
the status of civil society as (pious) effect? And, finally, what are the politics that situate and

emerge from this achievement?

In coining the term ‘civil society effect’, I am of course drawing an analogy to Timothy

Mitchell’s groundbreaking concept of the ‘state effect’ (1999). Mitchell arrives at the concept of

the ‘state effect’ by way of his project of interrogating, in a Foucauldian vein, the self-evident

distinctions between state and society and state and economy:

What is it about modern society, as a particular form of social and economic

order, that has made possible the apparent autonomy of the state as a freestanding
entity? Why is this kind of apparatus, with its typical basis in an abstract system
of law, its symbiotic relation with the sphere we call the economy, and its almost
transcendental association with the ‘nation’ as the fundamental political
community, the distinctive political arrangement of the modern age (Ibid.: 85).”

In an analogous fashion, we might ask what it is about the contemporary logic of the political

that allows for the hegemonic autonomy and seeming inevitability of civil society as distinct

from both the state and the private sphere (economic or otherwise). It is tempting to identify the

‘civil society effect’ closely with the era of postmodernism and globalization, just as Mitchell

attributes the ‘state effect’ to the modern age. But to do so would be to foreclose, rather than to

invite, ethnographic inquiry into the specific contexts and rationalities by which the sense and

sensibility of civil society is achieved. Although I intuit that there is a generality to the civil

society effect across contemporary political contexts, my aspiration is to comprehend how a

specific conception of civil society as a domain uniquely suited for, even constituted by, the

practice of piety comes into being.

Above all, the domain and aspiration of civil society demarcate a unique modality of

politics for the pious actors and institutions of my study. In order achieve a sense of the

specificity of the politics of civil society, by way of contrast we might do well to consider

anthropologist Partha Chatterjee’s recent reinvigoration of the Gramscian concept of political

society. In Politics of the Governed (2004), Chatterjee argues that the ascendancy of the

developmentalist state, governmentality and the whole host of associated Foucauldian disciplines

have resulted in a basic decoupling of politics and governance within the contemporary nation-

state. The current suzerainty of governmentality and its constituent subject, the population,

displaces both of the definitive modernist bases of political mobilization and popular

sovereignty: liberty and equality, with their analogous political subjects, the citizen and the

community. While Chatterjee holds that there was a relatively ‘organic’, chronological

progression from the liberal-republican state to the governmental state in the North-Atlantic

crucible of political modernity, such was never the case in colonial contexts (Ibid.: 37).

Partially on the basis of this historical distinction between the metropolitan North Atlantic and

the postcolonial world, Chatterjee forwards his concept of ‘political society,’ defined by its

necessary relationship to governmentality, in contrast to civil society, which he largely

dismisses. By distinguishing political society from civil society, Chatterjee effectively redresses

the old Marxist-subaltern critique of civil society as an elite bourgeois institutional domain and

project in new theoretical clothing. Although he recognizes that “civil society as an ideal

continues to energize an interventionist political project…as an actually existing form it is

demographically limited (Ibid.: 39, emphasis his).” In contrast to the bourgeois demographic

exclusivity of civil society, then, political society identifies the politics by which subaltern

groups negotiate the incursions and disciplines of governmentality.

What, then, is one to make of the political possibilities of civil society in light of

Chatterjee’s broadside? In the context of my project, there are at least three points to be made in

relation to the dispensation and political possibilities of civil society vis-à-vis piety in Turkey.

First, there is a simple response to Chatterjee’s argument that acknowledges its basic conclusions
but questions its emphasis. Conceptually, political society may indeed capture politics in most of

the world better than civil society, but in as much as civil society still animates political action as

an ideal in various contexts—as Chatterjee acknowledges—is it not also, and still, worthy of

ethnographic and analytical attention? With its emphasis on civil society and ethical

communities as constitutive ideals of one genre of the politics of piety, my own argument

answers this question in the strong affirmative, but also moves beyond it. Secondly, in response

to Chatterjee’s claim that political society is particularly characteristic of colonial and

postcolonial contexts, one might point out that the binary of metropole and colony/postcolony

does not exhaust all geopolitical histories and contexts. As I already noted above, Turkey, both

because of its Ottoman heritage and do to its ambivalent contemporary relationship to the

European Union and the ‘global north’ more generally, cannot be properly understood as either

postcolonial or North Atlantic/European. For this reason alone, the genealogy and contemporary

configuration of both civil society and political society in Turkey demand specific attention—

minimally, Chatterjee’s assumptions about the rise of political society in response to the

post/colonial developmentalist state are not transparently applicable. Finally, one might put a

theoretical question to Chatterjee’s critique: Is he justified in identifying governmentality

entirely with the realm of political society, and thereby foreclosing an inquiry into the

relationship between Foucauldian state disciplines and civil society? In other words, are not the

practices and ideals of civil society themselves subject to the logics of governmentality? My

discussion above of the relationship between the concept of the secular and liberal

governmentality suggests that, pace Chatterjee, governmentality and civil society are

significantly imbricated. Conversely, as the discussion of statist piety in Chapter Two will

demonstrate, state disciplines and their relationship to religion are also potential objects of
critique from within the domain of civil society. To adopt a turn of phrase from Chatterjee’s

own earlier work on secularism, civil society itself can provide “a site…of power where

governmentality is unable successfully to encompass sovereignty (1998: 1775),” even if civil

society is not entirely immune from the logics of governmentality.

Theoretical nuance aside, the principal point of this conversation is to underscore the

particular modality of politics that civil society articulates and presupposes. This modality of

politics is not one of partisan wrangling or democratic populism. Nor is it the pragmatic

realpolitik of global subalterns making tactical adjustments to competing regimes of power that

Chatterjee’s political society captures. Rather, it is a politics that privileges inexplicit

mobilizations and ultimately aims at a horizon of depoliticization for the discourses and ideals

that inform it. Even when framed as a politics of recognition, this civil politics, with its

produced presuppositions of essential identities and authentic practices, denigrates the more

agonistic, overt means and ends of political action in familiar modes. As we will see, many of

its most notable achievements are non-events of a sort, the establishment of modes of piety that

do not invite or demand political intervention on the part of the state. Ultimately, the

ethnographic pursuit of this specific achievement of civil society as a site for the politics of

depoliticized religiosity underpins and orients the cardinal analytic of my dissertation: liberal

piety.

Liberal Piety, Preliminarily

Like studies of the relationship between Islam and political modernity, research on

‘liberal Islam’ has become something of an academic cottage industry in recent years. The most

valuable of these works, such as Charles Kurzman’s sourcebook Liberal Islam (1998), are

compilations of primary source historical and contemporary writings on themes of pluralism and
liberalism by Muslims themselves; a host of other titles query the supposed compatibilities and

incompatibilities of Islam and liberal democracy in general (Arat 2005; Armajani 2004; Hashemi

2009; March 2009). It is not my intention to discount the importance of this upsurge of scholarly

interest in the relationship between political liberalism and Islam—in the context of bloody,

monolithic and all too popular fantasies of Islam, research on the complexities of the relationship

between Muslims and liberal democratic principles in multiple national and geopolitical contexts

provides a crucial foil to imaginaries of an inevitable clash between Islam and the West.22

Nevertheless, recent studies of liberalism and Islam are frequently frustrating, both

ethnographically and conceptually—too often, they take Islam and liberalism to be fully-

coherent discursive and historical objectivities that only interact contingently with each other.

On the other hand, as I have already noted above, the Asadian critique of secularism tends to

conceive of liberalism and liberal publicness as necessarily heteronomous impositions on

religion that defy and deny the logics and practices of pious discursive traditions.

In the context of Turkey, neither of these approaches satisfies scrutiny. Islamic piety, as

it is practiced and conceived among the civil society organizations of my study, is not related to

liberalism in a merely contingent or ex post facto manner—rather, incipient political and

economic liberalism (and neoliberalism), by serving as a foil to Kemalism and its imperative of

national-secular homogeneity, is a necessary cause of and context for Turkish civil Islam. Nor

do the advocates and practitioners of civil Islam in Turkey consider liberal-democratic

institutions, sentiments and sensibilities to be heteronomous incursions upon their piety. Indeed,

as I have frequent occasion to discuss throughout the dissertation, my informants often

contrasted their own ‘intentional’ and ‘conscious’ (kasıtlı, bilinçli) piety favorably with the
22
For an insightful early critique of the ‘clash of civilizations’ hypothesis by a self-described
‘Islamicist’, see Mottahedeh 1995. Bilgrami 2003, Ernst 2003, Mamdani 2004 and Asad 2008
also each offer valuable perspectives on and criticisms of the Huntingtonian hypothesis.
‘unthinking’ (kasıtsız, bilinçsiz) practices of Turkish Muslims who do not participate in the

institutions and activities of Turkish Islamic civil society.

My aspiration to capture the integral, synthetic relationship between sociopolitical

liberality and civil Islam in Turkey leads directly to the principal orienting concept of this

dissertation as a whole: liberal piety. While the specific content and varieties of liberal piety

occupy the majority of the presentation to come, a few words on the structure and purchase of

the concept are in order. Liberal piety is, above all, a dialectical concept—in the context of civil

Islam in Turkey, liberal piety comes to exist through the ceaseless effort to render political

liberality and the discursive traditions and practices of Islam coherent and seamless in relation to

each other. On the one hand, an emergent liberal political context, and the civil society effect in

particular, are principal causes of and contexts for piety in contemporary Turkey. Two cardinal

liberal ideals animate the practice of Islam within Turkey’s pious institutions: the legally-

circumscribed, rights-bearing citizen sequestered from the interference of the state and the free

association of these citizens within the sphere of civil society. Together, these twin values act as

a productive counterweight to the homogenous national utopia of Kemalism—in somewhat

different language, this is a case of ‘the secular’ militating against and mitigating ‘the laicist’.

As I will delineate throughout Chapters Three, Four and Five, the piety practiced within

Turkey’s civil society institutions is not merely preserved by this commitment to liberality—

rather, liberal principles of pluralism and individualism articulate with the precepts and beliefs of

Islam in a creative, productive manner. On the other hand, the discursive traditions of Islam

themselves are equally a necessary cause of commitments to political liberalism among the

actors and institutions that constitute my study. My discussion of neo-Ottomanism, especially in

Chapters Four and Five, offers the most thorough example of the way in which Islamic history is
understood to offer a precedent for, and even demand, principles of liberal toleration and

individual responsibility. Although most of my interlocutors recognize the early modern

European roots of liberal democracy, they argue persuasively that liberalism also has (often-

unacknowledged) Islamic roots, and that their own liberal sensibilities stem directly from this

heritage.

All of this is to emphasize that liberality and piety are not mere ‘idioms’ for each other in

the context of my research—rather, each is both cause and effect of the other, and together they

constitute a synthetic, distinct modality of politics, social practice, historicity and religiosity.

The proof of this claim, of course, inevitably resides in the ethnographic pudding yet to be placed

upon the table of argument. For the moment, it suffices to underscore the unique and historically

recent advent of liberal piety within the sphere of Turkish civil society and in relation to Turkish

Islam more generally. As I noted above, the efflorescence of civil society institutions devoted to

pious activities in Turkey is a relatively new development, corresponding to the past quarter

century of Turkish political and socioeconomic reforms and the concomitant, hesitant retreat of

Kemalist laicism. In this respect, liberal piety is also neoliberal—its emergence is a partial effect

of a broader reconfiguration of the political and the social, both in Turkey and globally. (As

such, I expect that the concept will bear comparative fruit with regard to new modalities of

public piety in diverse confessional and political contexts.) That said, liberal piety should not be

understood as a mere effect of the shifting tectonic plates of Turkish politics and publicness. The

discourses and practices that constitute and orient liberal piety evince longer, more intricate

histories and sociologies, even as the particular ensemble of liberality and pious commitment it

describes is historically recent.

 One crucial conceptual distinction related to liberal piety, which animates much of the

presentation to come, deserves brief introduction here. Liberal piety is not identical to pious

liberalism, although the two often commingle and achieve articulation in common sites and

discourses. For shorthand, we might gloss pious liberalism as the overt commitment to liberal

political principles and ideals on the part of pious actors. As my presentation will bear out, overt

pious liberalism is a key project and value for many of Turkey’s pious civil society organizations

and actors; however, it does not exhaust the concept and practice of liberal piety as a whole.

Unlike pious liberalism, liberal piety does not necessarily imply an explicit commitment to

liberal political values—rather, it designates the relationship of commensuration through which

liberality and piety affect and effect each other. Thus, attributes, attitudes and actions that

constitute liberal piety can, and do, characterize sites, discourses and subjects that do not

participate in or valorize pious liberalism per se. And while pious liberalism is also a principal

concern of my ethnographic rendering, my argument aspires to capture the generality of liberal

piety that exceeds overtly pious commitments to liberalism.

Finally, before continuing, a caveat by way of a word of caution. In the chapters to come,

I treat liberal piety as something of an ideal type, to invoke the Weberian heritage—liberal piety

exists only in dialogic contrast to other abstract modes of Islam in contemporary Turkey. That

said, however, I remain aware of the limitations of this schematic, cardinal perspective; even as I

argue for the abstract specificity of liberal piety, I also remain vigilant in acknowledging the less

schematic, contingent and unexpected complications and articulations of liberal piety within

denser regimes of religiosity and sociality. To put this point another way: While it is relatively

easily to delineate liberal piety in dialogic relationship to other abstract modes and ideologies of

Islam, it is much more difficult to trace the dialectic of particularity and abstraction that defines
liberal piety in relationship to the excessive biographies and genealogies of religiosity that

characterize the lives of believers themselves. And although my principal aim throughout this

dissertation remains on the former, schematic level, I also attend to the pressures that liberal

piety both exerts and experiences in relation to these latter, less circumscribed domains of belief

and practice.

Pious Communities and Civil Institutions: A Brief Sociology and Prehistory of Liberal Piety

Although I initially conceived of my research project as a general survey of pious civil

society institutions in Turkey, both ethnographic exigencies and my own evolving interests led

me to focus specifically on three different communities (cemaatler), each of which achieves

representation through a wide number of different foundations and associations. One of these

communities, Turkish Alevis (Aleviler) is a religious minority that is not recognized by the state,

constituting somewhere between ten and twenty percent of the Turkish population. Many

principal Alevi beliefs bear strong similarities with Twelver Jafari (Caferi) Shi’a Islam as

practiced in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon, but Alevis maintain unique ritual practices and identify

strongly with a number of saints (pirler) from the Ottoman era. The second group upon which I

focus is the Nur Community (Nur Cemaatı), a modernist Sunni community with roots in the late

Ottoman and early Republican period. Finally, the third community of my study, the Gülen

Community (Gülen Cemaatı), is a more recent offshoot of the Nur Community. The Gülen

Community draws inspiration primarily from the voluminous writings of the eponymous

philosopher and theologian Fethullah Gülen and has achieved a greater degree of global

influence and cosmopolitan reach than almost any other Turkish social movement, pious or

otherwise. In as much as the presentation of the following chapters shuttles frequently among
institutions and individuals associated with these communities, I offer a brief description of each

of them here.

The general category of ‘community’ itself also invites ethnographic and analytical

inquiry. Primarily, I opt to identify the Nur, Gülen, and Alevi institutions of my study as parts of

broader communities because community is a term of self-ascription—‘cemaat’, the most

common Turkish word for community, is the broader category to which pious civil society actors

attribute their organizations and actions. Furthermore, as I discuss in Chapter Three, writers and

theologians such as Ali Bulaç—a journalist affiliated with various Gülen institutions—have

articulated a coherent theory of the community as a uniquely suitable social type for

contemporary pious Muslims. Beyond its status as an ethnographic term, however, the category

community also directs attention to the liberalizing politics of civil society in general. From the

ideological perspective of ‘community’, the institutions of both civil society and the state are

contingent and artifactual. Although civil society encourages organization, the identities and

practices thereby organized are simultaneously conceptualized by their actors as prior to this

articulation. Furthermore, this incipient authenticity of the ‘community’ opens to a rather

paradoxical depoliticized politics which, in classically liberal fashion, demands non-intervention

from the state precisely because the community conceives of itself as non- and logically pre-

political. In a somewhat different formulation, we might say that the category of the community

presupposes authentic ethical and social uniformity that is only politicized in an ex post facto

fashion.23 Throughout the presentation to come, I endeavor both to acknowledge these claims to

communitarian apolitical authenticity on the part of my interlocutors while also interrogating the

public, political, and semiotic logics by which these claims to apolitical community are possible.

23
I am particularly endebted to John Comaroff for this observation and articulation.
The Nur Community: Quietist Revivalism and the Ethical Centrality of the Individual

It would be difficult for anyone familiar with the contemporary political, social, and

cultural topography of contemporary Turkey to be unaware of the figure of Said Nursi (known

by his disciples as Bediüzzaman, “Wonder of the Age”, or simply Üstad, “Master”). In spite of

his humble origins—he was born in an alpine village in approximately 1877, in the Kurdish

region of the Ottoman Empire near the provincial capital of Bitlis—Nursi’s precocious mastery

of Qur’anic interpretation and the Sunna24 at an early age quickly earned him a reputation among

religious scholars and tribal chieftains throughout the eastern frontier of Empire (Vahide 2005).

His notoriety only increased following his relocation to the Ottoman capital of Istanbul, in 1907;

just prior to World War I, he was even able to appeal to and receive support from Sultan

Mehmed Reşad for his grand aspiration, an Islamic university, known as the Meresetü’z-Zehra or

Eastern University, which was to be founded in the province of Van and offer education in three

languages, Arabic, Kurdish and Turkish (Ibid.: 101 ff.). Although this dream was never realized,

Nursi’s fame only continued to wax following the establishment of the Turkish Republic, in

1923, both in spite of and because of his constant harassment and repeated incarceration by the

nascent Turkish state. During these numerous periods of captivity, Nursi was able to produce the

vast majority of his writings, known collectively as the Risale-i Nur (Epistles of Light); in spite

of their illegality, his Qur’anic commentary (tefsir) and sermons passed from hand to hand,

making their way out of the prisons, and, on the basis of diligent copying by a growing legion of

enthusiasts, achieved a sort of underground publicity as a corpus. By the time of Nursi’s death,

24
The Sunna (Turkish Sünnet) is the collective name for the traditions of Islam based upon the
hadith (Turkish hadiseler), the authoritative sayings of doings of the Prophet Muhammad, rather
than on the Qur’an itself. Shi’a and Sunni Islam share much of the Sunna, but there are
significant differences between the two traditions concerning which precise hadiths are
authoritative. Nursi himself was Sunni, of course. For articulate and accessible discussions of
the Sunna and hadith, see Brown 1996 and 2004: 84-96, Algar 2000, and Rahman 1979: 50-58
in the southeastern city of Urfa in 1960, the military—already jittery in anticipation of the coup

that would occur several months later—kidnapped his corpse and had it buried in an anonymous

grave somewhere in the country’s west, probably within the province of Isparta (Ibid.: 345-

346).25 Ironically, perhaps, the military’s abduction only served to contribute to the ample

hagiography of Nursi, in spite of his own instance that his written works, not his person, were the

legitimate object of fame, adulation, and emulation.

Over the nearly five decades since his death, Said Nursi and the Risale-i Nur have

become the object of and inspiration for one of the most vibrant and visible ‘new Islamic

movements’ in contemporary Turkey (Yavuz 2003a; Nereid 1998; Esposito 1996; Zürcher

2004). In addition to the innumerable weekly classes, based upon readings of the Risale-i Nur,

followers of Nursi—collectively known by the contentious title of ‘Nursi-ists’, or Nurcular—

achieve organization through a panoply of civil society organizations, primarily foundations

(vakıflar). Simultaneously, the Nurcular are constant bugbears and objects of criticism for the

politicians, military brass, and media outlets that voice a staunch version of Kemalist secularism,

which does not tend to interest itself in subtle distinctions among different Islamic groups. From

the frequently hegemonic perspective of staunch Kemalism, the Nur community is merely one

hue in the spectrum of ‘Shari’aists’ or Şeriatçılar, which, as a whole, are taken to constitute a

real and imminent threat to the autonomy and authority of Kemalism.

In spite of this rather paranoid imputation on the part of Kemalism, both the writings of

Said Nursi and the practices of the Nur Community evince a deep indifference, even skepticism,

toward partisan politics and state power. Nursi’s writings themselves emphasize the primacy of
25
Said Nursi’s ultimate resting place continues to be an object of intense speculation and media
attention. In 2006, journalists from Aksiyon, an Islamically-oriented weekly magazine with a
particular dedication to the life and works of Said Nursi, revived the debate over Nursi’s burial
by interviewing several surviving army officers, who claimed to have witnessed Nursi’s final
interment on a mountainside in İsparata. See Doğan 2008.
the Muslim individual as a practitioner of quietist, rationalist piety (Nursi 2004b, 2004c, 2005).

And while this rationalist, individualistic emphasis shares many themes with Muslim modernists

such as Muhammad ‘Abduh (1966) and Sayyid Qutb (1981), his concern that political

entanglement can distract from the perfection of piety sets him apart from commonly-cited

theorists of ‘political’ Islam.26 The standard activities of the Nursi community reflect this

emphasis on individual striving toward superior piety outside of the structures and discourses of

overt political mobilization. The most widespread Nursi institution is the weekly class (ders) or

conversation (sohbet), in which a senior teacher (hoca) reads passages aloud from Nursi’s

collected writings, the Risale-i Nur, and coordinates a discussion on the basis of these passages.

I will have the opportunity to describe the institution of the weekly class in much greater detail in

later chapters—in this context, I merely want to flag the prominence of the Risale-i Nur class and

the emphasis on ethico-moral probity, rather than political identity, that characterizes it.

Most of the weekly Risale-i Nur classes—of which there are thousands throughout

Turkey, including the several that I participated in on a regular basis as part of my fieldwork—

are coordinated by civil society foundations devoted to supporting Nursi’s project of pious

revival. Additionally, these foundations organize the publication of Nursi’s oeuvre, as well as

theological, historical and academic texts on Nursi and his relationship to Turkish and Sunni

Islam more generally. Nur foundations also organize frequent conferences and seminars devoted

to scholarship on Nursi and the Nur community; larger symposia often involve the cooperation

of several different organizations. Although it is difficult to estimate the number of different Nur

foundations and associations in Turkey with precision—I met with some ten to twenty during my

time in Istanbul—the Nur Community on the whole achieves its articulation and organization

26
Chapter Five includes a lengthy discussion of the principle of müspet, or positive action, and
its relationship to Nursi’s political passivism and quietism.
almost solely through the institutions of civil society. To a certain degree, the organizational

diversity of Nur organizations corresponds to ideological and theological differences—the Zehra

Foundation (Zehra Vakfı), for instance, emphasizes Said Nursi’s Kurdish heritage and is

primarily oriented toward Turkey’s Kurdish community. Over the course of my research, I

chose to focus on two Nur institutions, the New Asia Foundation (Yeni Asya Vakfı) and, in

particular, the Istanbul Science and Culture Foundation (İstanbul İlim ve Kültür Vakfı). The

activities of each of these foundations, including weekly Risale-i Nur classes, publishing, and

conference-organization, are described in greater detail throughout the later chapters of the

dissertation.

The Gülen Community: Pious Pedagogy and Global Horizons for Liberal Piety

If the Nur Community stands at the forefront of an individual-oriented, pietistic revival

within Turkish civil society, the Gülen Community represents another permutation of liberal

piety in the context of the civil sphere: the inculcation of pious probity as cultural capital and the

means to a global network of businesses, schools, and non-governmental organizations. Hakan

Yavuz summarizes the key features of the Gülen Community, and its distinction from the Nur

Community, nicely:

Gülen’s community uses Nursi’s flexible ideas to promote a nationalist, global,

and free-market orientation. Gülen’s faith-inspired education movement is
different from Nursi’s exclusively faith movement. Gülen is an inspirational
leader of a transnational education movement, whereas Nursi was the formative
giant of intellectual discourse. Although Nursi was focused on personal
transformation, Gülen has focused on personal and social transformation by
utilizing new liberal economic and political conditions. As a combined ulema-
intellectual persona, Gülen not only preaches inner mobilization of new social and
cultural actors, but also introduces a new liberative (sic) map of action. His goals
are to sharpen Muslim self-consciousness, to deepen the meaning of the shared
idioms and practices of society, to empower excluded social groups through
education and networks, and to bring just and peaceful solutions to the social and
psychological problems of society (2003b: 19, emphasis in original).
Gülen’s theology and conception of individualistic piety are firmly rooted in Said Nursi’s

teaching, and both the two communities share both a sympathy of sensibility and dense

institutional ties. However, as Yavuz emphasizes, the aspirations of the Gülen Community are

more expansive in geographical and institutional scope than those of the Nur Community.

Fethullah Gülen himself was born into relatively humble circumstances in the

northeastern Turkish province of Erzurum in 1941, but it was during his tenure as a teacher at a

Qur’anic school in the western city of Izmir in the 1960s that he came under the influence of

Nursi’s writings and the Nur Community (Ibid.: 19). However, Gülen’s activities and aspirations

soon exceeded those of the Nur Community at the time, and by the 1970s he was recognized as a

national charismatic figure and leader of a grass-roots piety movement himself. In particular,

Gülen’s emphasis on establishing and expanding pious business networks—a fact that has led

Yavuz (Ibid.) and others (Aktay 2003: 149) to refer to the Gülen’s followers as ‘Turkish

Puritans’ or ‘Protestants’, in analogy to Weber’s (2003 [1958]) model—is a major point of

distinction between the Gülen and Nur communities (see also Turam 2007: 68 ff.).27 In 1998,

Gülen emigrated from Turkey to the United States, ostensibly to seek care for his diabetes, but

also under a substantial degree of domestic political pressure following the coup against the

Welfare Party government in February 1997; he has resided in Pennsylvania since then. Perhaps

the ultimate testament to the success of Gülen’s cosmopolitan aspirations came in 2008, when he

was voted the world’s leading public intellectual in the annual Foreign Policy poll (Foreign

Policy 2008).

27
Just as the devotees of Said Nursi are known by the popular name “Nurists” (Nurcular),
followers of Fethullah Gülen are dubbed “Fethullah-ists” (Fethullahcılar). These designations
are somewhat pejorative and not favored by members of the communities themselves; I avoid
them in general throughout the dissertation.
 Unlike the Nur Community, which is primarily organized through civil society

institutions, the Gülen network includes private schools, media holdings, financial institutions

and sympathetic businesses in addition to non-governmental organizations. One of the most

well-known, and controversial, Gülen institutions is the “light house” (ışık evi). While Gülen’s

light houses began as private reading circles (dershaneler) similar to those of the Risale-i Nur

classes, they have evolved into larger dormitories where same-sex university students are able to

live gratis throughout their studies, provided that they participate in the activities of the house

and community more broadly (Yavuz 2003b: 32 ff.).28 Although both current and former

residents of light houses with whom I spoke emphasized the necessarily voluntary and

egalitarian character of the houses, light houses and Gülen dormitories are nevertheless a

frequent target of criticism in the secularist Turkish press, which typically descries them as little

more than laboratories for ‘brainwashing’ (beyin yıkaması).29 Even more recently and notably,

Gülen and his enthusiasts have achieved publicity as the objects of a foiled Byzantine coup plot

apparently organized from within the Turkish Armed Forces (Türk Silahlı Kuvvetleri, TSK) and

related to the equally esoteric, secretive right-wing paramilitary group, Ergenekon. On June 12th

of 2009, the leftist daily newspaper Side (Taraf) published an anonymous document, ostensibly

leaked from the military, titled “The Plan to Eradicate the Justice and Development Party and

Gülen” (AKP ve Gülen’i Bitirme Planı), which outlined a series of actions intended both to

28
For a detailed discussion of the light houses and the institution of the ‘older brother’ (abi) who
is generally responsible for both the material and spiritual upkeep of any particular light house,
see Hendrick 2008: 9ff.
29
See, for example, an article from the daily newspaper Radikal, from 1999, just after Gülen left
Turkey for the United States. The author of the article claims that the Gülen had planned to
“seize control of the state” (“devleti ele geçirmeyi hedeflediği ortaya çıkan Fethullah Gülen…”)
and that the light houses were used as centers for “brainwashing” (beyin yıkaması) in order to
produce “Gülen’s Soldiers” (Gülen’in askerleri, the title of the piece) (Aydoğan 1999). Gülen
himself has frequently and vociferously denied all accusations and insinuations that he intends,
or ever intended, to seize state or political power in any say (see Foreign Policy 2008).
overthrow the currently ruling Justice and Development Party and to ‘eradicate’ Gülen’s

influence in Turkish society more generally (Taraf Gazetesi 2009). As I write, the Turkish

courts are still attempting to sort out the authenticity of the “Intervention Plan” (Eylem Planı), as

it is know popularly known; several high ranking military officers have been subpoenaed to

testify in civilian courts on the matter, a first in Republican Turkish history.30

Less dramatically, the Gülen Community is also famous for its “Turkish Schools” (Türk

Okulları), private primary and secondary educational institutions that offer bi- and often tri-

lingual education in Turkish, English, and, when located abroad, the local language. According

to recent dissertation research by Joshua Hendrick (2008: 140) the Gülen Community now

maintains over five hundred schools in over one hundred countries; the Community’s influence

is particularly prominent in the Balkans31 and Central Asia (Balcı 2003; Turam 2003, 2007;

Yavuz 2003b: 39), although it also maintains prominent schools in Western Europe (especially in

countries with large Turkish immigrant populations such as Germany and the Netherlands), the
30
The “Plan to Eradicate the Justice and Development Party and Gülen,” its relationship to the
Ergenkon organization and the trials now occurring in Turkey related to Ergenekon, and the
more general lessons that they have to offer to the student of religion and secularism in
contemporary Turkey could, and doubtless will, occupy many volumes in their own right. I
follow the Turkish news daily but have nevertheless been overwhelmed in attempting to follow
all of the threads of the different alleged plots and conspiracies. Minimally, the fact that the
“Intervention Plan” lumped together the Justice and Development Party—the current legally-
governing party in Turkey, with roots in so-called ‘Islamist’ politics—and Gülen, whose
organization is defined by its articulation in civil society and the private economic sphere,
demonstrates that from a staunch militarist-secularist perspective in Turkey all Islamic
organizations are cut from the same potentially-fundamentalist cloth. Any student, or affiliate, of
either the Justice and Development Party or the Gülen Community well knows that vast
differences in both political aspiration and piety exist between the two. For a characteristically
fast-but-thorough synopsis of Ergenekon, see Yavuz 2009b; for a useful introduction in Turkish
see Dündar and Kazdağlı 2008. The “Plan to Eradicate the Justice and Development Party and
Gülen” is still emerging in the Turkish media itself, and is as yet too recent to have had academic
commentators.
31
Not coincidentally, I encountered a teacher from a Gülen-affiliated school in Albania on an
overnight bus from Tirana to Istanbul in August of 2006; he and his pregnant wife were returning
to Turkey so that she could give birth to her baby in Istanbul, but intended to return to Albania
soon thereafter.
United States, and Australia. Finally, the Gülen Community owns a wide variety of media

businesses, including Zaman, Turkish newspaper with the highest daily circulation, and its

English-language equivalent, Today’s Zaman; a variety of journals and magazines including

Ekoloji (Ecology), Yeni Ümit (New Hope), Aksiyon (Action), and the English-language The

Fountain; the radio station Burç FM; the television channel Samanyolu (Milky Way) and, in the

United States, Ebru Television (Yavuz 2003b: 36).

Within this cosmopolitan skein of businesses, schools and media outlets, Gülen civil

society organizations act as communicative fibers among otherwise distant and distinct

individuals and institutions. This coordinating role of the Gülen civil society network was driven

home for me most memorably following my fieldwork in Turkey, when I met with several

employees of Chicago’s Niagra Foundation, one of the most active Gülen institutions in the

United States—everyone whom I met at Niagra was well-acquainted with most of my

interlocutors from Gülen circles in Istanbul, and eager to put me in contact with further

associates elsewhere in the United States and Turkey. During my research itself, I focused on

the most prominent Gülen foundation in Istanbul, the Turkish Journalists and Writers Foundation

(Türkiye Gazeteciler ve Yazarlar Vakfı, GYV), which maintains especially strong connections

with Zaman newspaper. In addition to significant publishing activities—an entire floor of the

Foundation offices is devoted to its eponymous press—the Journalists and Writers Foundation is

principally devoted to “interreligious dialogue activities” (dinler arası diyalog faaliyetleri).

Conferences, seminars, and international meetings, as well as publications on the shared bases of

the Abrahamic faiths (semavi dinler), are all coordinated by the Abant Platform (Abant

Platformu), an institutionally-distinct branch of the Foundation devoted specifically to

interreligious and inter-civilizational dialogue. I will have ample occasion to interpret and
comment in more detail on the Journalists and Writers Foundation’s conception of dialogue and

its relation to liberal piety in Chapter Five, which focuses specifically on pious ideals and

practices of religious pluralism.

Alevism: Civil Society as Means to a Minority Politics of Cultural-Religious Recognition

In contrast to both the Nur Community and the Gülen Community, Turkish Alevism

(Alevilik) is not a project of Sunni pious revivalism coordinated through and centered on civil

society, but a distinct religious minority community in its own right. To put this point in a

somewhat different manner: Members of the Nur and Gülen Community’s typically understand

their piety as a fuller, more expansive form of Sunni Islam, not different in kind from the

practices and beliefs of Sunnis throughout Turkey and the world. Alevis, on the other hand, are

acutely aware of their difference and distinction as a minority cultural and religious identity

(kimlik, azınlık) in Turkey, even as there are strong disputes among Alevis as to what determines

this difference.

Although Turkish Alevis constitute somewhere between ten and twenty percent of the

population of Turkey (Shankland 2003)—a far larger percentage than Turkey’s three officially

recognized religious minorities, Greek Orthodox Christians, Armenian Christians, and Jews—

attaining an accurate measure of the Alevi population is difficult due to the obdurate refusal of

the state, and the Presidency of Religious Affairs in particular, to recognize their status as a

distinct religious community at all. Doctrinally, Alevis share significant similarities with

Twelver Shi’a Islam, including reverence for the Ehl-i-Beyt (Arabic: Ahl al-Bayt), the holy

family of the Prophet Muhammad himself, Muhammad’s daughter Fatma32 (Fatima), Ali, the

32
As much as possible, I use Turkish transliterations of proper names and theological terms
derived from Arabic throughout (e.g. Fatma rather than Fatima, içtihad rather than ijtihad,
Hüseyin rather than Husayn, Kerbala rather than Karbala, etc.).
son-in-law and nephew of the Muhammad and husband of Fatma, whom they consider to be the

first Imam, and Ali’s two sons, Hasan and Hüseyin. Like most Twelver Jafari Shi’a, many

Alevis fast during the holy month of Muharrem, rather than or in addition to Ramadan, and

mourn the martyrdom of Hüseyin at the Battle of Kerbala on the holiday of Aşure (Arabic

Ashura), on the tenth day of Muharrem. Unlike most Twelver Shi’a, however, most Alevis do

not pray in mosques (which, in Turkey, are almost exclusively Sunni-Hanafi and controlled by

the Presidency of Religious Affairs33), and maintain distinctive houses of worship, known as

“Cem Houses” (cem evleri). Furthermore, Alevis reserve specific veneration for several later

historical-religious figures, especially Hacı Bektaş Veli, the eponymous 13th Century founder of

the Bektashi Sufi order, and Pir Sultan Abdal, an Ottoman-era poet and bard from the province

of Sivas. More generally, Alevi practice, unlike Sunni Turkish Islam, is not primarily text-based,

and the Qur’an does not play a major role in their forms of worship.34 Finally, Alevism is

characterized by a unique form of ritual worship, the cem, a form of semah, or ritualized dance,

which features both dancers and musical accompaniment by minstrels (ozanlar, aşıklar) in honor

of key events in the Alevi past, such as the martyrdom of Hüseyin.35 The cem and other Alevi

forms of ritual practice are frequently, though not always, associated with primordial Central

33
Kabir Tambar’s dissertation (2009a) for the Anthropology Department of the University of
Chicago eloquently details the trials and tribulations of an ‘Alevi-Shi’a’ mosque in the provincial
city of Çorum. The mosque in his study is not coordinated by the Presidency of Religious
Affairs and has struggled greatly to achieve ‘recognition’ as such.
34
That said, a text known as the Buyruk (Edict) attributed to the Sixth Shi’a Imam, Jafar al-Sadiq
(Cafer), plays an important role in both Alevi practices and those of the Bektashis (Bektaşiler), a
mystical order located primarily in the Balkans that shares many similarities with Alevism
(including reverence for the 13th-Century saint Hacı Bektaş Veli) (Shankland 2003: x).
35
Shankland 1993 (pp. 140 ff.), Stokes 1996 and Erdemir 2005 each provide extensive accounts
of the cem, the first in a rural village context and the second two in urban contexts. Chapter
Three of this dissertation offers a description of a cem that I participated in during my own
fieldwork.
Asian ‘shamanistic’ rites, and most Alevis do not engage in the five daily prayers (namaz, salat)

that form a fundament of both Sunni and Shi’a worship.36

As the anthropologists David Shankland (1993, 2003) and Aykan Erdemir (2005) have

each demonstrated in different ways, the Alevi community has been dramatically affected by the

process of urbanization in Turkey, which began in the 1950s. At the establishment of the

Republic in 1923, Alevism was chiefly a rural religion, practiced in villages throughout central

and eastern Anatolia. Beginning with the industrialization of the 1950s, many Alevi villages (as

well as Sunni villages) began to empty as younger residents migrated to Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir,

and other major western Turkish cities, and, occasionally, to farther-flung destinations in West

Germany and elsewhere in Western Europe. Throughout the 1970s, many of these younger,

urban Alevis became involved in leftist-communist political organizations in Turkey, and

Alevism in general became associated with leftism in the heady, increasingly violent political

climate of the time. After an escalation in civil violence between right- and left-wing groups in

the 1970s—a particularly notable event was the Kahramanmaraş Massacre of December 1978, in

which ultra-right wing ‘Grey Wolves’ (bozkurtlar) murdered over a hundred leftist Alevis—the

Turkish army initiated a coup d’état on September 12th 1980, removed the government of Prime

Minister Süleyman Demirel and the Justice Party (Adalet Partisi, AP), outlawed all existing

political parties and associations (dernekler), and established military rule for the following three

years. In the trials that followed the coup, many young leftist Alevis were convicted to long

prison terms and frequently ‘disappeared’; as a partial result of the political crises of the late

seventies and early eighties, Turkey’s Alevis found themselves at something of a communal

crossroads following the reestablishment of civilian rule in 1983.

36
Again, Tambar 2009a details a fascinating exception to many of these generalizations about
the Turkish Alevi Community.
 Given this tumultuous political history, the renaissance of Alevi cultural-religious

identity over the past quarter century is nothing short of astonishing. Like the Nur and Gülen

Communities, Turkey’s Alevi Community has taken great advantage of the neoliberal openness

toward civil society institutions, which began with the presidency of Turgut Özal following the

military rule of the early eighties. As I will examine in detail in Chapters Three and Five, the

vast expansion in the number of Alevi foundations and associations in recent decades has led

simultaneously to a consolidation of collective sentiment around the notion of a minority Alevi

religious-cultural identity and an animated debate over both the constitution of this identity and

the most appropriate political means to recognition of minority status. During my fieldwork in

Turkey, I ultimately centered my attentions on two different Alevi organizations, the Cem

Foundation (Cem Vakfı) located in Istanbul, and the Hacı Bektaş Veli Anatolian Culture

Foundation (Hacı Bektaş Veli Anadolu Kültür Vakfı), located in Ankara. Together, these two

prominent foundations, each of which is associated with a broader federation of smaller

foundations and associations, articulate the two major currents of Alevi political sensibility,

corresponding to two different understanding of secularism itself. While the Cem Foundation

argues that Alevi organizations should lobby the state and the Presidency of Religious Affairs for

equal representation and funding comparable to that provided for Sunni Islam, the Hacı Bektaş

Foundation advocates the removal of the Presidency of Religious Affairs altogether (for a much

more detailed discussion of this difference, see Chapter Five). In addition to these two major

foundations, I also spend significant time with several other Alevi organizations, including the

Sultanbeyli Pir Sultan Abdal Association (Sultanbeyli Pir Sultan Abdal Derneği), a small Alevi

lodge in a poor suburb of Istanbul that was embroiled in a contentious lawsuit with the municipal

government during my time in Turkey (see Chapter Five) and the Ehl-i Beyt Foundation (Ehl-I
Beyt Vakfı), which marshals a radical interpretation of Alevism as nearly equivalent to Twelver

Shi’ism. These divergent, somewhat less prominent Alevi organizations offer an important

vantage on the diversity of identitarian definitions and practice among Alevi civil society

institutions on the whole.

Throughout my time in Turkey, my research among pious foundations and associations

brought me in contact with a number of organizations and actors who are not directly affiliated

with the the Nur, Gülen and Alevi Communities. I was particularly drawn to the Turkish

Charitable Organizations Foundation (Türkiye Gönüllü Teşeküller Vakfı), an umbrella

organization (şemsiye kuruluşu) that primarily coordinates cooperation among other like-minded

pious foundations and associations (including many Nur and Gülen institutions, as well as the

Alevi Ehl-i Beyt Foundation), due to its seemingly omnipresent influence among many of the

primary institutions of my study. I also met frequently with Kemalist civil society organizations

such as the Atatürk Foundation (Atatürk Vakfı) and Atatürkist Thought Association (Atatürkçü

Düşünce Derneği), leftist organizations such as the Social Democracy Foundation (Sosyal

Demokrası Vakfı, SODEV) and state bureaucrats from the General Directorate of Foundations

and Presidency of Religious Affairs in order to attain a sense of the field of debate surrounding

piety and civil society outside of pious foundations and associations themselves. Finally, I

should note that there were certain Turkish Islamic communities, such as the Süleymancı and

Nakşibendi Sufi Orders, that remained outside my study because they continue to be illegal in

Turkey and therefore cannot organize in within civil society at all.37 Each of these divergent

research contexts provided crucial alternative perspectives on both the specificity and multiple

37
See Silverstein 2008a for an engaging discussion of the manner in which a contemporary
Turkish Nakşibendi order address challenges of publicness, piety and legality.
conjugations of liberal piety and civil Islam in Turkey, as I hope to indicate in the chapters to

come.

A Brief Note on Methodology and the Organization of the Argument

The substantial majority of research for my dissertation project was conducted over a

period of approximately eighteen months from September 2005 to February 2007. I lived

throughout this time in Istanbul, where the majority of the organizations of my study are located;

approximately every two months throughout my tenure in Turkey, I traveled to Ankara, usually

for a week at a time, to maintain contact with several institutions and state bureaucracies there—

notably the Hacı Bektaş Foundation, the General Directorate of Foundations, and the Presidency

of Religious Affairs. Since returning to the United States, I have made three brief follow-up trips

to Turkey, most recently in April 2009; I have also maintained conversations with friends and

informants over email, and done my best to follow the tribulations of Turkish politics and public

affairs by daily reading of Turkish-language news websites.

My primary ethnographic method throughout my research is best captured by the well-

worn anthropological nostrum of participant observation. I spent as much time as possible with

each of the foundations and associations that I chose to examine; primary activities included

participation in weekly classes (especially Risale-i Nur classes), attendance at conferences and

symposia, and many hours spent in less formal conversation with a wide variety of employees,

sympathizers and casual acquaintances of the various organizations. Frequently, a closer

friendship with a foundation official resulted in an invitation to dinner or coffee at a private

home. I also conducted approximately twenty-five formal, recorded interviews with some of my

most loquacious and informative interlocutors; I draw on these interviews frequently for

quotations throughout the dissertation. A final, more ‘participatory’ activity that aided greatly in
my ethnography was translation and provision of English-language instruction—employees at

many foundations and associations frequently asked me to translate short articles and essays

from Turkish to English, and younger men often recruited me to offer semi-regular instruction in

English.

The following four chapters of my argument proceed broadly from generality to

specificity. In Chapter Two, Liberal Piety as an Emergent Genre of Publicness, I situate the

practices and discourses of liberal piety among other public, nonliberal modalities of Islam in

contemporary Turkey—in particular, the nonliberal, homogeneous statist Islam of the Turkish

Presidency of Religious Affairs and the illiberal, spectacular mass Islam of partisan protest. The

final three chapters of the dissertation then flesh out the positive content of liberal piety itself.

Chapter Three, Invocations of Tradition, Aspirations to Modernity and Ideals of

Contemporaneity: The Public Historicities of Liberal Piety and Chapter Four, Pious Aesthetics

of Publicness: Making Space Virtuous in Istanbul are, in certain ways, a unit: Respectively, they

explore the conceptions and practices of time and space that characterize liberal piety in Turkey,

and Istanbul in particular. Chapter Three focuses on how civil Islamic institutions commensurate

the historicities of tradition, modernity and contemporaneity with reference to the uptake and

glorification of historical figures such as Mevlana (Rumi), the interpretive practice of içtihad,

and the Alevi cem ceremony. Chapter Four examines the spatial practices and discourses that

render Istanbul a pious chronotopic place, with particular reference to, and valorization of, its

Ottoman Islamic past. Finally, Chapter Five, Confessional Pluralism and Liberal Piety:

Aspirations to Legitimate Religious Difference in Contemporary Turkey, synthesizes the

previous arguments and analyses by delineating how civil Islamic institutions champion a

commitment to religious pluralism as an integral aspect of liberal piety.

 Chapter Two
Liberal Piety as a Genre of Publicness

Introduction: Pious Publicness as Emergent Practice and Ideal

Just look around when you’re walking in the streets here in Istanbul. Nobody
stops, everyone is on their way somewhere. The public sphere is just somewhere
people pass through, from their private homes to their jobs. It wasn’t like this
during Ottoman times. In the Ottoman era, the public sphere was a place that
people dwelled in. It wasn’t just a point of transit (geçiş). But it’s not so anymore.
Of course, we would like it to be this way, to live in the public sphere.38

Cemal Bey39, the vice chairman of the Journalists and Writers Foundation, paused in his

description of this ideal, inhabited public sphere to offer me a chocolate-covered Malatya

apricot, a delicacy that he had acquired during a recent trip to Turkey’s southeast. By this late

point in my research, I was familiar with my key interlocutor’s articulate, consistent valorization

of publicness as both a means to and end of piety, and his specific argument that the political and

religious dispensation of Ottoman Empire, unlike that of contemporary Republican Turkey,

achieved a seamless integration of public being and devout religiosity. Still, I was struck by his

precise contrast between the ‘empty’, transitory quality of contemporary Turkish publicness and

the ‘full’, inhabited nature of the Ottoman public sphere. Cemal Bey continued by punctuating

the importance of this contrast to the activities and aims of the Foundation itself: “Our civil

initiative supports a public sphere united with life itself. This public sphere must benefit from

faith, just as it should support piety.”40

38
İstanbul’da gezerken gözlerinizi açın. Hiç kimse durmaz, herkes tıkır tıkır bir yere gider. Ne
yazik ki kamusal alan sadece bir geçiş yeridir, insanların evlerinden iş yerlerine gittileri bir yer.
Osmanlı döneminde hiç böyle değildi. O zamanlarda insanların yaşadıkları, hayatlarını
sürdükleri bir yerdi kamusal alan. Yalnız bir geçiş değildi. Artık öyle değil…tabii ki eski tarzını
tercih ederiz, kamusal alan yaşamak isterdik…
39
Bey and Hanım are polite titles in Turkish for men and women, respectively, essentially
equivalent to ‘mister’ and ‘miss.’ I use them to refer to my informants and interlocutors
throughout.
40
Vakfımızın sivil insiyatifi yaşamla birleşik bir kamusal alan sevk eder. Kamusal alan imandan
istifade edilsin, hem de imanı desteklesin.
 I begin with Cemal Bey’s considered valorization of the Ottoman public sphere because

it nicely summarizes the broader theme of this chapter as a whole: the relationship between the

ideals and practices of liberal piety and modes of publicness among contemporary Islamic civil

society organizations in Turkey. More generally, this chapter represents the initiation of the

dissertation’s primary argument, which will develop fully over the course of the following four

chapters. In chapter one, I offered a panoramic overview of the tensions and determinations of

state and civil society in Turkey, with a particular focus on the relationship between Kemalist

laicism and liberal secularism in relation to civil Islamic institutions. Throughout the

dissertation, I remain ethnographically interested in articulations and interpretations of the

distinction between state and civil society—indeed one of my arguments is that the valorization

of civil society and, especially, the category of the community, as domains that are necessarily

separate from the interventions and logics of the state partially defines the very liberalness of the

pious practices and discourses that I examine. However, I am not principally concerned with

forwarding an institutional ethnography; therefore, the bureaucratic and organizational

topography outlined in the previous chapter remains a backdrop to the central arguments yet to

come. Rather than institutions, then, the remainder of the dissertation focuses on and details the

dialectical concept of liberal piety. In a nutshell, I argue that liberalness and piety are necessary

means to and ends of each other for the institutions and actors of Turkish Islamic civil society. A

commitment to the politically liberal virtues of tolerance, voluntarism, and free self-

determination is a necessary basis for the efflorescence of pious religiosity; conversely and

concomitantly, proper piety is capable of emerging only in a liberal political and social context,

and often implies an overt commitment to the principles of liberalism. In order to place the
groundwork for this argument, this chapter offers an analytical purchase on how liberal piety

exists within a broader domain of public practices and discourses in Turkey today.

Anthropologists are no strangers, of course, to the manifold elaborations and criticisms of

the concept of the public sphere in the two decades since the English-language publication of

Jurgen Habermas’ The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989a). Much critique

has focused on the counterfeit universality of the bourgeois public sphere that Habermas

idealizes unrepentantly (see Fraser 1991; Warner 1991; Benhabib 1991; Negt and Kluge 1993).

Despite the Enlightenment glorification of the universality of detached, critical rationality—or,

in Habermas’ intersubjective adaptation, “communicative action” (1989b)—access to the public

sphere was, in practice, limited to a single social type. Beyond vilifying the false universality of

the public sphere, critics such as Michael Warner have forwarded an analysis of the creative

ways in which publicness is contested and creatively reconstituted (1991, 2002). Crucial to this

discussion is Warner’s concept of the counterpublic, a relatively circumscribed social and

discursive form that is both distinct from and stands in a critical relationship to the public sphere

at large. As Warner details, counterpublics exist in dialectical relationship to hegemonic modes

of publicness—they both inscribe and challenge the presuppositions of the dominant public
sphere.41 It is also worth noting explicitly that hegemonic publicness (i.e. non-counterpublic

publicnesss) is defined in part by its very distinction from its various counterpublics.

One of the overarching arguments of this dissertation is that contemporary politics of

publicness in Turkey is characterized by dramatic controversy and contest over the definition and

constitution of hegemonic publicness itself. On one hand, laicist Kemalism, which I detailed

more thoroughly in the preceding chapter, continues to maintain a claim to monopoly over the

legitimate form and content of publicness in Turkey. In reference to questions of religiosity in

particular, Kemalism enforces a strict antinomy between piety and publicness—the two are

categorical opposites, incapable of reconciliation or hybridization. On the other hand, a liberal

model of the pubic sphere more familiar to Habermas and his followers also stakes a claim to

hegemonic publicness in contemporary Turkey. According to this liberal model, publicness

should be (and note the moralizing subjunctive) a space of plurality and pluralism, rather than

homogeneous national-secular culture. Among Islamic civil society organizations, this liberal

public sphere and its cognate reading of secularism is often associated with globalized,

cosmopolitan regimes of political liberalism and multiculturalism, even as it is simultaneously

rooted in an idealized Ottoman-Turkish past (a theme I discuss at length in Chapter Four).

Unlike Kemalism, liberal secularism makes an ideological claim to be merely formal and not

41
Warner’s own definition of a counterpublic is as follows:
The stronger modification of Habermas’s analysis…is that some publics are
defined by their tension with a larger public. Their participants are marked off
from persons or citizens in general. Discussion within such a public is understood
to contravene the rules obtaining to the world at large, being structured by
alternative dispositions or protocols, making different assumptions about what can
be said or what goes without saying. This kind of public is, in effect, a
counterpublic: it maintains at some level, conscious or not, an awareness of its
subordinate status (2005: 56).”
While I find Warner’s definition valuable for its clarity, my own argument focuses more on the
invaginations of different modes of publicness and counterpublicness, rather than on the
necessary subordination of counterpublics themselves.
substantive—all participants are welcome to engage one another publicly on the basis of

communicative reason. Talal Asad (1999, 2003) and his followers have made a project of

speaking truth to the power that necessarily undergirds liberal, secular publicness. Nonetheless,

as I argue broadly throughout this dissertation, the potential of liberal secularity to serve as a

counterpublic foil to Kemalism (and, I might add, to other illiberal and nonliberal laicist systems

of secularism) demands ethnographic attention and insight. It is precisely the counterpublic

possibility of liberal secularism in Turkey that provides the nexus for the emergence of liberal

piety.

Counterpublicness, then, is a key analytical vantage for my inquiry into liberal piety, but

I also remain wary of its conceptual limitations. Specifically, the tendency of counterpublicness

to stress the agonistic, and occasionally antagonistic, relationship between hegemonic and

subaltern publics risks an overweening emphasis of questions of domination and resistance, even

if this dynamic has been transposed from a strictly political to a semiotic-discursive context. In

recent years, anthropologists have duly criticized the troublesome foreclosure on a multivalent

reading of the genealogies and operations of political power that ethnographic emphasis on

resistance and its cognate, opposition, often imply (see Abu Lughod 1990; Gal 1995; Mbembe

2003; Hollander and Einhower 2004).42 While resistance and opposition may very well

constitute ethnographic categories of self-understanding and interpretation, this does not imply

that all political and analytical questions of publicness should be framed in the binary mode that

resistance and opposition privilege. Furthermore, while subjectivities, acts, discourses and

institutions may all be described as public, they are not necessarily public in the same ways.

Ironically, both the classical Habermasian theory of the public sphere and critical analyses of
42
I am grateful to Andy Graan for pointing out this general argument and directing my attention
to the direction of the relevant anthropological literature critical of the categories of resistance
and opposition.
counterpublics tend to map publicness unproblematically across institutional, discursive and

subjective domains. However, as my inquiry into liberal piety will suggest, the most creative

possibilities of publicness often reside in the apertures, disjunctures and opacities that persist

among institutions, discourses, actors and events.

Rather than merely propose that civil Turkish Islam constitutes a counterpublic of

Kemalism, then, I forward a reading of liberal piety as an emergent genre of publicness in

contemporary Turkey. In referring to genres of publicness, I invoke recent subdisciplinary

literature in semiotic and linguistic anthropology inspired by the work of Russian literary theorist

Mikhail Bakhtin (e.g. Hanks 1987; Briggs and Bauman 1992; and Crapanzano 1996). Generally,

this literature has seized on the observation that social forms, like the literary texts of Bakhtin’s

interest, exhibit and achieve definition through generic features. Just as genres only exist in a

dialogic relationship of mutual constitution with one another (and the totality of all genres), so

too do social and political forms achieve articulation and definition by virtue of their dialogic

relationships with other social forms. Bakhtin’s own musings on dialogism are instructive:

…no living word relates to its object in a singular way: between the word and its
object, between the word and the speaking subject, there exists an elastic
environment of other, alien words about the same object, the same theme, and this
is an environment that is often difficult to penetrate. It is precisely in the process
of living interaction with this specific environment that the word may be
individualized and given stylistic shape. Indeed, any concrete discourse
(utterance) finds the object at which it was directed already as it were overlain
with qualifications, open to dispute, charged with value, already enveloped in an
obscuring mist—or, on the contrary, by the “light” of alien words that have
already been spoken about it. It is entangled, shot through with shared thoughts,
points of view, alien value judgments, and accents (1981: 276).

Of course, in the case of social forms, the dialogic relationship between an utterance and its

‘specific environment’ that Bakhtin describes is subject to powers, constraints and

determinations that often exceed the realm of discourse. Publicness, in this sense, is a meta-

generic principle by which certain utterances and actions achieve legitimate entry into a
privileged, political domain while others do not. From a Bakhtinian perspective,

counterpublicness designates a fraught genre of publicness, whereas privacy indicates the

incapacity of an utterance or action to achieve the generic dialogism of publicness at all.

In summary, a Bakhtinian approach to publicness as an evaluative meta-genre—a

principle of permission or refusal for certain genres of utterance and action in certain contexts by

certain actors—provides a more nuanced ethnographic vantage on different types of publicness

than is available to the binary model of publicness and counterpublicness. The task of an

ethnography of genres of publicness, then, is twofold: To identify the general principle(s) of

publicness that unite and commensurate different discourses, institutions, and subjects, and to

probe the political and semiotic specificities that circumscribe distinct genres of publicness. In

light of this twin aspiration, one of my aims in this dissertation is to locate liberal piety within a

larger taxonomy of genres of publicness in contemporary Turkey. The extended discussion of

Kemalism and emergent political liberalism in Chapter One was primarily intended to introduce

the two principal ideologies of publicness in contemporary Turkey; the coming chapters, on the

other hand, are more centrally concerned with the specificity of liberal piety as an emergent

genre of publicness in Turkey.

A focus on piety as a particular genre of publicness also sheds light on questions of

‘public religion’. The sociologist of religion Jose Casanova (1994) initially adduced the category

of public religion to account for the incontrovertible failure of the sociological theory of

secularization, based broadly upon Weberian modernization theory and primarily associated with

the sociologists Thomas Luckmann (1967) and Niklas Luhmann (1982). In the wake of the

global renaissance of religion in 1980s, beginning with the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Casanova

argues that two of the three canonical claims of secularization theory, the decline of religion and
the privatization of religion, are empirically untenable (Casanova agrees—and I broadly concur

—with the third tenet of the hypothesis, the differentiation and separation of religion within its

own sphere). While Casanova dismisses the claim of the general decline of religion as simply

false, he takes the principle of privatization more seriously: Although both the history and

systematic logic of the bourgeois public sphere sanction the privatization of religiosity, the

current moment is marked by a global deprivatization of religion (Ibid: 41).43 Conceptually,

public religion is synonymous with this very movement of deprivatization.

Casanova’s theory has much to recommend it—his clear and precise summary of the

basic principles of the secularization hypothesis is invaluable, and his particular analyses of the

multifarious relationships between the Catholic Church and institutions of civil society in

different national contexts bear interesting comparisons and contrasts to my own research on

liberal piety in Turkey. However, his relative lack of interest in how publicness itself shapes and

defines legitimate modes of religiosity causes his theory to suffer from a schematic emptiness.

When he writes, for instance, that “what needs to be examined is the different ways in which

religions, old and new, traditional and modern, may play public roles…in the public sphere of

civil society (Ibid: 61),” one does not sense that religiosity is affected or constituted by the

venture of publicness itself. Casanova’s instances of deprivatized religion also maintain the

problematic assumption that piety precedes publicness in a coherent, pristine manner. Although

religion can become public in order to protect liberties and contest the legitimacy of laws (Ibid:

57-58), in Casanova’s assessment, this publicness is only functional rather than substantive or

43
Parenthetically, Casanova never clarifies whether he views the deprivatization of religion as an
historical result of changing regimes of publicness or as an immanent possibility of all contexts
of publicness. While I am inclined to the former view, the latter schematic argument is also
imaginable.
formal. Put another way, publicness is an incidental feature of some religions for Casanova; it

does not shape religion itself.44

In contrast to Casanova, then, my inquiry into liberal piety as an emergent genre of

publicness in contemporary Turkey does not merely ask whether piety is potentially and actually

public (Casanoa’s primary question), but also how this venture of publicness is achieved and

what effects it has on practices and discourses of piety themselves. Unlike ethnographic studies

that begin from a coherent understanding of what constitutes Islam,45 I endeavor to comprehend

and detail how publicness and liberal Islamic piety mutually constitute and affect each other. In

this chapter in particular, I take inspiration from Bakhtin in order to situate liberal piety as a

specific, often counterpublic genre of publicness within a broader generic field of public Islam in

Turkey. In the first section of the chapter, I focus on both the weekly Risale-i Nur classes and

more infrequent conferences and seminars organized by the foundations of the Nur Community

as exemplary instances of liberal piety in context. Following this, I situate liberal piety by

conducting a detour through two genres of public Turkish Islam that are explicitly nonliberal:

the bureaucratic, étatist Sunni piety produced and broadcast by the state’s Presidency of

Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Bakanlığı) and the spectacular mass piety of partisan politics,

represented in this instance by a rally against the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Turkey in

44
Talal Asad (1999: 180) forwards a broadly similar critique of Casanova’s argument. While I
agree with Asad’s criticism, I remain ethnographically concerned with how pious practices
themselves are affected by accepting the assumptions of liberalism.
45
The best example of such ethnographic-historical work is Robert Heffner’s Civil Islam (2000).
While Heffner provides an exceptionally detailed narrative of the permutations and
peregrinations of different Islamic actors and institutions over the course of Indonesian national
history, he only obliquely gestures toward how politicization and publicness have affected, and
been affected by, practices of Indonesian piety themselves. Jenny White’s Islamist Mobilization
in Turkey (2002) marshals an analytically similar, if more ethnographically fine-grained,
approach to the relationship between party politics and Sunni piety in Turkey.
November of 2006 that was coordinated by the rightist Sunni Felicity Party (Saadet Partisi).

Finally, the chapter concludes by briefly touching on modes of Islamic piety in contemporary

Turkey that do not achieve publicness at all. One of these modes, quotidian obligatory practice,

is a quintessential example of private piety. A second mode of non-public Turkish Islam,

Sufism, remains illegal, and thereby gestures toward the continual circumscription of public

piety by the law in Turkey, even as commitments to liberal tolerance and pluralism have partially

flourished within the bounds of this circumscription.

Lastly, before proceeding to this broader consideration, a brief word on the relationship

among publicness in general, idealizations of the public sphere, and liberal piety as a specific

genre of publicness. As the quotation from Cemal Bey at the outside of the chapter suggests, one

of the characteristic features of liberal piety is its explicit moralization and idealization of

publicness. In the coming sections and chapters, I vigilantly trace the relationship between the

particular qualities and interventions of liberal piety as one genre of publicness in contemporary

Turkey and the aspirational horizon of general, liberal publicness that liberal piety both espouses

and seeks to enact. Indeed, one of the persistent, fascinating paradoxes that define liberal piety

in Turkey is the manner in which its aspiration to and practice of liberal generality define its

(counterpublic) specificity as a particular genre of publicness. On the other hand, I also maintain

critical interest in the abstract political mediations by which liberal ideologies of the public

sphere become possible in contemporary Turkey. There is much at stake, for instance, in Cemal

Bey’s rendering of contemporary publicness as denuded and empty. In this regard, one must ask

what unifying principles of publicness span across different public practices and contexts, pious

and non-pious, in contemporary Turkey. For Cemal Bey and many of my other interlocutors,
contemporary publicness is not an unproblematic good—in particular, they interpret the abstract

‘stranger sociality’, to again adopt Michael Warner’s phrase (2005: 74), of public action and

interaction as an lack and moral dilemma. Yet it is only within this broader regime of publicness

that the (often counterpublic) genre of liberal piety, with its critical reading of one type of pious

public sphere against a secular other, becomes thinkable and practicable.

Conversations in the Evening: The Exemplary Liberal Piety of the Risale-i Nur Classes

Each evening, just after the fall of dusk and the evening call to prayer, all across Turkey,

groups of devout Sunni Muslims gather together for several hours to examine their faith over tea

and ample platters of fresh fruit. They come together in both cramped apartment salons and

spacious lecture halls, located in bucolic villages, sleepy provincial capitals, downtrodden

suburbs and cosmopolitan urban centres alike. In Istanbul—Turkey’s largest metropolis, with a

population between ten and fifteen million inhabitants—alone, there are over a thousand of these

gatherings, known as ‘classes’ or ‘conversations’ (dersler, sohbetler), which typically convene

on a weekly basis. These gatherings are, as a rule, homogenous in gender—although women’s

classes will often invite a male scholar of the Qur’an or hadith, the opposite is unheard of. Aside

from this crucial distinction, however, participation in these weekly conversations, both among

members of a single group and between groups themselves, is remarkably diverse, incorporating

individuals of divergent ethnic, class and educational backgrounds, as well as members of

different generations. The conversations are united, above all, by their object of inquiry and

source of inspiration: the Risale-i Nur, the collected works of Said Nursi, quite probably the most

famous Turkish Muslim philosopher of the Twentieth Century.

On one particular Thursday evening, approximately forty men, young and old, gather in

the “Ottoman-style” conference room of a restored, Ottoman-era medrese to read from the
Risale-i Nur. This medrese serves as the offices of the Istanbul Science and Culture Foundation

(İstanbul İlim ve Kültür Vakfı), one of the more prominent civil society organizations that,

together, provide the institutional bedrock and nexus for the community of Nursi’s followers.

The members of the class are university students, professors, physicians, lawyers, businessmen

and more than a few successful merchants from the nearby Kapalıçarşı—in short a swath of the

burgeoning new Muslim bourgeoisie which has fascinated the secularist Turkish media in the

fifteen years or so since the beginning of the renaissance of political Islam in Turkey (e.g.

Soydemir 2003). The class lasts for two hours or so, filling the space between the evening

prayers and final prayers of the day (in Turkish, akşam namazı and yatsı namazı). In general, the

evening prayers are followed immediately by a light dinner, provided gratis by the foundation.46

After tea has been served, the attendees gather in a small conference salon in order to listen to

passages from the Risale-i Nur, which are read aloud by the hoca, or teacher. On the whole,

these classes draw directly from the Risale-i Nur to address and untangle the ethical dilemmas

that face the Muslim individual in the context of modern economic, social, political and cultural

forms.

In many respects, the Risale classes of contemporary Turkey may seem an unlikely

context for liberal piety—within many mass-mediated fantasies of religiosity in Turkey, the Nur

Community, like the Gülen Community, is imagined as the sites of an illiberal and reactionary

(irtica) sociality that contradicts the imperatives of laicist modernity. And, indeed, there are

demographic and structural features of the classes that are nonliberal, at least according to a
46
While this charitable meal is not offered at all classes, tea, crackers, and cookies are typically
served during most every class, followed by fresh fruit once the class has ended. The Istanbul
Science and Culture Foundation only began offering evening meals during my fieldwork; in
conversation, Faris Bey, the chairman of the Foundation, explicitly expressed pride over the fact
that the Foundation had been able to revive the Ottoman tradition of the soup kitchen, or imaret,
albeit in a limited fashion. For a fascinating overview and case study of the relationship between
Islamic foundations and Ottoman-era soup kitchens, see Singer 2002.
strong reading of liberalism that demands a specific mode of integrated sociality as well as

negative freedom and legally-minimal equality among citizens and collectivities. As I already

noted, the classes are gender exclusive—while I did have the opportunity to attend women’s

classes on several occasions, I was invited as a guest speaker and foreign researcher, qualities

that trumped my masculinity, at least temporarily. And although male hocas occasionally offer

lessons to women, the reverse is never the case, and a typical member of a Risale class would

never imagine attending a class for the opposite gender. Furthermore, mutually-inflected

hierarchies of knowledge, age and ethical devotion define the intimate sociality of any particular

Risale class. These hierarchies are evident in the spatial layout of the classes themselves.

The moral and discursive center of any Risale study group is the hoca himself, who sits

on a low sofa facing a wooden bookstand, with the various volumes of the Risale-i Nur47 near at

hand for reference. The hoca is typically a senior member of the class who has conducted

intensive study of both the Risale itself and the Qur’an and Sunna more generally. Many, though

certainly not all, of the hocas I met during my research had had formal training in a university

faculty of theology, or ilahiyat fakültesi, typically at Istanbul’s Marmara University or Ankara

University, which offer the largest and most prestigious theology programs in all of Turkey.48

On occasion, another senior member of the class or an esteemed guest will be offered the honor

47
The Nur classes in which I participated relied primarily on The Words (Sözler), divided into
thirty-three different ‘words’, which constitute the majority of Nursi’s writings. Other briefer
texts, such as the Mektubatlar and Lem’alar were also occasionally cited. The primary
publishing houses devoted to printing the Risale-i Nur, Sözler Yayınevi and Söz Basım Yayın are
owned and managed by a number of foundations, including the Istanbul Science and Culture
Foundation and the New Asia Foundation (Yeni Asya Vakfı).
48
In fact, İbrahim Canan, the primary hoca of the Risale-i Nur class at the Science and Culture
Foundation that I describe in this section, was also a nationally-respected authority on the hadith
and Sunna and a professor of theology (ilahiyatçı) at Marmara University in Istanbul. Sadly,
İbrahim Canan passed away in a bus accident in Istanbul just days before I finished the first draft
of this dissertation.
of reading a lesson from the Risale; when doing so, they occupy the space, and thus the role, of

the hoca. The rest of the class members sit on a series of sofas arranged in a circular or

rectangular fashion, facing the hoca; if necessary, younger participants and newcomers sit upon

their knees on the floor.49 Although participants occasionally opt to follow the hoca’s reading by

opening to the chosen passage in their own copies of the Risale-i Nur—I always did so, out of

linguistic necessity—most students prefer to listen without the aid or distraction of the written

text.50 Finally, in each class, one regular participant takes on the role of a secretary or clerk

(katip), recording the passages and basic topics of discussion that constitute the conversation on

any given week.

The minute, contextual hierarchies of knowledge, age and authority that exist within the

Risale-i Nur classes mirror more general hierarchies within the Nur Community. Above all,

veneration is reserved for those members of the community who interacted with and learned

from Said Nursi himself. Figures such as Mehmet Kırkıncı and Mehmet Nuri Güleç (known

affectionately among the Nur Community as Fırınca Ağabey/Abi51), who were students of Nursi

49
In general, classes range in size from about ten to forty or fifty members, though a larger few
classes, notably, that at the Suffa Foundation (Suffa Vakfı), in the neighborhood of Süleymaniye,
attract upwards of a hundred participants each week.
50
This emphasis on the inimitable texture and quality of the spoken word is characteristic of
Islam in other contexts as well, of course. Michael Sells (2007), for one, argues that the Qur’an
articulates a unique ‘sound vision’, the recitation of which cannot be reduced to the written word.
See also Hirschkind’s discussion (2006) of the inimitable aesthetic and ethical qualities of pious
sound, especially as captured in cassette sermons, in relation to Islamic counterpublics in
contemporary Egypt.
51
The term ağabey, typically shortened in pronunciation to ‘abi’ in speech, is one of the more
interesting shifters and indicators of both casual intimacy and respect in contemporary Turkish.
Though it literally means ‘older brother’, it is frequently used as a term of address among men of
approximately the same age and social status who do not know each other. It is also used as a
marker of familiarity among male friends, and, among relatively elite cosmopolitan circles, even
across gender (similar to American colloquial usage of ‘dude’ or ‘bro’). Finally, as in this case,
the familiar ağabey can also be used to single a mode of intimate respect and aspiration on the
part of younger individuals toward a uniquely-experienced and beloved elder.
as young men, serve as the eminences grises of the community at large. The unique respect that

these early students of Nursi receive was vividly emphasized during one of my earliest

experiences with the Nur Community, the National Risale-i Nur Congress in April 2005.

Although the congress was dedicated to academic and historical research on Said Nursi’s life and

the Risale, the most unexpected, frenetic moment of the multi-day event was the surprise visit of

Yusuf Islam, the artist previously known as Cat Stevens, who enjoys immense popularity among

young, devout, urban Turkish Muslims (and, indeed, among Sunni Muslims throughout the

world52). Before Yusuf Islam was mobbed by autograph seekers and fans in the conference

audience, he was conveyed directly to Fırınca Ağabey and Mustafa Sungur Ağabey, two of

Nursi’s original students who were sitting together at the front row of the conference, in order to

pay his respects. As I often noted to my friends within the Nur Community itself, the reverence

in which Nursi’s few remaining original students are held strongly resembles the emphasis that

Muslims the world over place upon the moral superiority of the original companions (Turkish

sahabeler) of the Prophet Muhammad. This premium placed upon firsthand, biographical

experience of spiritually-enlightened figures as endowing a degree of piety above and beyond

that available to Muslims generally is a topic that demands more attention, both in relation to the

Nur Community and in connection to the Salafi movement within Sunni Islam as a whole.53

52
For instance, on a trip to Skopje, Macedonia in 2003, I visited an Ottoman era mosque, only to
be invited home by two young Albanian-Macedonian men who offered me and my friend Andy
pamphlets on the relationship between Christianity and Islam and played a recent Yusuf Islam
album, ‘A is for Allah’, for us.
53
I do not intend to associate the Nur Community generally with Salafism, which is primarily an
Arab and South Asian theological, social and political formation. Indeed, most enthusiasts of
Said Nursi would deny any connection to the statist political ambitions articulated Salafis; more
generally, the relative lack of anything resembling Salafism (Turkish Selafilik) in contemporary
Turkey is notable and deserves further inquiry. Nonetheless, in their specific emphasis on the
importance of the Companions of the Prophet Muhammad, the Nur Community shares a
theological and historical concern with Salafism more generally. For a brief, fascinating
discussion of some of the dilemmas regarding Salafism itself, see Salomon 2009.
 Beyond this explicit homage reserved for those of Nursi’s original students who are still

alive, generation and age together play a formative role in mediating and determining regimes of

knowledge and pedagogy within the Nur Community. Although the homology among age,

ethical probity, and religious knowledge within the Nur Community is partial at best,

generational difference, like gender in other contexts, is often invoked as an inevitable difference

that necessitates pedagogical intervention. Older participants in the Risale classes that I attended

often foregrounded ‘the youth’ (gençler, gençlik, delikanlılar) as the ultimate ‘target’ audience of

the conversations. As Mustafa, a man his sixties, remarked to me, “We’re already old, you

know. Of course it is important for us to continue studying, too, but we don’t have much time

left. The young (class members) are the ones who really need this. There are many temptations

in life these days, and we must show the young the right way. The Risale-i Nur is a crucial tool

in this struggle.”54 More generally, the Nur Community idealizes and practices pedagogy as a

lifelong process and project of cultivating individual moral probity. A quote from Talal Asad

contrasting a Kantian understanding of the ethical conscience with the practice of ethical

discipline in Sunni Islam on the whole is also an apt description of the Nur Community’s

pedagogical ambition:

The individual’s ability to judge what conduct is right and good (for oneself as
well for others)…(is) dependent not on an inaccessible conscience but on
embodied relationships—heavily so in the learning process of childhood, but also
in adulthood where the intervention of authorities, relatives, and friends in
particular situations may be critical for the exercise of that ability or for dealing
with the consequences of its failure. Here body-and-mind is the object of moral
discipline (Asad 2003: 247-248).

54
Biz zaten ihtiyarız, vaktimiz pek kalmaz. Tabii biz de Risale’lere ihtiyaç duyuyoruz, fakat
Risale’lerin hitap ettiği kısım gerçekten bu delikanlılardır. Bu günler ya…dikkat etmezse baştan
cıkarlar onlar. Gençlere doğru yolu göstermemiz lazım. Risale’ler büyük bir katkı verir bu
mucadelede.
 In summary, then, liberality does not adequately characterize the intimate, ethical

sociality inculcated by the Risale classes or practiced by the Nur Community on the whole.

However, as Lisa Wedeen has argued persuasively in the context of Qat chew sessions in Yemen

(2008: 120 ff.), the fact that discursive practices and social institutions do not share fully in the

normative history of liberal publicness imagined by Habermas and his followers does not imply

that they are incapable of having liberal, public, or (in Wedeen’s case) democratic effects. With

regard to the Nur Community in particular, the nonliberal sociality evinced within the context of

the Risale classes nonetheless bolsters deliberative practices and individualistic pious ideals that

mark the community as an exemplar of liberal piety within the broader field of Turkish

publicness. Here, the distinction between liberal piety and pious liberalism that I forwarded in

Chapter One is pertinent: The Nur Community exemplifies liberal piety even if it does not

necessarily espouse political liberalism explicitly. Although, as George Makdisi observed in a

classic study on institutions of learning in Islam (1981: 14ff.), the particular pedagogic sociality

of the study circle (Arabic halqa) has a long history dating back to the first centuries of Islam,

this does not imply that this institutional form of the class or conversation is incommensurable

with new regimes of publicness.55 As Habermas himself brilliantly demonstrated, institutional

forms (e.g. coffeehouses, salons) can act as means to the incipient publicness and liberality of

persons and discourses. This public, potentially liberal, relationship among institutions,

discourses and subjects also maintains for Turkey’s Nur Community—specifically, both the

Risale classes themselves and the more explicitly cosmopolitan, academic seminars, conferences

55
Brinkley Messick’s pathbreaking study (1993) of the transformation of Islamic education in
Yemen from pre-Ottoman times to the present offers further fascinating comparisons in this
regard.
and symposia that Nur foundations sponsor establish the distinctive piety of the Nur Community

as both liberal and public.

Deliberative communication, which evaluates the relationship between collective and

individual goods—the very semiotic micropolitical regime that Habermas valorized as an

incipient mode of the liberal public sphere—is a prominent feature of the Risale classes. Unlike

Habermas’ kaffeeklatschs, however, the guiding principle of deliberation in the Risale classes is

pious, individual ethical probity rather than reflexive critical rationality. Consider the following

interchange, from one of the Risale circles with which I spend significant time during my

fieldwork. The evening prayers (akşam namazı) had just ended, and the congregation of

approximately twenty men and boys, ranging in age from ten or twelve to eighty, milled about

the sparsely decorated room, engaging in easy conversation. New arrivals, who had opted to

perform their prayers at one of the many local mosques rather than in the classroom (dershane)

itself, entered the already cramped apartment in twos and threes. I had arrived early to the

weekly Saturday night class in this modest dormitory in Üsküdar, a bustling, relatively devout

neighborhood on the Asian side of Istanbul, and was looking forward to the warm intimacy and

informality with which the hoca, Can Bey, typically conducted the class. To my right, Necdet

Abi, one of the organizers of the class, gently lectured several young men who had just returned

from their mandatory military service on the importance of marrying before growing too old and

“giving into sinful temptation” (günaha girmek). Picking up on this topic of discussion,

Mehmet, a regular class participant in his seventies whom I respectfully addressed as ‘uncle’

(amca), began to tell me about one of his sons, who happened to have married an American

convert to Islam, and quizzed me concerning marriage practices in the United States. Can Hoca
soon expanded on this theme, and began to discuss the ethico-sexual pitfalls facing young people

in the context of contemporary Istanbul, and urban Turkey more generally. Like Necdet Abi, he

excoriated the sexual license of Istanbul’s youth and urged the adolescents and young men in the

class to wed before time inevitably breaks their resolve. I jokingly interjected: “What about me

Can Hoca? Should I also marry soon?” His replied with a chuckle: “You’re much too old—

you’re clearly stuck at home,”56 using a Turkish idiom, ‘evde kalmak,’ that carries the same

(albeit non-gendered) connotation as ‘old maid’ in English.

Clearly, this conversation on marriage, sexual desire, and sin was a far cry from the

substantive ‘content’ of classic liberal publicness, which one can gloss as the ideal of individual

economic and legal autonomy vis-à-vis the (early) modern state. However, the process of

conversation itself is quite reminiscent of the classical public sphere—in both cases, one

witnesses the the articulation of an object for debate (rationality and individual

economic/political liberty for Habermas, ethical probity and sexuality for the Nur group), the

premise that this object achieves coherence through this debate, and an attitude of openness to

participation in this debate on the part of a variety of interlocutors in spite of differences among

them. Nonetheless, however indeed, dyed-in-the-wool liberals would likely object that the

deliberation characteristic of Turkey’s Risale classes is illiberal (or at least nonliberal) precisely

due to its failure to advocate untethered liberal individualism and its reliance on an inexorable

relationship of ethical determination between the divine and the human (mediated, of course, by

the Qur’an and the Sunna). Such a contention, however, leans on two problematic assumptions.

First, this ‘content-based’ ideology of liberal publicness mandates a strict distinction between the

56
--Ey hoca bana ne dersiniz? Evleneyim mi yakında?
--Fazla yaşlısın Jeremy, artık evde kaldın…
secular and the religious, and posits that liberality is only a possible predicate of the former.

Like other recent ethnographies of secularism and the secular, my own research militates against

this strict distinction, which is ultimately normative rather than descriptive. Secondly, the

argument that contexts such as the Risale classes are necessarily non/illiberal because they fail to

espouse the overt substantive imperatives of liberalism denies attention to the fact that liberal

publicness exceeds mere attachment to an explicit program of political liberalism. As Habermas

rightly noted, publicness is an ensemble of institutions, subjectivities and discourses that serve as

a means to political sensibilities and arguments. While Habermas himself argued for a necessary

causal relationship between institutions, subjectivies, and discourses, on the one hand, and politic

rationalities, on the other, ethnographers and political scientists—and I gesture again to the work

of Michael Warner and Lisa Wedeen here—have amply demonstrated that contexts and practices

of publicness do not necessarily inculcate or imply explicitly liberal political commitments. In

the case of the Risale classes, the institutional sites of civil society, the deliberative discursive

practices that occur within these sites, and the pious subjectivity that these practices support and

presuppose define a genre of publicness, liberal piety. This is the case in spite of their lack of an

overt political project of pious liberalism. As a coda to this consideration of the Risale classes, I

offer a few scenes from other events coordinated by Nur civil society organizations, which

evince even more thoroughly liberal-public institutional sites and interpellate more classically

liberal publics.

The conference at which I unexpectedly encountered Yusuf Islam was by no means an

ethnographic anomaly (although most similar events did not boast international luminaries of his

echelon). Indeed, along with weekly classes and formal interviews, scholarly conferences and

symposia were a primary site for my ethnography of civil Islam and liberal piety. While many of
these conferences were organized by Nur civil society organizations, and the Istanbul Science

and Culture Foundation in particular, the Gülen Community and Alevi Community were also

avid conference arrangers. The Journalists and Writers Foundation (Türkiye Gazeteciler ve

Yazarlar Vakfı), a prominent Gülen organization that I discuss at more length in the chapters to

come, has become famous for its annual Abant Platform meetings, in addition to a plethora of

smaller conferences that it regularly plans and hosts. The Abant Meetings are held both within

and outside of Turkey—recent international sites include Paris, Cairo, and Washington DC—and

are typically dedicated to themes that unite questions of religion and contemporary governance,

ranging from secularism to Turkey’s EU aspirations to the role of religion in the Israeli-

Palestinian conflict. For their part, Alevi groups such as the Cem Foundation and Hacı-Bektaş

Foundation sponsor a cadre of researchers who study the history and regional variations of

Alevism, both within Turkey and in Central Asia; these researchers frequently present their work

at public symposia and lectures organized by the foundations. Conferences are also a primary

means for coordination and cooperation between and among organizations. For instance, the

Istanbul Science and Culture Foundation frequently shared planning and costs for conferences

with other Nur organizations, such as the New Asia Foundation. ‘Umbrella institutions’

(şemsiye kuruluşları) such as the pan-Sunni Turkish Charitable Organizations Foundation, exist

primarily to encourage and to facilitate cooperation among various organizations in the activities

such as conference-planning, publishing and advocacy. Finally, conferences provide the site for

serendipitous ‘networking’ among the well-informed members of civil Islamic organizations—I

cannot overstate the number of occasions on which I happened upon a contact from one

foundation or association while attending a conference sponsored by another. A particularly

memorable example of this dense sociality within the domain of civil society occurred at a
conference held in honor of Edward Said in November 2006, at Istanbul’s Cemal Reşit Rey

Concert Hall, a privileged venue for major conferences and, therefore, a frequent destination for

me throughout my research. At the reception following the keynote speech—delivered, in fact,

by famous subaltern studies critic Gayatri Spivak—I encountered no less than five contacts from

different organizations with which I conducted research. Needless to say, contexts such as this

were methodologically invaluable to my research—I followed the networking threads of

Istanbul’s civil Islamic community on the basis of introductions made possible by conferences

themselves.

Although I do not have space to delve deeply into the topic of academic-style conferences

and symposia here—specific conferences will appear as ethnographic contexts throughout the

dissertation—I would like to offer a few general remarks about their discursive and institutional

form and their relationship to liberal piety as a genre of publicness. In general, the aesthetics of

the spaces that hosted these conferences would be familiar to any cosmopolitan, or even

provincial, academic: Speakers sit at tables, either at the front of a room or on a stage or

rostrum, and deliver their presentations from a podium or through microphones placed on the

table. The conferences are typically organized as a series of panels, with no more than four

speakers per panel, often book-ended by keynote and plenary speeches from more prominent

invitees. Dress tends to be quite formal—suits and ties for men, and either suits and skirts or

formal ‘manteau’ (Turkish manto) style long-coats for women. It is worth noting that such

conferences offer an academic forum in which the headscarf (başörtüsü, türban) is permitted—

as I discuss in detail in Chapter Four, the ban on headscarves on Turkish university campuses

remains a major object of public mobilization for many Islamic organizations. These
stereotypical, easily-recognizable aesthetic and formal features of the conferences organized by

Turkey’s Islamic NGOs coexist with other, untypical features that define their spaces and publics

as pious. Recited prayers drawn from Qur’anic verses often inaugurate and close a conference’s

program. The audience may be divided by gender, with men occupying on half of a salon and

women the other, though this is not necessarily the case.57 As a rule, breaks are scheduled to

correspond with prayer-times, and a small room in the conference hotel or complex typically

serves as a mescit, or small mosque, where prayers can be performed. And, perhaps needless to

note, conference meals observe Islamic dietary rules restricting liquor and pork and regulating

the manner in which animals are butchered.

There is a somewhat banal point to be made here concerning what one might call

discursive and institutional hybridization or invagination—the manner in which forms that are

typically associated with one type of institution and discourse become inhabited by practices that

characterize previously distinct discourses, institutions and subjectivities. Yael Navaro-Yashin

(2002: 94 ff) and Jenny White (1999) have made similar arguments about ‘Islamic’ fashion

shows in Istanbul, describing, with no small degree of titillation, the unexpected tableau of long-

legged, beautiful models donning headscarves and neo-Ottoman haute couture. I would like to

make a somewhat different point, however, with regard to the importance of conferences and

symposia to Turkish civil Islam. I have already asserted that liberal piety, as practiced by

Islamic civil society institutions in Turkey, is an emergent genre of (counter)publicness. As

57
In this vein, I recall a humorous moment from the Second General Assembly Meeting for the
International Union of Muslim Scholars, which I discuss more thoroughly in Chapter Four. I had
attended the Meeting with my friend and contact from the Writers and Journalists Foundation,
Cemal Uşak, and his niece Selma. Although the seating gigantic conference hall was divided in
half to maintain gender separation (selamlık-haremlik), Cemal sat to the side with Selma and me.
When I later asked Selma whether this might make Cemal Bey uncomfortable, she replied drily:
“My uncle is an unusual fellow (Amcam tipik bir adam değil).”
such, it necessarily participates dialogically in broad field of publicness defined by a preexisting

set of institutions, discourses and subjectivities. Publics and counterpublics, in Turkey as

elsewhere, both define and are defined by this institutional and discursive field. Thus, in a

certain respect, it is unremarkable that Islamic civil society institutions have adopted and adapted

the form of the academic conference to their projects—in order to emerge as a genre of

publicness, participation within already existing modes of publicness is, one might say,

mandatory. A similar argument applies to new Islamic media in contemporary Turkey, most

notably, the daily newspaper Zaman (Time) and its English language sibling, Today’s Zaman.

Zaman is affiliated with the Gülen Community and the Journalists and Writers Foundation in

particular; while it addresses itself frequently to questions of piety and faith, it is also a respected

‘general’ publication with one of the highest circulations of all Turkish newspapers, as well as a

prominent website. The Gülen Community also maintains a prominent international television

station, Samanyolu TV (Milky Way Television); an English language version of the station

broadcast in the United States and Canada is known as Ebru TV. To interpret the academic-style

conferences sponsored by pious foundations or new Islamic media such as Zaman as either

capitulations to or instances of pious resistance against liberal-secular or Kemalist publicness is,

then, to miss the crucial point. As discursive and institutional forms and practices, conferences

and mass media situate liberal piety as one genre of publicness, both necessarily related to and

distinct from other genres. A consideration of other, nonliberal genres of public piety will

provide more comprehensive purchase on the specificity of liberal piety.

The Directorate of Religious Affairs: Non-Liberal, Bureaucratic, Statist Islam

On a cool May afternoon during the middle of my research, I boarded one of the swarm

of minibuses that hover around Güven Park in Kızılay, Ankara’s central business district, and
headed west toward Turkey’s Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Bakanlığı). While

most of Ankara’s state ministries are located near the city center, in either Kızılay or Çankaya,

the Presidency of Religious Affairs maintains its own sprawling campus on Ankara’s western

fringe—a testament to both its size and importance (it is the largest single state bureaucracy in

Turkey) and its relative independence from Ankara’s other governmental bureaucracies. My

appointment on that afternoon was with Mehmet Görmez, a professor of theology at Ankara

University and one of several upper-level assistants to Ali Bardakoğlu, the current head of the

Presidency. Mehmet Bey and I spoke over requisite tea for approximately forty-five minutes in

his exceptionally large office. On the whole, our conversation was rather sedate and scripted:

He outlined the history and functions of the Presidency of Religious Affairs (about which I will

expand below) and emphasized its non-partisan, non-political character. Mehmet Bey bristled

noticeably, however, when I presented him with a standard Alevi criticism of the Presidency,

namely that it actively favors Sunni Islam in to the detriment of Turkey’s Alevi Community.58

He responded, with no small degree of indignation, that the Presidency of Religious Affairs is

“above all sects,”59 Sunni and Alevi alike, and that, in any case, Alevism is more of a ‘culture’

(kültür) than a ‘religion’ (din). Finally, as our interview came to a close, Mehmet Bey offered

me a somewhat disheartening piece of advice, framed as a dismissal of my project in general: “I

want to tell you something, as a fellow researcher. Your project is on the wrong path. You’re

interested in civil society and religious communities (cemaatler), but you can’t learn about Islam

from these sorts of things. If you want to understand Islam, study its history, its texts. What

you’re studying won’t really teach you anything. It’s merely politics.”60
58
I deal with this criticism and its relationship to specific Alevi foundations and associations in
much more detail in Chapter Five.
59
Diyanet mezhepler üstünde bir kurumdur.
60
Bir şey söylemek istiyorum, başka araştırmacı olarak. Sizin arastırmalarınız tam yanlış
yoldadır. Sivil toplum, cemaatlerle fılan ilgileniyorsunuz fakat bu tür şeylerden gerçek İslam
 At the time, I was predictably upset by Görmez’ casual rejection of the validity of my

project. In the coming weeks, I related his comments to many friends and research contacts from

different pious civil society organizations, and consistently met with a nod and a sympathetic

smile. The general response of my friends associated with civil Islamic organizations was

knowing lack of surprise. “Of course that’s what an official from the Presidency of Religious

Affairs would say about your research,” they unanimously seemed to (and often did) say. Upon

reflection over the course of the several years since this conversation, I too have come to

comprehend the indicative and fascinating presuppositions about the relationship among religion,

publicness, politics, and citizenship that Mehmet Bey’s remarks, and the Presidency of Religious

Affairs’ activities more broadly, articulate. In brief, the Presidency of Religious Affairs, as the

primary institutional site for the national production and regulation of Sunni Islam in Turkey,

broadcasts a non-liberal mode of public piety that, somewhat paradoxically, aims necessarily at

privatization on an individual level. The Presidency’s rendering of Islam is homogenous, text-

based and reliant upon a static, singular interpretation of Islamic tradition. While the publicness

of the Islam that the Presidency of Religious Affairs produces and fosters is guaranteed by its

relationship to the state, the Presidency, like the Turkish state generally, imagines the

relationship between citizen and pious practitioner as a hierarchical one: The public obligations

and privileges of citizenship demand and sanction a privatized mode of piety. And it is precisely

this public advocacy and fostering of an ideally privatized piety that makes the Presidency of

Religious Affairs a crucial counterpublic to the liberal piety of civil Islam in contemporary

Turkey.

ögrenilmez. İslam’ı anlamak isterseniz onun tarihini, metinlerini araştırın. Anlattığınız

araştırmalardan istifade edemezsin. Sadece siyasettir, politikadır.
 Mehmet Bey’s summary of the Presidency of Religious Affairs’ activities and aspirations

was a near-verbatim citation of the Constitutional stipulation of the institution’s purview and

role. He emphasized the Presidency’s three distinct functions: “To explain and to teach

(primarily via publications) Islam’s principles of faith, worship, and morality; to administer

Turkey’s mosques, and; to enlighten society in matters relating to religion.”61 The constitutional

clause relating to the Presidency of Religious Affairs is almost identical, specifying these same

three areas of activity, namely “to carry out affairs related to the beliefs, prayers and moral

foundations of Islam, to enlighten society about religion, and to manage places of prayer

(Gözaydın 2006: 4).” The Constitution also underscores the institution’s transcendence of

political particularity: “The Presidency of Religious Affairs, which is within the general

administration, shall exercise its duties prescribed in its particular law, in accordance with the

principles of secularism, removed from all political views and ideas, and aiming at national

solidarity and integrity (Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Anayasası 1982: Clause 136).”62 Historically, the

Presidency of Religious Affairs was coeval with the foundation of the Turkish Republic in the

aftermath of the Ottoman Empire, and the radical laicist reforms that marked the Republic’s

61
1) İslam’ın iman, ibadet, ve ahlak konuları anlatmak ve öğretmek, 2) bütün camileri idare
etmek, 3) toplumu din konusunda aydınlatmak.
62
Genel idare içinde yer alan Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı, laiklik ilkesi doğrultusunda, bütün siyasî
görüş ve düşünüşlerin dışında kalarak ve milletçe dayanışmayı ve bütünleşmeyi amaç edinerek,
özel kanununda gösterilen görevleri yerine getirir. I adapted this translation from the English
language version of the Constitution, available at
http://www.anayasa.gov.tr/images/loaded/pdf_dosyalari/THE_CONSTITUTION_OF_THE_RE
PUBLIC_OF_TURKEY.pdf
departure from the Empire. It was designed as the synthesis of two Ottoman ministries, the

Ministry of Evkaf63 and the Ministry of Şeriyye (Shari’a), including the office of the Sheikh-ül-

İslam (Şeyhülislam), at the time, the supreme clerical authority in Islam (Gözaydın 2006: 3).

Simultaneous with the abolishment of these two Ottoman ministries, in March 1924, the

Presidency of Religious Affairs was created as an administrative department under the Prime

Ministry in order to manage all religious affairs in the nascent republic (Ibid.). Importantly, the

sequestering of religion within a single bureaucratic body allowed for the more thorough

secularization of Turkish law and state politics generally, achieved chiefly through the whole-

cloth borrowing of Swiss Civil Law and the Italian penal code (Berkes 1964: 467 ff).

Both domestic critics of the Presidency of Religious Affairs, especially from within the

Alevi Community, and a bevy of Turkish social scientists have interrogated the ‘paradox’ or

‘contradiction’ of a secular state devoted to supporting and propagating Islam through a massive

bureaucratic apparatus (Çakır and Bozar 2005; Kara 2002; Kaya 1998; Gözaydın 1993, 1995,

2006). İştar Gözaydın, who has devoted her career to questioning the historical and political

tensions surrounding the Presidency of Religious Affairs, nicely articulates the standard

argument that the Presidency aims at the minimization and control, rather than production, of

religion: “Paradoxically, in this context, the state employs the Presidency of Religious Affairs

against religion and its influence on the socio-economic level (2006: 7).” In Gözaydın’s view,

63
Confusingly, the administration of foundations (vakıflar), both pious and non-pious alike, was
later vested in a separate state ministry, the General Directorate of Foundations (Vakıflar Genel
Müdürlüğü), which was only established in 1967, some forty five years after the establishment of
the Republic. As Murat Çızakçı argues persuasively in his helpful history of the venture of pious
foundations in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, the establishment of the General
Directorate of Foundations marks an important departure from the strict Kemalist-Jacobinism of
the early Republic, which had aimed at the absolute abolition of all pious foundations (2000:
90ff). See also Chapter One, pp. 25-27.
the Presidency achieves the paradox of fostering Islam in order to minimize it by comprehending

and producing religion as a ‘service’ that fulfils a social ‘need’—just as the strong, welfare state

must fulfill the material needs of its citizens, so too must it address their spiritual needs (Ibid.: 5).

While I generally agree with this reading and critique of the Presidency’s governmentalized

piety, I would like to make a somewhat different argument about the irrevocable public

importance of the Presidency of Religious Affairs to Islam in Turkey more generally. In the

simplest terms, the privatization of piety in the laicist, Kemalist context is not—indeed, cannot

be—identical to the privatization of religious devotion in liberal contexts. Rather than the effect

of a Kantian categorical imperative, the privatization of Islam in Turkey has always been a

matter of state force.64 As such, it has required the public production of privatized Islam itself,

by means of the Presidency of Religious Affairs. Certainly, the public service of religion that

the Presidency provides is only to be consumed by citizens within the private sphere—the

Presidency always maintains and enforces a privatized ideal of piety that is (and must be)

commensurable with the laicist imperatives of the Turkish state as a whole. Nonetheless, by its

very production of privatized piety, the Presidency of Religious Affairs also provides a

benchmark and demarcates the horizons of possibility for other public genres of piety, including

liberal piety. More strongly, one might say that the Presidency of Religious Affairs defines all

other modes of public piety in Turkey as necessarily counterpublic in relation to the idealized,

privatized, static, statist Islam that it produces.

64
Of course, critical readings of the public sphere and secularism forwarded by Michael Warner,
Talal Asad and others maintain that state power always undergirds and animates the dynamics of
the public and the private. Nonetheless, in the Turkish national context, there is an overt aspect
to the determining relationship between the state and the public/private distinction that defies
liberal expectations of a withdrawn, minimal, or, in the libertarian/neo-conservative fantasy, non-
existent state.
 Above all, the Presidency of Religious Affairs fosters and broadcasts a genre of public

piety in which questions of proper practice and belief are uncontestably rooted in textual

tradition and mediated by the single, singular authority of the state. Herein lies the crux of the

paradox of publicness that defines it as a state institution. On the one hand, as an administrative

bureaucracy of the state, the Presidency of Religious Affairs enjoys unique status as the sole

public body capable of producing a legitimate, uncontestable Islam. The Presidency defines

publicly hegemonic Islamic practice in contemporary Turkey. On the other hand, because the

statist mode of Islam produced by the Presidency of Religious Affairs is always already

understood to be singular and uncontestable, the bureaucratic public production of Islam aims

toward and transforms seamlessly into a fully privatized practice of piety for individual citizens.

This is an Islam defined by the imperatives of laicism. Furthermore, under the Presidency of

Religious Affairs’ homogenous and homogenizing interpretation of Islam, public, political

contestation over questions of piety is neither possible nor permissible: Inasmuch as Islamic

tradition is taken to be single and fixed, debate over the conditions of practice and belief is

necessarily illegitimate, and quite often intolerable.

Even a casual inquiry into the history of Islamic theology and law suggests that the

Presidency of Religious Affairs’ ideology of absolute doctrinal homogeneity eschews the

diversity of practice and vibrancy of debate that have defined Islam over its history and

geographical spread. To take only the most prominent counterexample, the four classical Sunni

schools of jurisprudence (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i and, Hanbali) and the legal methodology (fiqh;

Turkish fıkıh) relying on the principles of analogy (qiyas; Turkish kıyas), consensus (ijma;

Turkish icma) and authoritative interpretation (ijtihad; Turkish içtihad)65 presuppose a

65
See Chapter Three for a prolonged discussion of içtihad as practiced and idealized by the Nur
Community.
multiplicity of positions vis-à-vis the texts of tradition.66 More important in this context,

however, is the ineluctable pressure that the Presidency of Religious Affairs’ privatized yet

public, statist Islam maintains on all other modes of piety in Turkey. As I will argue in Chapter

Five, this homogenizing pressure has had extraordinary effects on Turkey’s Alevi community in

particular—much of the activity of Alevi civil society organizations explicitly targets the

legitimacy of the state’s definition of Islam. The Presidency of Religious Affairs’ hegemonic

piety also exerts discursive and pragmatic pressure on other avatars of civil Islam in Turkey,

such as the Nur Community and Gülen Community, precisely because the Presidency militates

against any public piety that is not also statist. The very possibility of a civil, liberal piety,

separate from the organizing purview of the state—an historically recent development in Turkey,

as I discussed in Chapter One—contradicts the privatizing imperative of the the Presidency of

Religious Affairs’ public piety. It is this very aspiration to independence from the homogenizing

force of the state that (partially) defines liberal piety as a genre of publicness in Turkey, and

draws it into a necessarily counterpublic relationship with the singular Islam of the Presidency of

Religious Affairs.

Piety as Mass Spectacle: Partisan Turkish Islam and Public Illiberality

“Ayasofya is a mosque, and will always be a mosque! Ayasofya is ours and will always

be ours! Devious and ignorant Pope, don’t come here! Shoulder to shoulder against oppression!

God is great!”67 I milled through a thick crowd of young men—the women demonstrators were

sequestered in a separate section, on the hill behind us—that filled Istanbul’s Çağlayan Square in

66
Moreover, as Talal Asad rightly notes in his discussion of the transformation of Shari’a in the
context of colonial and postcolonial Egypt, it is precisely the rendering of fiqh as a set of rules
authorized and maintained by and for the state that brings the imperatives of homogenization and
totalization to the fore (2003: 218 ff.).
67
Ayasofya bir camiidir, camii kalacak! Ayasofya bizimdir, bizim kalacak! Sinsi Papa gelme!
Zülme karşı omuz omuza! Allahu ekber!
the cool November morning. The protest had been organized by the Felicity Party (Saadet

Partisi), a right-wing ‘Islamist’ party, in protest of the imminent arrival of Pope Benedict the 16th

to Turkey. A few months earlier, during a lecture at the University of Regensburg on September

12th, Benedict had ignited a political firestorm by favorably quoting the following remarks,

originally made by the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus: “Show me just what

Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as

his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached (BBC 2006).” Benedict’s comments

were greeted with anger and indignation by Muslim commentators in both Turkey and elsewhere

and interpreted as another provocation aimed at creating a ‘clash’ between Christian/European

‘civilization’ and Islam, of a piece with the Cartoon Controversy caused by inflammatory

cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad that Jyllands-Posten, a Danish newspaper, published

in 2005. Although Benedict’s primary purpose in traveling to Turkey was to meet with Patriarch

Bartholomew at the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Istanbul—the Vatican framed his courtesy

call as an historic moment of reconciliation between the Western and Eastern Churches—he also

hoped to mend fences with the ‘Muslim World’ at large during his first visit as Pope to a

Muslim-majority nation. For this reason, Benedict held tête-a-tête meetings with Prime Minister

Erdoğan, Ali Bardakoğlu, the aforementioned head of Diyanet, and the chief Mufti of Istanbul

during his sojourn, and toured both Ayasofya and the Blue Mosque (Sultanahmet Camii) while

in Istanbul. Nonetheless, many Turkish Muslims, as well as some of the more populist Islamic

press organs such as the newspapers Vakit and Yeni Şafak,68 were unimpressed and unpersuaded

by Benedict’s gestures of good will. Several days prior to his arrival, a group of young men

associated with the Alperen Lodges and the right-wing Great Unity Party (Büyük Birlik Partisi,
68
Several days prior to his visit, Vakit published a headline simply reading “You’re not wanted”
(İstenmiyorsun), while Yeni Şafak pronounced that “The Islamic World will be waiting for an
apology from the Pope” (İslam dünyası Papa’dan bir özür bekliyor) (Yeni Şafak 2006).
BBP) performed prayers (namaz) in the Ayasofya Museum specifically to protest his visit—a

notable public provocation because it marshaled the obligatory ritual practice of prayer in order

to criticize and interrogate both Benedict’s Christian appropriation of Ayasofya as a ‘church’ and

the state-secularist definition of Ayasofya as a ‘museum’ (Soncan and Cansev 2006). The

demonstration in Çağlayan Square was conceived as a similar, mass outpouring of ‘popular’

sentiment against Benedict—reportedly the Felicity Party arranged for buses to convey

protestors to Istanbul from every province (il) of Turkey, although the approximately 20,000

demonstrators in attendance was a far cry from the million expected (Zaman 2006).

I milled about Çağlayan Square as the assembled crowd awaited the keynote addresses

from Recai Kutan, the head of the Felicity Party, and former Welfare Party Prime Minister

Necmettin Erbakan, the eminence gris of the party-based Islamic political movement in Turkey.

Hundreds banners and posters, both home-made and mass-produced, hovered above the crowd;

on the whole, they commented dryly on the perceived hypocrisy of Benedict himself and

Christianity more generally. Among the slogans that I noticed, some in English, some in

Turkish: “We believe in Jesus. Do you believe in Muhammad?” “The Inquisition: No

Comment.” “The Crusades, that was a peaceful walk.” “We do not want a Watikan (sic) here!”

“This is Istanbul, not Constantinople!”69 “You shouldn’t be surprised, Benedict, and you

shouldn’t try our patience!”70 “Salvation lies neither in the EU nor the USA, but in Felicity.”71 In

spite of the small Turkish flag that I had been given after passing through the security check at

the edge of the protest, I clearly cut a strange figure among the protestors—a large cadre of

foreign journalists had been segregated in a press area near the rear of the demonstration, but

69
Burası İstanbul, Konstantin değil!
70
Papa şaşırma sabrımızı taşırma!
71
Ne ABD ne AB Kurtuluş Saadet’te.
ever the good participant observer, I made my way near the front, just to the left of the stage—

and was often challenged with unsolicited questions on my opinion of Benedict (I answered

unflaggingly that I found his remarks inappropriate and inflammatory). Eventually, I struck up a

conversation with Adem, an enthusiastic young man who identified himself as a member of the

Felicity Party Youth Faction (Saadet Partisi Gençlik Kolu). Echoing the sentiments of many of

the placards, Adem expressed deep concern and indignation over what he perceived to be a long

history of aggression toward Islam on the part of the ‘West’ (Batı), spanning from the Crusades

to Benedict’s recent provocation. Both Kutan and Erbakan reiterated this monolithic history of

Western aggression in their official statements, broadcast from the stage through a PA—although

they were at some pains to reconcile the Turkish tradition of hospitality (misafirperverlik

geleneği) with their hostility to Benedict’s arrival, they each contextualized the protest within a

broader litany of complaints, including American President George W. Bush’s ‘War’ against

Islam, and recent or ongoing armed conflicts in Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and

Chechnya. The governing Justice and Development Party, which shares political roots with the

Felicity Party (Prime Minister Erdoğan was once Erbakan’s apprentice and favorite son, but the

two parted ways following the closure of the Welfare Party in 1997), was also criticized for its

acquiescence to Benedict’s visit. In a particularly remarkable gesture, one of the speakers urged

the demonstrators to flood a government telephone line with text messages simply reading “The

Pope shouldn’t come” (Papa gelmesin)—all about me, cell phones emerged and digits

dexterously fulfilled the speaker’s request.

The demonstration at Çağlayan was, above all, a summoning of pious identification to

mass spectacle. What might it mean to think through the categories of ‘the crowd’ or ‘the mass’

from the point of view of the politics of piety? The relationship between the figure of the crowd
or mob and the political imperatives of modernity has a fraught history in anthropology and the

critical social sciences more broadly. Writing with the French Revolution, and quite possibly the

storming of the Bastille itself, in mind, the 19th Century French sociologist Gustave LeBon

(2001) adduced the figure of the ‘crowd’ to account for a uniquely modern political subjectivity,

both treacherous and, if harnessed correctly, potentially revolutionary, that is irreducible to the

calm rationalism of Enlightenment individualism. LeBon himself described the crowd with

snide, elitist-bourgeois skepticism and paranoia, but his contemporary interpreters—notably

anthropologist William Mazzarella, in a synoptic, forthcoming reinterpretation of LeBon (2010b)

—have argued that the figure of the crowd provides instructive insight into the privileged modes

of public affect and political subjectivity that modernity (and also, perhaps, postmodernity) both

rely upon and efface.72 As Mazzarella argues, the crowd, with its presupposed irrationality and

‘magical’ modes of thought and interaction, acts as both a prop and a foil to the calm, rational

individual subject of liberalism. Furthermore, although the crowd, like all political subjects, is

mediated in a variety of ways, Mazzarella also directs attention to the crowd’s effect of

‘immediation’ (2006). It is precisely the ability of the crowd to seem spontaneous, authentic, and

immediate(d), even as it participates in the travails of political mediation, that endows it with

unique potentiality and ambivalence. The crowd’s kinetic irrationality, figured as unmediated

and immediate, opens to dangerous horizons of political possibility that defy, and potentially

threaten, placid rationality of the liberal subject.

The politics of mediation is also a central concern for Guy Debord, another Francophone

sociologist who writes within a more overtly Marxian tradition. In The Society of the Spectacle

(1994), Debord argues that modern society is based, above all, on spectacular representation, in

72
For an instructive comparison to mass politics, crowds and spectacle in contemporary India,
see Tambiah 1996.
both a semiotic and political sense: spectacular events and mass mediated images provide the

means for and meaning of society’s reflexive self-understanding.73 Of course, it is important to

note that Debord writes in an overtly romantic vein that nostalgizes an ontologically-true,

authentic mode of sociality and subjectivity, which is both logically and historically prior to the

society of the spectacle—a romanticism that contemporary theorists of mass subjectivity such as

Mazzarella militate against. Nonetheless, with this caveat in mind, we might productively unite

LeBon’s and Mazzarella’s interest in the unique political subjectivity of the crowd and Debord’s

focus on spectacle as a privileged political medium in order to open an analysis of the political

spectacle of the crowd. In a crucial sense, the crowd and the spectacle share a common logic of

representative authenticity: Although the spectacle of the crowd is deeply mediated by pre-

existing political dispensations, it seems as if it is spontaneous and immediate. And this

spectacular effect of immediation undergirds the crowd’s political rationality.

The mass spectacle of the crowd as a genre of public affect in contemporary Turkey is by

no means limited to ‘Islamist’ politics. In a forthcoming article, Kabir Tambar (2009b) cogently

dissects the secularist/Kemalist instrumentalization of crowd politics as a means of harnessing

‘popular’ sentiment against the election of Abdullah Gül, one of the leading lights of the Justice

and Development Party, to the Turkish Presidency in April 2008.74 Nor, for that matter, is the

73
For instance, a rather typical passage near the beginning of The Society of the Spectacle:
The spectacle appears at once as society itself, as a part of society and as a means
of unification. As a part of society, it is that sector where all attention, all
consciousness converges. Being isolated—and precisely for that reason—this
sector is the locus of illusion and false consciousness; the unity it imposes is
merely the official language of generalized separation (1994: 12).
74
Gül ultimately acceded to (and, at the time of my writing, still holds) the Turkish Presidency,
in spite of the massive anti-AKP, pro-Kemalist demonstrations organized in Istanbul and Izmir
and at Anıt Kabir, Atatürk’s tomb complex and the epicenter of the ritual production of statist
Kemalism, located in Ankara.
spectacle of the crowd that I witnessed at Çağlayan Square the only modality of partisan political

Islam in Turkey today. As both Hakan Yavuz (2003a) and Jenny White (2002) have duly noted,

the mobilization of pious sentiment and identity to partisan ends by parties such as Felicity and

the governing Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) draws on and

(re)constitutes local social networks that exceed party structures themselves. Nonetheless, as the

protest against Benedict XVI’s visit suggests, the spectacle of the crowd is a principal genre of

public, politicized Islam in contemporary Turkey. In this light, it is striking that most scholarly

studies of contemporary Turkish Islam have neglected to comment on the relationship between

the spectacle of the crowd and practices and identities of Islamic piety.

Upon reflection, it is not entirely surprising that questions of mass spectacle and the

politics of crowds have remained absent from recent serious studies of Turkish Islam. I have

also struggled immensely over the ethics of ethnography, as a practice of both research and

writing, that orient the description of mass spectacles and crowds identified as ‘Islamic’. Indeed,

I vacillated for quite some time over whether or not to include this section on the Felicity Party

demonstration in my presentation at all. My abiding concern—which I strongly believe to be

shared by other serious scholars of contemporary Islam, both in Turkey and elsewhere—is that

the ethnographic description of mass, spectacular modalities of Islam too easily invites

neoconservative and neo-Orientalist readings of Islam as necessarily illiberal, anti-Western,

antidemocratic and ‘irrational’. Unfortunately, such politically-interested interpretations, based

squarely upon the latter day Orientalism of Bernard Lewis (1990, 2002) and the civilizational

paranoia of Samuel Huntington (1996) still maintain a near monopoly on public representations

of Islam in the North Atlantic World, all the more so following the events of September 11th
2001.75 Rags by academic cranks such as Daniel Pipes (2002), who offer uniformly monolithic,

paranoid, and often downright phobic representations of Islam, are regrettably among the most

popular and best-selling works on Islam in English. And their arguments have visceral, hate-

mongering avatars in films such as Fitna (2008) by Dutch demagogue-auteur Geert Wilders, and,

Obsession (2005), a sensationalist DVD demonizing the threat of Islam that was mailed

anonymously to millions of voters prior to the American Presidential Election of 2008.

In consideration of this volatile and often upsetting political culture about Islam, the

ethnographer must exercise unusual diligence when describing Islamic piety. Nonetheless, in

spite of these urgent concerns, my aspiration to capture the diversity of and relationships among

different genres of public Islam in Turkey demands attention to modalities and contexts, such as

Çağlayan Square, that participate in mass spectacle and marshal an illiberal politics. Allow me

to be excessively direct in this matter: the mass spectacle of partisan Islam that I have described

is not illiberal because Islam is somehow ontologically and definitively illiberal. Rather, it is

only illiberal in dialogic relationship to other genres of piety and publicness in Turkey, both

liberal and nonliberal alike. Illiberal piety only makes sense in relationship to liberal piety. As I

hope is already eminently clear, the illiberal mass spectacle of piety is only one genre of public

Islam in Turkey. There is a more general question here that I have chosen to skirt, namely,

whether all mass spectacles of crowdedness, religious, secularist or otherwise, are necessarily

illiberal. Given the constitutive tension between the figures of the crowd and the rational, self-

determining modern individual that Mazzarella traces, I suspect that the crowd as a political

75
Mahmood Mamdani’s Good Muslim World, Bad Muslim World (2004) is the most eloquent
and thorough interrogation of the post-Cold War political rationality which has resulted in the
zero-sum distinction between ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ Muslims on the basis of an Orientalist reading of
Islam as a ‘culture’ that necessarily implies a reactionary, anti-Western politics.
subject cannot avoid an incipient tendency toward illiberality. This general question aside,

however, the spectacle of the crowd at Çağlayan Square was, in a somewhat superficial sense,

politically illiberal in both its overt message and its mode of public affect. The public

marshalling of righteous indignation and the rejection of interreligious good will (albeit on the

basis of Benedict’s own failure to live up to a cosmopolitan liberal standard of interreligious

respect) defined the spectacle of the crowd at Çağlayan Square as a specific instance of illiberal

public piety. Considering the frequent curtailment on Islamically-oriented political parties in

Turkey—most notably, the ‘soft coup’ of 28 February 1997, in which the Turkish military

forcibly removed the government of Prime Minister Erbakan from power and banned his party,

Welfare—this particular genre of public Islam in Turkey continues to exist at a certain limit of

the publicly achievable, beyond which state interference becomes almost inevitable.

Over the days and weeks preceding and following the demonstration at Çağlayan Square,

I frequently discussed the Felicity Party’s rally against Benedict with many of my friends and

contacts within the world of civil Turkish Islam. To a person, they were opposed to both the

illiberal pageantry of the crowd and the hostility toward Benedict. A young man at the

Journalists and Writers Foundation essentially argued that ‘true’ Muslims should and must ‘turn

the other cheek’, and demonstrate their superiority to Benedict by welcoming him as a guest and

respecting him as a sincere believer, albeit from a different faith. A member of the Istanbul

Science and Culture Foundation invoked the principle of müspet, or positive action, to criticize

the Felicity Party protest. I discuss müspet at much greater length in Chapter Five, but in this

context, it is sufficient to note that the principle of positive action, because it denigrates all self-

interested motivations and acts and promotes a quietist practice of piety, militates against the
type of righteous indignation evident at Çağlayan Square. These overt criticisms of the Felicity

Party’s acrimonious protest against Benedict on the part of civil Islamic actors gesture toward the

diversity and broader contours of the cartography of public piety in contemporary Turkey. In

general, as a genre of public piety, the mass, spectacular Islam that was on display at Çağlayan

Square articulates and marshals a mode of public affect that differs radically from the measured

individualism of liberal piety that I analyze more generally throughout this dissertation. The

mass spectacle of the pious crowd is also contrary to the staid uniformity of tradition that

distinguishes the bureaucratic piety of the Presidency of Religious Affairs, which I outlined in

the previous section. Simultaneously, these distinctions and incommensurabilities are formative:

liberal piety, bureaucratic traditionalism, and mass spectacle mutually define one another as

genres of public Islam within a broader dialogic field of possible and practiced publicness. And

within this broader field, these different genres of public piety act as reciprocal counterpublics to

one another.

Conclusion: Liberal Piety in Light of Other, Non-Public and Semi-Public Islams

Throughout the final period of my fieldwork in Istanbul, I lived opposite a rather typical

local mosque, which was the primary site of daily prayers (namaz) for most of the men in my

neighborhood, Eskişehir, in the municipal district of Kurtuluş. On my way to and from research

appointments, jejune errands, and the miscellaneous urban distractions that drew me out of my

apartment on a regularly basis, I frequently spoke leisurely with many of the men who worship

regularly at Eskişehir Mosque; I also occasionally listened to the weekly sermon (vaaz, hutbe),

delivered by the mosque’s imam following the noon prayers on Fridays.76 Over the course of my

76
The Presidency of Religious Affairs plays a major role in stipulating the topics and substance
of Friday sermons in Turkish mosques—for example, the Presidency website offers an
exhaustive list of “sample sermons” (örnek vaazlar) for imams (see
http://www.diyanet.gov.tr/yayin/basiliyayin/yweb_kitap.asp?yid=25). The mosque, and the
casual acquaintance with many of these many of the worshippers at the Eskişehir Mosque, I

described my interest in and research on civil Islamic institutions in Turkey. Although they were

often enthusiastic about my interest in Islam in general, these men rarely expressed specific

curiosity about the institutions and communities that were the focus of my research. And while,

when I gently pressed them on the matter, they typically voiced general support for the Justice

and Development Party, the Islamically-oriented governing party, this political sympathy was a

far cry from the fervent, spectacular, politicized Islam of Çağlayan Square and the Felicity Party.

For most of the worshippers at my local Eskişehir Mosque—as for millions of other Sunni

Muslims throughout Turkey—piety is primarily a quotidian, non-politicized, non-public matter.

These worshippers are part of the unobtrusive majority of Turks, the overwhelming 98.4 percent

(Çarkoğlu and Toprak 2006: 38, quoted in Silverstein 2008a: 125) of the population who identify

themselves as Muslim but who do not, on the whole, interpret this identification as a necessary

political project or activist commitment.

Quotidian Islam in contemporary Turkey is the obverse of the coin of the Presidency of

Religious Affairs’ statist piety: The depoliticized, non-public practice exemplified by the

worshippers at Eskişehir Mosque adheres to the imperative of privatization that the statist

interpretation of Islam inculcates and attempts to produce. But there are also other, more fraught

non-public modes of Islam in contemporary Turkey. The anthropologist Brian Silverstein

(2008a) has brilliantly outlined the challenges of publicness, privacy and outright illegality that

define the discursive purview of Sufi brotherhoods (tasavvuf-i tarikatlar) in Turkey. While Sufi

brotherhoods such as the Nakişbendis (Nakşibendiler) and the Suleymancı (Süleymancılar) have

Friday sermon in particular, therefore constitute contexts for the broadcast and inculcation of the
statist Islam that I discussed above.
benefited from the liberalization of the mass media since the 1980s, the perduring illegality77 of

Sufi orders has necessitated that they exist, in Silverstein’s words, as a “public secret” (Ibid.:

124), incapable of achieving the full publicness of statist, spectacular, and liberal Islam in

Turkey. The ambivalence of the public yet secret status of Sufi orders has also contributed to the

frequent ascription of conspiratorial motives to the brotherhoods—throughout my time in

Turkey, I regularly encountered the claim that Sufi orders maintain an invisible, decisive

influence on domestic politics, and have done so since the Prime Ministry of Turgut Özal (who is

widely considered to have been a Nakşibendi) in the 1980s. I will discuss some of these

dilemmas of Sufism in Turkey more thoroughly in the next chapter.

To return in conclusion, then, to the principal object and argument of this chapter: It is

only within the multivalent field of multiple interpretations and practices of Islam in Turkey that

liberal piety achieves its specificity as one specific genre of publicness. Some of liberal piety’s

dialogic others are also public modes of religiosity; in particular, the statist Islam of the

Presidency of Religious Affairs and the spectacular, mass Islam of geo-religious protest are two

striking instances of nonliberal public piety. Moreover, liberal piety is further delineated by its

distinction from non-public modes of Islam, such as privatized quotidian worship, and Islamic

practices such as Sufism that are neither coherently public nor private, and reside partially

outside the domain of legality entirely. Having sketched this broad, dialogic field of plural

practices and discourses of Islam in Turkey, the following three chapters aim to flesh out the

77
Sufi orders were first outlawed in Turkey in 1925, during the secularizing reforms described
more thoroughly in the previous Chapter. All religious lodges (tekkeler, dergahlar, zaviyeler),
Sufi as well as Alevi, were closed, and membership in a brotherhood (tarikat) was prohibited;
although attitudes toward Sufism have shifted greatly, especially in the context of the
socioeconomic liberalization begun in the 1980s, membership in a Sufi order as a devotee or
sheik still remains technically illegal. For a more thorough account of Sufism in Republican
Turkey, see Silverstein 2008a (esp. pp. 124-125) and Mardin 1991.
practices and discourses that constitute the positive content of liberal piety in particular. I pursue

this aspiration by focusing on the articulations of tradition, ideologies of space, and political

attitudes toward religious pluralism and interreligious dialogue that, on the whole, characterize

and define civil Islamic institutions in contemporary Turkey.

 Chapter Three
Invocations of Tradition, Aspirations to Modernity, and Ideals of
Contemporaneity: The Public Historicities of Liberal Piety78

Introduction: Which of These Families is Ready for Europe? Which is Modern?

Look at two families, one Sunni, one Alevi. The Sunni family looks like it just
came from the village. The woman is wearing a headscarf, the man has his
beard…then look at the Alevi family. The man wears a suit, the woman is
unveiled. So I ask you: Which one of these families is ready for Europe? Which
is modern?79

I was rather discombobulated following the epic public transportation journey from my

home on the Bosporus to Kocasinan, which involved no less than four transfers, from bus to

tramway to subway to bus yet again and finally on to one of Istanbul’s notoriously maniacal,

private minibuses that navigate the narrow, dusty streets of the further suburbs and squats

(gecekondular), and had scarcely caught my breath before Ayhan Bey, my contact at the Cem

Foundation (Cem Vakfı), whisked me into the office of the Foundation vice-president, Ali Bey.

Apparently, an urgent meeting at a distant location on the opposite side of Istanbul demanded Ali

Bey’s departure in less than an hour, and he spared no time in regaling me with his

congratulations, questions, and advice. After plying me with saccharine cookies, ample tea, and

requisite compliments on my Turkish, Ali Bey launched into a familiar, especially articulate

screed on Alevism in contemporary Turkey, quoted above, before repeating his rhetorical

question: “Which one is modern?”

The answer, and its implication, were clear. I encountered this emphasis on the

quintessential modernity of Alevism throughout my time in Turkey. Alevis themselves, along

78
I would like to thank Malika Zhegal in particular for her helpful comments on this chapter.
79
İki tane aileye bakın, bir tanesi Sunni, bir tanesi Alevi. Sunni ailesi köyden yeni varmış gibi
gözüküyor. İşte karısı başörtülü, kocasının sakalı var…şimdi Alevi ailesine bakın. Adam bir
takım elbise giyer, karısı başı açıktır…Peki size soruyorum: Hangisi Avrupa’ya hazır? Hangisi
modern?
with occasional non-Alevi Kemalists, extolled the unique capacity of Alevism to achieve

synthesis with the aesthetic and political imperatives of ‘modernity’. Many of my more

conservative Sunni friends, on the other hand, often criticized Alevis for being ‘too secular’

(fazla laik), or ‘modern in a bad way’ (yanlış bir şekilde çağdaş olmak). Within a the classical,

teleological narrative of Turkish modernization, still espoused by many state actors and

Kemalists, Turkey’s Alevis are frequently interpreted and praised as exemplars of development

(geliştirme); for this same reason, they are often viewed skeptically by the part of Turks who

question the validity of the modernization narrative in general.

Even Turkey’s Alevis articulate new discursive and political horizons of possibility

within the historical frame of modernity and its geographical analogue, Europe, the aspiration to

and fulfillment of the modern also presents significant dilemmas for the Alevi Community. For

better or worse, modernity cannot possibly be the entire story for Alevis—to be merely modern

is not to be Alevi at all. The evaporation of identity in the face of homogeneous modernity (and

urbanity) is a common theme of complaint for older Alevis, who descry the waywardness of

Alevi youth. On an institutional level, civil society organizations such as the Cem Foundation

and the Hacı Bektaş Foundation (Hacı Bektaş Vakfı) sponsor cadres of staff researchers to

catalogue the variety of ‘authentic’ Alevi rituals and ballads in rural Anatolian villages, and,

increasingly, in the post-Soviet Central Asian Republics (for instance, Aydın 2002, 2003 and

Yaman 1996, 2002). A performance by one such ‘authentic’ bard (ozan) from a village in the

province of Erzincan provides one of my more vivid memories from my research with the Cem

Foundation. Following his near incomprehensible (to me) song in a distinct regional dialect of
Turkish, my friend Ayhan Bey—himself a researcher on Alevi ‘authenticity’—grinned broadly

and remarked, “You just don’t find Alevis like this much any more, especially in the cities.”80

Pious Historicity as Discursive Tradition and Public Argument

The dilemmas and opportunities of historicity that face the Alevi Community are not

theirs alone. As this chapter will demonstrate, the institutions and actors of the Gülen and Nur

Communities also negotiate among the imperatives and advantages that accrue to the traditional,

the modern, and the contemporary (a historicity related to that of the modern, but lacking

modernity’s teleogical presuppositions—in certain respects, the contemporary is conceptually

similar to the postmodern, but I prefer to avoid the periodization implied by the latter term). On

the whole, this chapter addresses two deeply entwined issues: the status of the historicities of

tradition, modernity and contemporaneity as public arguments characteristic of liberal piety and

civil Islam in Turkey today, and the relationship of these public, pious historicities to the

practices of Islamic discursive traditions that precede and exceed the politics of publicness. Like

liberal piety in general, the historicities of civil Islam that I delineate in this chapter have

emerged in dialogic relation to the partial withdrawal of Kemalist laicism, and the Kemalist

modernization narrative in particular. This emergence should not be mistaken for origin,

however—as we will see, discursive practices such as içtihad (Arabic ijtihad) and the Alevi cem

ceremony draw upon traditions with different, often longer histories and historicities, even as

they also become articulated as public arguments of and for liberal piety.

By way of clearing the ground for this discussion, allow me to be explicit about what I do

not aim to do in this chapter. I have little interest in rehashing the well-worn debates over the

relative compatibility or incompatibility of modernity and tradition as such (cf. Hobsbawm and

80
Böyle gerçek Aleviler artık bulunmaz, özellikle kentlerde yoktur…
Ranger 1983). Such discussions often seem to hinge on a peculiarly modernist assumption,

namely, that different historicities are subject to comparison and adjudication on the basis of a

singular, unilinear and objective model of history; in other words, different historicities are

relatively true or false to the degree that they correspond to ‘actual’ history. In a teleological,

neo-Hegelian turn, ‘modernity’ is the sign beneath which history and historicity achieve

synthetic commensuration; all historicities that deny modernity’s presuppositions are relegated to

the dustbin of the traditional. For the majority of actors in Turkey’s civil Islamic sphere, this

monolithic and hegemonic definition of history and modernity is neither a practice nor

presupposition; rather ‘the modern’ and ‘the traditional’ are two related positions within a field

of arguments about the relationship between the past of history and the possibilities of the

present. Nor am I particularly interested in intervening in the more specific debate over the

relationship between Islam and modernity, taken as two coherent, distinct discursive traditions or

political systems (cf. Esposito and Burgat 2003; Cooper, Nettler, and Mahmoud 1998). To be

sure, much of this literature—I am thinking in particular of the works of Fazlur Rahman (1979,

1982), Daniel Brown (1996), Ibrahim Abu-Rabi’ (1996) and Muhammad Qasim Zaman (2002)

—has cast valuable critical light on how ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ are mutually constructed and

contested within colonial and post-colonial contexts of Islam, especially in South Asia and the

Arab Middle East. Nonetheless, as the legions of critics inspired by Edward Said (1978) have

duly noted, the trope of ‘tradition’ in the context of the Islamic Middle East continues to bear an

inexpugnable Orientalist flavor.81 Furthermore, as Brian Silverstein (2008a, 2008b) has recently
81
Of particular note in this context is Gayatri Spivak’s “Reading Orientalism Thirty Years Later,
in Istanbul (2006),” a meditation on the uptake and particular relevance of the concept of
Orientalism in contemporary Turkey. This paper was delivered as the keynote address for a
conference titled “Edward Said Anısına Oryantalizm,” (“Orientalism: In Memory of Edward
Said) held on the 9th and 10th of December 2006 and organized partially by the Istanbul
Municipal Government; I would like to thank Professor Spivak especially for providing me with
the text of her unpublished lecture.
argued, the gradual, non-colonial history of political and economic reforms that constituted

modernization in the late Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey has yielded a

substantially different relationship between the categories of ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ in

Turkey. More generally, the persistent framing of analysis on the basis of two objects—

modernity and tradition, modernity and religion, modernity and Islam—carries the risk of both

reproducing modern political presuppositions regarding the proper space and place of religion

(Asad 1999, 2003)—a point that is, of course, central to my dissertation as a whole. Equally

troubling, the binary logic of modernity/tradition often reduces the role of the scholar to one of

either confirmation or denial. Too frequently, the ultimate conclusion and role of the research is

either to question or to assert the compatibility of Islam and modernity, or, at best perhaps, to

offer critical, informed resistance to the binary straitjacket in the first place.

In general, then, this chapter seeks an ethnographically-informed analysis of the modes of

historicity that inform and orient liberal piety in contemporary Turkey—both the explicit

ideologies of history as an object and the practices that embody and reconfigure these ideologies.

For the purposes of my argument, the historicities of ‘tradition,’ ‘modernity’ and

‘contemporaneity’ are, above all, ethnographic data and objects. As such, they are neither

necessarily incommensurable nor mutually-determining. While my interlocutors do articulate

coherent relationships among these historicities, they are not bound by the same categorical

imperatives that have underpinned scholarship on questions of historicity; this is particularly true

in contexts in which tradition itself is viewed as a means to modernity and contemporaneity. My

primary goal in this chapter, then, is to render the contextually-specific ways in which practices

of and aspirations to tradition, modernity and/or contemporaneity achieve articulation and

degrees of public legitimacy as constitutive features of liberal piety in Turkey. In order to

achieve this analytical aspiration, I remain vigilant in my avoidance of the Scylla and Charybdis

of essentialism and reductionism. On the one hand, my analysis militates against the

hypostatization of tradition or religion as a mode of historicity that is independent of and prior to

the temporalities that define modernity. On the other hand, I am equally critical of the frequent

reduction of religiously-informed historicities to epiphenomenal reactions to or refractions of

hegemonic modernity.

My treatment of ‘tradition’ as an ethnographic datum in this chapter differs significantly

from most social scientific treatments of ‘tradition’ that maintain interdisciplinary currency. As I

have already emphasized, I am not interested in evaluating ‘tradition’ as resistance or

capitulation to the supposedly indomitable logics of modernity. Rather, I seek a double-pronged

ethnographic reading of ‘tradition’ within the Turkish context. The first facet of this

ethnographic reading draws directly upon Talal Asad’s watershed definition of a ‘discursive

tradition’—“those discourses and practices of argumentation, conceptually articulated with an

exemplary past and dependent on an interpretive engagement with a set of foundational texts, by

which practitioners of a tradition distinguish correct actions from incorrect ones (Scott and

Hirschkind 2006: 8; Asad 1986).”82 In particular, I invoke the concept of the ‘discursive

tradition’ in order to discuss the theological discipline of içtihad or ‘authoritative legal

interpretation’ as it is idealized and practiced by Turkey’s Nur Community. For the purposes of

my argument, the concept of ‘discursive tradition’ nicely captures the micropolitics of

82
Asad’s own concept of the discursive tradition leans heavily on the philosopher and Thomist
theologian Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of liberalism’s attempt to comprehend and supercede
the arguments of divergent religious ‘traditions’. See in particular MacIntyre 1981 and
MacIntyre 1988.
interpretation that are necessary to linking past inheritance and present practice. However, as an

analytical concept, ‘discursive tradition’ is too bounded to trace exhaustively the relationship

between Islamic ‘tradition’ and publicness in contemporary Turkey. The second aspect of my

analysis of ‘tradition’, then, focuses on how ‘tradition’ itself is marshaled and idealized as a

mode of public argument to questions of modernity, contemporaneity and futurity.

As public argument, the invocation of tradition presupposes and articulates a deep

concern for authenticity, in particular, the authenticity of origins. This emphasis on authenticity

unites public appeals of and for tradition with the theme of nostalgia. In Chapter Four, I dwell

more centrally on nostalgia—especially nostalgia for the Ottoman era—as a definitive feature of

the chronotope of Istanbul (Bakhtin 1981; see also Erol 2008) as practiced and articulated by

Turkish civil Islamic actors and institutions. For the moment, I merely want to flag the frequent

ethnographic confluence of the discursive practices of tradition and nostalgia for tradition itself.

Without putting too fine a point on the matter, nostalgia for tradition locates authenticity of

religious practice in an idealized past that must be recuperated to address the inevitable

waywardness of the present. However—and this is crucial—nostalgia for tradition qua public

argument is also a principal means to asserting the legitimacy of liberal piety within the

contemporary political terrain of publicness in Turkey. Following Charles Taylor (1994), we

might say that nostalgia for tradition provides the grounds for a politics of recognition based

upon the ineluctable authenticity of the past (see also Trilling 1972). As I will show below, this

apotheosis of the authenticity of past tradition is a crucial feature of practices and discourses of

historicity that characterize liberal piety in Turkey. Moreover, authenticity is one the key

principles of collective identity that undergirds a politics of and for recognition in the present.
 While both practices of and nostalgic discourse about Islamic tradition have achieved

new public prominence in urban Turkey over recent decades, authorized public debates on

modernity and modernization are coeval with the Turkish Republic itself. Indeed, the still-

frequent invocation of the ‘modern Turkish state’ and the concomitant implication of rupture

from the Ottoman past demonstrate the inextricability of modernity and the nation-state in the

Turkish context.83 To be sure, modernization and Westernization (modernleştirme,

çağdaşlaşma, Batılılaştırma) are both projects and objects of debate that extend back to the

Ottoman Empire of the 19th Century, and the era of Tanzimat reforms that began in 1839 (for

reference, Bernard Lewis’ The Emergence of Modern Turkey [1961] provides the classic

narrative of the change from the late Ottoman Empire to the Republic). Nonetheless, in as much

as modernity and Europeanness/Occidentality—understood as radical departures from the

‘Oriental’ decadence that was cause and index of the decline of the Ottoman Empire—were

explicit goals of the Kemalist script of the early Republic, they have also been long-standing

objects of academic inquiry on Turkey, especially on the part of Turkish historians and

sociologists themselves (for example, see Heper 1973 and Berkes 1973). In recent years,

however, a cadre of younger Turkish social scientists have departed from the positivist (and

often laudatory) interest in objectively confirming Turkey’s political, economic, and cultural

modernization in order to examine how the practices, discourses and fantasies of modernity are

produced themselves. In a study that constitutes one of my central interlocutors in both this and

following chapter, Esra Özyürek outlines how ‘the modern’ has recently emerged as the object of

privatized nostalgia among Turkey’s Kemalist elite. More broadly, social scientists such as

Nilüfer Göle (1996, 1997), Alev Çinar (2005), Ayşe Öncü (1997) and Çağlar Keyder (1997)

83
See, for instance, Esra Özyürek’s fascinating discussion of recent museum exhibits and public
commemorations of the early Republic (2006: 65 ff.).
have examined the fate of Turkish modernity in relation to diverse questions of gender, (so-

called) Islamist politics, bourgeois domestic intimacy and neoliberal economic reforms (see also

Davison 1998 and Keyman 2007). My own concern with modernity in this chapter is in

conversation with this literature, but, taking a cue from Özyürek, I also depart from the still-

common assumption of the self-evidence of modernity in order to question how a sense of the

modern is produced and practiced as a manner of relating to history itself.

In examining ‘the modern’ as a characteristic historicity of liberal piety in Turkey, I also

take a strong methodological stance concerning the ethnographic availability of certain types of

data. As an ethnographer, it is neither my role nor my ability to confirm or deny the claims to

modernity (or postmodernity) that my informants make themselves—to do so would be to

reinscribe and authorize the very terms of historicity that I am attempting to elucidate.

Nevertheless, modernity as a mode of historicity—the particular sense of “the difference

between ‘what we are’ and ‘what we should be’ (Manoukian 2005: 79)” and the ever-postponed

project of overcoming (and hence reinforcing) this gap—is accessible to ethnographic scrutiny

on the basis of its discursive and pragmatic articulations. Indeed, there is a striking parallel here

between my ethnographic interventions and analytical aspirations (as one hopes is always the

case). The historicity of modernity, like that of nostalgia for tradition, was particularly available

to me as an ethnographer because of its status as an effective, legitimate public argument and

sentiment in contemporary Turkey; the publicness of this historicity in relationship to its pious

contexts is precisely what I attempt to delineate analytically.

For the sake of analytical clarity, a brief word is necessary on the distinction between

modernity and contemporaneity as modes of historicity. In the sections of this chapter to follow,

I will argue that both modernity and contemporaneity are distinctive historicities of liberal piety
Turkey today. Despite their frequent invocation as synonyms, modernity and contemporaneity

(they can both rendered by the Turkish term çağdaşlık, literally, “of the era,” although

‘modernity’ also has several cognate forms, ‘modernlik’ and ‘modernite’84) are not collapsible as

historicities. As defined above, the historicity of modernity expresses a progressive, utopian

conception of time that comprehends the difference between the real and the ideal, ‘the is’ and

‘the ought’, as a negatively-marked difference between the present and the future.85 The

historicity of contemporaneity, on the other hand, integrates ‘the is’ and ‘the ought’ into a single,

present moment, and thereby renders projects of futurity relatively insignificant. Modernity and

contemporaneity are both characteristic of civil Islam and liberal piety in Turkey today—indeed,

they are occasionally valorized by the same institutions and individual actors. Nonetheless, their

analytical distinction is equally crucial. They ultimately express two very different

understandings of the relationship between secularism and religion, one Jacobin/laicist, and the

other liberal (again, we encounter the tension between ‘the laicist’ and ‘the secular’ outlined in

Chapter One).

Finally, before returning to my ethnography proper, I must emphasize that my concern

for the public historicities of tradition, modernity, and contemporaneity does not deny or reveal a

lack of interest in other, less public modes of historicity. Indeed, I pause throughout the chapter

to consider how and why certain practices of Turkish Islam do not easily achieve

commensuration with the historicities of tradition, modernity or contemporaneity. This

consideration of multiple pious historicities, some of which achieve publicness, and others of
84
See also Aydemir: “What makes matters even more complicated is the fact that the
connotations of the various expressions used to signify modernity (modern, moderen, modernite,
çağdaş, çağcıl, asrı, muasır), or tradition (gelenek, görenek, töre, anane) in the Turkish language
are so ambiguous that one could use them pejoratively or affirmatively in different contexts
(2005: 942).”
85
As Svetlana Boym (2001) notes, nostalgia registers the same evaluative difference between the
present and the past; concomitantly, nostalgia is a definitively modern historicity and emotion.
which do not, moves beyond the observation that “only religions that have accepted the

assumptions of moral and liberal political discourse are…commended (Asad 1999: 180)” within

the public sphere. Pace Asad, I am not so much interested in how liberal political discourse

places a straitjacket upon religiosity; rather, I aim to capture how religious discourses and

practices both reinforce and undermine the very distinction between privacy and publicness itself

in contextually specific ways. This aspiration, in turn, coordinates my interest in multiple

historicities—both those that achieve public articulation and legitimacy and those that do not.

Progressive Tradition, Devout Modernity and the Hermeneutics of Example: The Journalists
and Writers Foundation

The granite-faced guard at the entrance of the museum didn’t bother to glance up as my

friend and fellow anthropologist Arzu extended our tickets for his inspection—he was clearly

harried and irked already, and the day was not yet half over. In the courtyard of the tomb

complex, a maelstrom of Turkish middle school children and a disciplined German tour group

competed for space and volume. A diverse host of other characters limned the fringes of these

two principal conglomerations—bauble-bedizened New Age Britons, a Muslim African-

American couple, urbane university students from Izmir and Ankara, curious locals, and the stray

ethnographer or two. Arzu and I had taken an overnight bus from Istanbul to Konya, a city of

approximately 800,000 inhabitants in central Anatolia, generally considered the heart of

Turkey’s conservative ‘Sunni Belt’.86 Like many of the curious crowd, we had come specifically

to view the full solar eclipse that took place on March 29th, 2006, but we did not miss the

86
Since the 1980s, small and mid-sized businesses—especially textile companies—owned by
devout Muslims in central Anatolian cities such as Konya and Kayseri have flourished, and the
cities themselves have become known popularly as the “Anatolian Tigers” (Anadolu Kaplanları),
on the model of the ‘Asian Tigers’ (Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea).
opportunity to visit Konya’s preeminent historical monument, public museum, tourist destination

and site of pilgrimage, the Tomb of Celaleddin Mevlana, the poet, philosopher and Sufi mystic

known as Rumi to English speakers.

Mevlana remains one of the most important historical and religious figures for

contemporary Turks. This persistent prominence is particularly notable considering the fact that

Mevlana was not Turkish himself. A Persian-speaker who was born in present-day Afghanistan,

Mevlana migrated to the Seljuk imperial capital of Konya as a young man. He arrived in Konya

in 1228 CE, and passed the remainder of his forty-five years in the city. One the one hand,

Mevlana and a number of the Sufi practices and tropes associated with him constitute a minor

culture industry87 in contemporary Turkey. As my visit to Konya in 2006 amply demonstrated,

his tomb (Yeşil Kubbe)—a state-run museum88—is a prominent destination for tourists and

pilgrims alike. The sema, a form of zikir—ritualized repetition of the names of God often

accompanied by rotating circumambulation—characteristic of the Mevlevi Sufi Order is a staple

‘folkloric commodity’ offered to tourists in Turkey eager to witness the famed Whirling

Dervishes firsthand.89 Sufi brotherhoods are also frequently invoked as a prime mover behind
87
One of the more financially successful interpretations of Sufi themes has been that of Mercan
Dede, the internationally popular “World Music” (see Stokes 2005) deejay who incorporates
sema performances into his concerts. Mercan Dede is featured in German-Turkish director Fatih
Akın’s cinematic meditation on Turkish music, İstanbul Hatırası (rendered in English as
“Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul”); during his scene, a young American woman and
Sufi acolyte is filmed while ‘dancing’ a sema to Mercan Dede’s set (Akın 2005).
88
All lodges (tekkeler, dergahlar, zaviyeler), tombs (türbeler), pilgrimage sites and other
ritualized spaces associated with both Sufism (primarily of the Nakşibendi Order) and Alevism-
Bektashism were closed by the Turkish State in 1925, in the midst of secularizing reforms
(Silverstein 2008a: 124; see also Chapter Five of this dissertation for a more specific
consideration of the effects of this closure on contemporary Alevi civil society organizations).
Some of the more prominent of these sites, including Mevlana’s Tomb, were converted into
state-run museums shortly thereafter. See Chapter Two, footnote 40 above.
89
On September 30th, 2007, Mevlana’s 800th birthday was celebrated in Konya with a sema
including 300 performers that was broadcast live on television internationally. According to
Ertuğrul Günay, head of the State Ministry of Culture and Tourism (Kültür ve Türizm Bakanlığı),
this number marked it as the largest sema in history (Zaman Gazetesi 2007); see also Ernst
the rise of Islamically-oriented politicians and parties, in particular former Prime Ministers

Turgat Özal and Necemettin Erbakan and Erbakan’s various parties, Welfare (Refah), Virtue

(Fazilet) and Felicity (Saadet) (Mardin 1991: 134; see also Yavuz 2003a: 11 and Silverstein

2008a: 145 f.n. 20). On the other hand, membership in Sufi orders remains officially illegal in

Turkey, resulting in an organizational ambiguity that anthropologist Brian Silverstein has aptly

dubbed “public secrecy (Silverstein 2008: 124).”

Keeping in mind this ambivalence surrounding Sufism in contemporary Turkey, I will

now turn to the invocation, interpretation and idealization of the figure of Mevlana among

Turkey’s Gülen Community and the Journalists and Writers Foundation in particular. As I hope

to show, the interpretive uptake of Mevlana offers a fascinating instance of the reconciliation of

tradition and norms of publicness, especially in light of the perduring ambivalence over Sufism

in Turkey. I should note that my ethnographic material in this section derives from

conversations conducted at the Journalists and Writers Foundation and, especially, from texts

relating to Mevlana that I personally translated from Turkish to English, often for a nominal fee.

In general, the Journalists and Writers Foundation’s interpretation of Mevlana champions his life

and writings as a harbinger for contemporary religious, political and cultural tolerance based

upon personal religious devotion. Although this reading of Mevlana does not disregard historical

context—indeed, much is made of his success in promoting tolerance in a time and place of

extreme tribulation (see Bilkam 2007)—he is primarily elevated as a universal examplar of pious

good will that has specific applicability to the contemporary context.90 Consider, for example,

1997: 77, which discusses the persistence of mawlid (Turkish mevlüt) celebrations at Mevlana’s
tomb in spite of the Turkish state’s ban on tekkes (Sufi lodges).
90
Throughout my research with the Journalists and Writers Foundation, I was daily reminded of
Mevlana’s universalism through the invocation of one of his most famous aphorisms, a sort of
shorthand mantra for the Gülen Community broadly: “Whoever you are, come! (Kim olursan ol,
yine gel!)”
the following passage, from an essay by the vice chairman of the Journalists and Writers

Foundation, my informant Cemal Uşak (in my translation):

One of Rumi’s famous sayings reads as follows: “One arm of my compass rests
faithfully upon the Shari’a. The other arm travels among all seventy-two nations
of the earth.” It is crucial to understand the meaning of this philosophical
metaphor fully and clearly. The right arm of the compass supports constancy and
identity, while the compass’s left arm encourages acceptance and tolerance of the
existence of the ‘Other’ and self-improvement on the basis of this fact…
Acceptance and respect toward the place of the ‘Other’ in no way implies
abandonment of one’s own position or identity. On the contrary, an individual is
only able to travel confidently and easily among the ‘seventy-two nations’ of the
world on the basis of the constancy and firmness of the ‘right arm of the
compass’. We now live in a ‘global village’, where borders have disappeared,
distances are traversed almost instantaneously, cultures are easily exposed to one
another through the organs of mass media, and, above all, differences among
people have become the causes (or excuses) of wars and conflicts aimed at
hegemony. In such a world, we need to understand and to practice Rumi's
philosophy more than ever before (Uşak 2007a: 5-6).91

It is tempting, perhaps, to read this interpretation of Rumi as a ‘secularization’, a rendering of an

historically distant personage who codified an abstruse mystical doctrine into the worldly,

psychological language of Selves and Others. Cemal Bey’s definition of Shari’a is particularly

provocative; in this context, Islamic law becomes a mere figure of ‘constancy’ and ‘firmness’.

And, indeed, the aspiration to interreligious and intercultural dialogue that forms and informs the

bulk of the Journalists and Writers Foundation’s activities (see also Chapter Five) has an

91
Mevlana’nın ünlü bir sözü şöyledir: “Hem çü pergarim, der pa der Şeriat üstüvar;
Pay-i diger seyr heftadü dü millet mikonend” (Benim pergelimin bir ayağı Şeriat üstündedir.
Diğer ayağım ise yetmiş iki millet üzerinde seyran etmektedir.) Bu felsefe gerçekten çok iyi
anlaşılmalıdır. Pergelin sağ ayağı; sabiteyi ve kimliği, diğer ayak ise “öteki”nin varlığını kabul
etmeyi, hazmetmeyi ve “öteki” üzerinden kendini geliştirmeyi ifade eder.... “Öteki”ni kabul ve
konumuna saygı, kişinin kendi duruşunu ve kimliğini terk etmesi değildir. Tam tersine, pergelin
sağ ayağı, yere ne kadar sağlam basıyorsa, kişi “yitmiş iki millet” üzerinde o kadar emin ve
rahat dolaşabilme imkânına sahip olabilir. Sınırların kalktığı, mesafelerin adeta bir “tık”
hızına düştüğü, inançların ve kültürlerin dev medya araçlarıyla birbirine kolaylıkla ulaşabildiği
ve hele hele, kimi mihrakların farklılıkları, hegemonyaları için savaş ve ihtilaf sebeplerine (veya
bahanelerine) dönüştürdüğü “küresel köyümüz” de, Mevlana’nın felsefesini anlamaya her
zamandan ziyade ihtiyacımız var.
explicitly worldly aim: the prevention of war, violence and other conflicts on the basis of

overcoming those ‘misunderstandings’ rooted in particularity that lead to acrimony.92

Nevertheless, my prolonged ethnography with the Journalists and Writers Foundation and among

the Gülen Community generally cautions against such a reading of interpretation as mere

‘secularization’. Another article by Cemal Uşak, which focuses on the Prophet Abraham as a

symbol of and inspiration for cooperation and understanding among Judaism, Christianity and

Islam, offers a vivid example of the hermeneutic logic that applies equally to Mevlana. Often,

Cemal Bey’s descriptions of Abraham echo his praise of Mevlana above: “The Prophet

Abraham, predecessor of all of the prophets, is indeed a crucial point of unity among members of

the three monotheistic religions. When properly understood, he is also a symbol of the hope for

the efforts of dialogue in the future (2007b: 2-3.)”93 This valorization of Abraham as a beacon of

interreligious tolerance and dialogue is immediately bolstered, however, with several hadiths and

Qur’anic passages in order to demonstrate the unique relationship between Abraham and

Muhammad, and the concomitant importance of Abraham to Muslims in particular. For

example:

Oh God! Just as You showed mercy to the Prophet Abraham and his family,
grant well-being to the Prophet Muhammad and his family, and bestow upon
them Your compassion. Oh God! Just as you blessed Abraham and his family
with Your beneficence, so too bless Muhammad and his family with Your
beneficence (Riyaz’us-Salihin, Hadith Number 1403) (Ibid.: 3).94
92
Regardless of their specific subject matter, nearly all of the articles published by the Journalists
and Writers Foundation that I read (and occasionally translated) ended with a formulaic call to
mutual understanding and support for peace and the cessation of violence based upon this mutual
understanding. This theme of tolerance is echoed in the titles of many of Fethullah Gülen’s own
works, for example Toward a Global Civilization of Love and Tolerance (2004) and İnsanın
Özündeki Sevgi (The Love at the Heart of Humankind) (2003).
93
Gerçekten Peygamberler atası Hz. İbrahim, üç semavi din mensupları arasında önemli bir
bağ ve eğer layıkıyla değerlendirilebilirse diyalog çalışmalarında geleceğe ait ümitlerin
sembolüdür.
94
“Ya Rabbi İbrahim’e ve ailesine merhamet ettiğin gibi, Muhammed’e ve ailesine de esenlik
ver, rahmet eyle! Ya Rabbi! İbrahim’e ve ailesine bereket ihsan eylediğin gibi, Muhammed’e ve
 The hermeneutical principle at work in the uptake and evaluation of both Mevlana and

Abraham in the passages above is, I would argue, simultaneously pious and liberal/secular.

Indeed, the relationship between ‘tradition’ and ‘interpretation’ characteristic of the Journalist

and Writers Foundation and the Gülen community militates strongly against the abstract

opposition between the religious and the secular. Against the polemical trope of ‘secularization’,

then, I propose an understanding of the characteristic hermeneutics of the Gülen Community—

exemplified by Fethullah Gülen’s prolific oeuvre itself—as a liberal, public rereading of tradition

for both pious and worldly ends. (And it is all too frequently forgotten that worldly ends can be

pious, too.) This hermeneutics of tradition is ‘liberal’ in both a theological and a political sense:

It draws liberally from a broad, encompassing understanding of Islamic and Abrahamic

traditions, and it promotes a liberal, tolerant piety as its primary end. Indeed, this is one instance

in which the category of pious liberalism, in addition to that of liberal piety, is apposite.

Crucially, the end of pious liberal tolerance on an individual level is itself a means to peace and

the cessation of violence on a collective, even global scale.

One of the principal, indeed definitive aspects of the hermeneutics of tradition practiced

by the Gülen Community is its commitment to both modernity and contemporaneity—a point

that members of the Journalists and Writers Foundation did not hesitate to emphasize in my

presence. Yet another article that I translated for the Foundation had the provocative title

“Rumi’s Message to Modern Humankind” (Mevlana’nın Çağdaş İnsana Mesajı, Özdemir 2007);

more generally, as I have already emphasized, the writers and thinkers associated with the Gülen

Community are spurred to interpretation of tradition by the desire to address and alleviate

contemporary conflicts. This commitment to modernity and contemporaneity on the part of the

ailesine de bereket ihsan eyle!” (Riyaz’us- Salihin, Hadis No: 1403)

Gülen community demands attention because a conception of modernity is fundamental to their

identity as a ‘community’ (cemaat) as such. Ali Bulaç, a prominent writer, intellectual and op-ed

writer for the daily newspaper Zaman, who is associated with the Journalists and Writers

Foundation (see Meeker 1991: 197-205; also Yavuz 2003a: 117-120; Çınar 2003: 11; and

Özyürek 2006: 70), expresses this point succinctly and eloquently:

One of the most common errors of Turkish intellectuals is to confuse communities

(cemaatler), which rely upon the preferences of individual free will and
voluntarism and express themselves through civil initiatives, with classical social
structures such as tribes and clans, which depend on ties of blood and
family95….However, this fictional image (of a community) bears absolutely no
relation to the true reality of communities. The communities of a modern Muslim
city depend upon voluntarism and free individual choice, operate through
initiatives in the civil sphere and pursue their existence through free will. Within
such communities, the strict and imperious hierarchy that is often witnessed in
traditional society does not exist (Bulaç 2007: 15, my translation, my emphasis).96

Bulaç makes a strong argument for the relationship between modernity and the Gülen

Community in this passage. Not only does the Gülen Community orient itself to contemporary

ends, but, qua community (cemaat), it is necessarily a modern social entity (this argument

constitutes the overarching thesis of Bulaç’s book as a whole).97 It is crucial to read this passage

in its polemical context. Bulaç’s argument for the modernity of the category of ‘community’ in

95
There is a striking similarity between Bulaç’s discussion here and Michael Meeker’s (1991:
194-196) analysis of the negotiation between Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft that characterizes
Turkey’s “New Muslim Intellectuals.” Not coincidentally, Bulaç is one of the three thinkers
whom Meeker focuses on specifically in his article.
96
Kişilerin serbest iradi tercihlerine dayanan, gönüllü çalışan ve sivil inisiyatif kullanan
cemaatleri, kan ve akrabalık bağına dayanan klasik kabile veya aşiret yapılarıyla aynı şey
sanmak, Türk aydınlarının süregelen önemli yanılgılarından biridir…Oysa, bu kurgusal imajın
cemaat gerçeğiyle uzaktan yakından ilgisi yok. Modern Müslüman kentin cemaatleri iradidir,
kişi tercihlerine dayanırlar, sivil alanda inisiyatif kullanırlar ve gönüllü olarak varlıklarını
sürdürürler. Aralarında, geleneksel toplumda gözlenen katı ve emredici hiyerarşi mevcut
değildir.
97
Sociological studies of the Gülen community as a ‘transnational network’, such as those by
Berna Turam (2007) and Joshua Hendrick (2007, 2008) seem to confirm this claim to the Gülen
community’s structural and social modernity (or post-modernity).
general, and, hence, the necessary modernity of the Gülen community in particular, is aimed

against those laicist “Turkish intellectuals” who would (and often do) identify the Gülen

Community as a ‘traditional’ Sufi brotherhood or sect (tarikat).98 In as much as Sufi

brotherhoods remain illegal in Turkey, the Gülen Community could not achieve public existence

as a panoply of civil society organizations if it were a brotherhood. For this reason, Bulaç’s

concern for the analytical uniqueness of the category of ‘community’ is not merely academic; the

category of ‘community,’ in contrast to the categories of ‘tribe’ (kabile, aşiret) and Sufi

brotherhood (tarikat) is a means to establishing the very modern and contemporary political

legitimacy of Fethullah Gülen and his followers within the Turkish context. Moreover, it is only

as a legitimate, modern social formation that the Gülen community can establish the interpretive

relationship to the past of tradition that I have described throughout this section. To return to the

specific interpretation of Mevlana that the Journalist and Writers Foundation elaborates, we

might say that members of the Gülen Community invoke Mevlana as a model or example

(örnek) of piety, but by no means do they follow him as a sheik (şeyh). The former partakes of a

legitimate hermeneutics of Islamic tradition; the latter would be an invitation to state intervention

and suppression.

98
Indeed, the article published in a Weekly (Haftalık) about my research, which I discuss at
length in Chapter Four, was titled “This American’s Thesis Topic is Islamic Sects” (“Bu
Amerikalı’nın tez konusu İslami Tarikatlar”) (Harmancı 2006). My insistence that my focus
was on civil society organizations and communities (cemaatler), not sects (tarikatlar) did not,
apparently, persuade the editor. I might also note that this misconception of the Gülen
Community is not limited to the Turkish secularist press. At an academic conference in
September 2009, titled “Islamic Resurgence in the Age of Globalization: Myth, Memory,
Emotion” and held at a university in the Norwegian city of Trondheim, a prominent Israeli
historian of Sufism forwarded Fethullah Gülen and his community as one of the most important
contemporary ‘Sufi’ movements. I interrupted to note that, by his own self-understanding, Gülen
is not Sufi and the community is not a ‘tarikat’ (Arabic tariqa), but again my point fell on deaf
ears.
 A broader consideration of Ali Bulaç’s works underscores the importance of the

‘hermeneutics of example’ to the Gülen Community’s relationship to Islamic tradition on the

whole. In his earlier writings, Bulaç marshals a close reading of the Prophet Muhammad’s life

and deeds to argue that Islam provides a model of and for contemporary interreligious tolerance.

In several well-known articles, Bulaç recuperates and interprets the ‘Medina Document,’ a legal

agreement specifying the rights and obligations shared by Muslims and the other communities of

Medina, such as Medina’s Jews, written following the hijra (Turkish hicret), or exodus of the

Muslim community from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE. In Bulaç’s own words, the Medina

Document “opens the door to real pluralism (by) the fact that individuals and groups can define

their own identities and choose their own religion and legal systems (1998: 178).”99 While I will

return to this particular argument in Chapter Five in order to detail the critique that liberal

Turkish Islam makes of the Turkish state, for the moment, I highlight it as a demonstration of the

liberal ‘hermeneutics of example’ through which the past of ‘tradition’ becomes an ineluctable

means to achieving modernity and contemporaneity.

The hermeneutics of example that I have outlined here is not the only aspect or principle

of the historicity that characterizes the Gülen Community. For instance, Ottoman nostalgia or

neo-Ottomanism, a theme I take up more centrally in Chapters Four and Five, is in vivid

evidence at the Journalists and Writers Foundation. The Foundation’s spacious conference room

emphasizes its taste for an Ottoman aesthetic: The low, plain sofas lining each wall of the

conference room and the miniature tables decorated with mother-of-pearl might have been
99
Bulaç’s argument focuses only on the Pact of Medina itself, written shortly after the hijra of
the Muslims from Mecca to Medina, and ignores the later history of the relationship between the
Medinan Muslims and the three Jewish tribes of Medina, the Banu Qaynuqa, Banu Qurayza and
Banu Nadir. Although each of these three tribes are protected by the Medina Document,
Muhammad later moved against them for a variety of political reasons; first the Banu Qaynuqa
and then the Banu Nadir were expelled, and finally the men of Banu Qurayza were eventually
slaughtered while the women and children were enslaved. See Stillman 1979: 3-21.
replicas of the furnishings still on display for tour groups in Istanbul’s Topkapı Palace. More

generally, like many of Turkey’s pious foundations, the Journalist and Writers Foundation

partakes of an ‘aesthetics of absence’ in relation to the chosen iconography of Kemalism and

Turkish laicism.100 Ottoman political and religious history maintains an equal pride of place in

the civil initiatives of the Journalists and Writers Foundation and the Gülen Community in

general. Interreligious dialogue constitutes one of the foundation’s major aspirations and

activities; within Turkey specifically, the Journalists and Writers Foundaion seeks out

interlocutors from those minority religious communities (dini azınlıklar)—Jews, Armenian

Orthodox Christians and Greek Orthodox Christians—that were recognized as distinct,

independent denominations (milletler) during the Ottoman era.101 While much of Chapter Five is

devoted to an in depth discussion of the politics of confessional pluralism practiced by a variety

of different pious foundations, I mention this particular example in this context in order to

underscore the importance of Ottoman historicity to the Journalists and Writers Foundation’s

devotion to interreligious dialogue. In our conversations, Cemal Bey and other prominent

members of the Foundation ceaselessly extolled the Ottoman millet system as the ideal means to

interreligious tolerance (hoşgörü). Considering the Ottoman Empire’s occasionally fraught

relations with Christian and Jewish communities—the frequent obligatory enlistment of

100
Chapter Four includes a much more detailed analysis of the Neo-Ottoman aesthetics of place
and space among Turkey’s Sunni foundations, as well as the aesthetics of absence noted here. In
this context, I merely flag Neo-Ottomanism as a principle of both aesthetics and historicity for
the Journalists and Writers Foundation.
101
The Treaty of Lausanne, which put an end to the Turkish War of Independence (Kurtuluş
Savaşı) in July 1924, granted specific minority rights to these same religious communities, as
well as to the Muslim minority community of Greece (see Mango 2002). One partial,
unintended consequence of this foundational recognition of official minorities—often known as
‘Lausanne minorities’ or Lozan Azınlıkları in Turkish—has been the incesant refusal on the part
of the to grant minority status to other ethnic, linguistic and religious groups in Turkey, notably
the Kurds and Alevis (though the same is true for the Laz of the northeastern Black Sea Coast
and various smaller religious groups, such as the Yezidi, most of whom live in the Kurdish
southeast). For a detailed discussion in Turkish see Oran, 2004.
Christian youths to the Janissary corps comes to mind—this idealization of Ottoman tolerance is

also a keen instance of progressive, restorative nostalgia (Boym 2001: xviii).

More mundanely, but equally important, as devout Sunni Muslims, the members of the

Journalists and Writers Foundaion and the Gülen Community practice and inhabit the quotidian

modes of piety that define Islam across its many geographical and historical contexts. During

our regular meetings, Cemal Bey would often beg my lenience in order to perform his prayers

within their allotted time frames. On Fridays, he graciously welcomed me to observe the

collective mid-day prayer in the Foundation’s conference room; after a brief sermon that

typically linked theological and contemporary sociocultural concerns, Cemal Bey led all of the

male members of the Foundation in prayer. As urban elites and cosmopolitans (again, a point I

dwell on further in the following chapter), most members of the Foundation had found the

opportunity to fulfill the obligation of pilgrimage to Mecca, often multiple times. They all

reliably fasted during day throughout the month of Ramadan. However—and this is one of my

central points—regardless of their ‘traditional’ precedents and legitimacy, none of these

quotidian practices qualifies as a public historicity for the Gülen Community. While my

informants would unanimously agree that one cannot be a Muslim without fulfilling these

obligations and participating in this quotidian mode of piety, it is equally true that quotidian

practice is insufficient to liberal piety as public religion in contemporary Turkey. In other words,

the hermeneutics of example and Ottoman nostalgia that I have described are ineluctable means

to achieving publicness for the Gülen Community. They articulate a coherent, pious historicity

within which the past of tradition speaks directly to a liberal religious dispensation in the present.

It is in this sense, above all, that certain modes of historicity are able to act as public argument.
As we will see in the next section, the Nur Community is able to forward a comparable public

argument for the legitimacy of its own practices by constructing a similar relationship between

‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ on the basis of içtihad, the classical discipline of authoritative

interpretation of Islamic Law in relation to the precedents of the Qur’an and the Sunna.

Içtihad, a Means to the Wonder of This Age: The Novelty of Bediüzzaman Said Nursi and the
Nur Community

Sacred laws change according to the ages. Indeed, in one age different prophets
may come, and they have come. Since subsequent to the Seal of the Prophets, his
Greater Shari’a is sufficient for all peoples in every age, no need has remained for
different laws. However, in secondary matters, the need for different schools has
persisted to a degree. Just as clothes change with the change of the seasons and
medicines change according to dispositions, so sacred laws change according to
the ages, and their ordinances change according to the capacities of peoples.
Because the secondary matters of the ordinances of Shari’a look to human
circumstances; they come according to them, and are like medicine.—
Bediuzzaman Said Nursi, “The Twenty-Seventh Word” (2004: 500).

İbrahim Hoca, a wizened scholar of theology and Islamic jurisprudence and primary

coordinator of the weekly Risale-i Nur class at the Istanbul Science and Culture Foundation

(İstanbul İlim ve Kültür Vakfı) blushed animatedly as his voice rose in volume and pitch. “The

Gate of İçtihad cannot be closed. Üstad102 is clear on this point. If the Gate of İçtihad were

closed, Islam would not be able to adapt to each age and time. But the Risale-i Nur, Üstad’s own

labor of içtihad, proves that this is not so.”103 The seven or eight middle-aged men—several

professors, two engineers, a lawyer, a fabric merchant, and a urologist—sitting in the spare

102
Rather than use his name, members of the Nur Community prefer to refer to Said Nursi with
the simple honorific “Üstad”, or “Master”. This preference for an honorific over a proper name
is also evident in the Gülen Community, where Fethullah Gülen himself is more commonly
referred to as Hocaefendi, or “Esteemed Teacher”.
103
İçtihad Kapısı kapanmaz, Üstad şunu açıkça söylüyor. İçtihad kapısı kapansaydı, İslam
bütün çağlara ve zamanlara uyarlayamazdı. Ancak Üstad’ın kendi içtihad işi olan Risale-i Nur
İçtihad Kapısı’nın kapanmaz olmasını gösteriyor.
conference salon of the Istanbul Science and Culture Foundation followed Ibrahim Hoca’s

explanation with rapt attention. We were in the midst of a month-long discussion of the “Twenty

Seventh Word” (Yirmi Yedinci Sözü) of Said Nursi’s Sözler (Words) a prolonged interpretation

of the Qur’anic Divine Names that constitutes the bulk of the Risale-i Nur (Epistles of Light). As

many of the class members repeatedly emphasized to me, the Twenty Seventh Word is generally

considered to be one of the most abstruse sections of the Risale-i Nur, only intended for

advanced students of Nursi’s theology and philosophy.104 Among other delicate dilemmas, the

Twenty Seventh Word directly addresses the question of the “Gate of Içtihad” and whether or

not its aperture remains open to contemporary Muslims.

Içtihad, authoritative interpretation of Islamic Law or Shari’a based upon the precedents

the Qur’an and the hadith traditions, is one of the preeminent objects of debate within the

discursive tradition of Islam as a whole. Wael Hallaq, a preeminent present-day scholar of

Sunni jurisprudence, provides a useful summary of içtihad in his prolonged meditation over

whether the ‘Gate of Interpretation’ is, or can possibly be, closed:

As conceived by classical Muslim jurists, ijtihad is the exertion of mental energy

in the search for a legal opinion to the extent that the faculties of the jurist become
incapable of further effort. In other words, ijtihad is the maximum effort
expended by the jurist to master and apply the principles and rules of usul al-fiqh
(legal theory) for the purpose of discovering God’s law (1984: 3).105

Hallaq’s definition has the virtue of underscoring the fact that içtihad is at its basis a means to

the end of the contextual establishment of Shari’a, rather than an end in itself. As a

jurisprudential means, içtihad only exists in dialogic relationship with the other principles that

104
Indeed, following one particularly frustrating class on the Twenty Seventh Word, the
Foundation attendant and doorman, Alparslan—who became a close friend and valuable resource
over the course of my research with the Istanbul Science and Culture Foundation—
recommended that I try another, less heady Risale-i Nur class in which the participants were not,
in his words, ‘major philosophers’ (büyük filozoflar).
105
Like Said Nursi, Hallaq himself ultimately concludes that the Gate of Ijtihad has not been
closed, and, more strongly, that it cannot be closed. See also Hallaq 1986 and Islahi 1999.
constitute the ‘roots’ of Islamic Law (fiqh, Turkish fıkıh): the Qur’an, the Sunna (authoritative

traditions of the Prophet Muhammad based upon his sayings, and actions or ahadith; Turkish

Sünnet), and consensus among legal scholars and jurists (Arabic ijma; Turkish icma) (Rahman

1979: 68). As an interpretative legal method, içtihad relies upon the principle of analogy (Arabic

qiyas; Turkish kıyas), through which an established legal precedent is applied to an

unprecedented case or context (Hallaq 1984: 4). As one of the roots of law, içtihad and its

constitutive method of analogy provide for a supple, encompassing and open-ended

jurisprudential framework that can be applied to any sociohistorical context of Islam. Due to this

potential flexibility and openness, the practice of içtihad has historically existed in tension—and

occasionally in outright confrontation—with the contrasting jurisprudential principle of rote

imitation, or taqlid (Turkish taklit) (Ibid.: 12).106

Historically, içtihad was a uniquely jurisprudential practice, only capable of being

deployed by legal scholars or ulema (Arabic ulama). Indeed, the practice of içtihad was

partially responsible for the development of the Four Schools, or Madhab (Turkish Mezhep) of

Sunni Law (Hanafi, Hanbali, Maliki and Shafii) in the second and third centuries of Islam;

simultaneously, contrasting perspectives on the legitimacy of içtihad partially defined

differences among the Schools. Partially on the basis of advent of modernist Islam, primarily

associated with the works of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Hassan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb and others,

however, the practices, presuppositions and possibilities of içtihad changed substantially. Most

generally, contemporary scholars and theologians who maintain that the Gate of Içtihad remains

open tend not to limit its application solely to the ulema; rather, içtihad is a viable interpretive

106
A practitioner of ijtihad is known as a mujtahid; a practitioner of taqlid is known as a
muqallid (Turkish müçtehit and mukallit respectively)
method for any Muslim provided he or she possesses the scriptural and jurisprudential

knowledge necessary to practicing içtihad.107

My primary argument in this section is that Said Nursi’s conception of içtihad should be

understood within this modernist reevaluation of legitimate Islamic interpretation itself. As I

hope to demonstrate, for Nursi, the very historicity of Islamic modernity both demands and

depends upon içtihad. In order to comprehend the relationship between içtihad and Said Nursi’s

project of devout modernity, I invoke Talal Asad’s concept of ‘discursive tradition’:

A (discursive) tradition consists essentially of discourses that seek to instruct

practitioners regarding the correct form and purpose of a given practice that,
precisely because it is established, has a history. These discourses relate
conceptually to a past (when the practice was instituted, and from which the
knowledge of its point and proper performance has been transmitted) and a future
(how the point of that practice can best be secured in the short or long term, or
why it should be modified or abandoned), through a present (how it is linked to
other practices, institutions, and social conditions) (1986: 14).

Asad’s definition of a discursive tradition has the virtue of underscoring the micropolitics of

historicity that defines any tradition in its specificity. To exist as a tradition, discursive practices

must construct an explicit relationship among the three moments of past, present and future; the

pragmatic micropolitics of establishing this relationship determines which pasts, presents and

futures achieve inclusion within or exclusion from the tradition. For Said Nursi and the Nur

107
Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the contemporary Egyptian-Qatari scholar who makes an ethnographic
appearance in Chapter Four, provides a vivid example of this in his seminal work Islamic
Awakening between Rejection and Extremism:
It would be enough for a Muslim to support his conviction with evidence from
one of the Islamic madhahib, or with a reliable ijtihad, based on sound evidence
from the Qur’an or al Sunnah. Therefore, should a person, who adopts a law
derived by one of the four great jurists of Islam—Shafii, Abu Hanifah, Malik, and
Ahmad ibn Hanbal—and commits himself to it, be described as an extremist
because he differs from that which various scholars—especially the contemporary
—expound? Do we have any right to suppress another person’s choice of ijtihad,
especially if it relates only to his personal life and behavior? (1991: 8).
Community, içtihad is a key means of articulating both the continuity and distinction of modern

Islam, and, thereby, securing the very future of Islam and the ummah as a whole.

Like other Muslim modernists, Nursi asserts unambiguously that the Gate of İçtihad is

open to any qualified Muslim: “Everyone capable who is qualified to practice içtihad, may

interpret matters for himself which are not incontestable; and they are binding on himself, but not

on others (2004: 738).” Equally important is the pride of place that Nursi gives içtihad within

his practical theology: For Nursi, içtihad constitutes Islam’s privileged means of adaptation to

the contemporary era. As he asserts in the long quotation cited at the opening of this section,

“sacred laws change according to the ages (Ibid: 500),” and, indeed, must do so in order for

Islam to maintain its currency. This does not imply that Nursi advocates a theologically ‘liberal’

reading of Shari’a based upon içtihad —he is unambiguous in stating that the fundamentals of

Shari’a are universal, unchangeable, and applicable to all times and places. Furthermore, içtihad

is only available to those Muslims who have mastered the necessary jurisprudential and

theological corpus that supports the principle of analogy (Ibid: 495 ff.). Nonetheless, içtihad

provides a key means to the transformation and adaptation of ‘secondary matters’ over time;

concomitantly, içtihad defines the historical specificity of different ages of Islam, modern Islam

among them. Nursi’s advocacy of içtihad as the legitimate, adaptive principle of Islamic

historicity is both exemplified and expanded upon in the practices of Turkey’s contemporary Nur

Community.

Although the hour at which the Istanbul Science and Culture Foundation Risale-i Nur

class typically ended had passed, the conversation evinced no sign of losing steam. Now, several

years after the completion of my field research, I remember this particular class with unique

vividness—it was easily the most animated of the many evenings I spent at the Foundation.
Following Ibrahim Hoca’s exposition of the concept of içtihad in the Risale-i Nur, Ferhat Bey, a

professor of law at Istanbul Technical University, intervened with a question of fundamental

importance: “What, exactly is the importance of the Risale-i Nur as a work of içtihad itself?”108

Faris Bey, the chairman of the Foundation, and one of the other organizers of the class,

responded eagerly, without pause: “The Risale-i Nur is a work of modern theology. It addresses

reason, the mind. As Üstad says, in the past, the way of religion passed through the heart

(gönül). This was the way of Mevlana, of the Nakşibendi, of mysticism, of the brotherhoods.

But in our age, the way of religion passes through the mind (akıl). And this is what makes the

Risale-i Nur unique and appropriate to our era.”109 I encountered this contrast between Islamic

mysticism and the Risale-i Nur frequently during my research with the Nur Community—it was

consistently invoked to explain the modernity of the Risale-i Nur and its unique legitimacy in

comparison to other ‘premodern’ Islamic practices, such as those of Sufism. Although the

metaphors, similes and figurative language of the Risale-i Nur often draw eloquently upon Sufi

themes such as the sema or zikir, Nursi is his adamant in his insistence that mysticism is not a

privileged means to piety. To the contrary, the contemporary age privileges the universal path of

reason (akıl yolu) as a means to pious comprehension. As a reasoned meditation upon the Divine

Names, the Risale-i Nur is thus an exemplary instance of içtihad of and for the contemporary

Sunni community. Indeed, the honorific epithet that members of the Nur Community

consistently use when referring to Nursi himself reflects the essential contemporaneity of his

work. Nursi is “Bediüzzaman”, the ‘Wonder of the Age’: His theological brilliance is

108
Bir içtihad işi olarak Risale-i Nur’un önemi tam nedir hocam?
109
Risale-i Nur modern bir ihlahiyat işi, akıllara hitap eder. Üstad der ki eskiden dinin gerçek
yolu gönülden geçti. İşte Mevlana’nın, Nakşiler’in, tasavvufun, tarikatların yolu budur. Ancak
bizim cağımızda dinin gerçek yolu aklından geçer ki Risale-i Nur bu cağa musaittir.
inseparable from his articulation of a contemporary, modern horizon of and for Sunni Islam

within Republican Turkey (Mardin 1989).

Interest in and reassertion of içtihad in contemporary Turkey is by no means limited to

the Nur Community.110 I frequently discussed the topic with friends and informants from the

Gülen Community as well—unsurprising, perhaps, considering the fact that Fethullah Gülen’s

ethical and spiritual project is an expansion upon Nursi’s own revivification of personalized

faith. Many of Gülen’s enthusiasts and followers insist that, like Nursi, Gülen is a contemporary

mujtahid whose work relies upon içtihad in order to articulate the direct relevance of Islam to

contemporary dilemmas.111 Unlike Said Nursi and the Nur Community, however, the Gülen

Community does not elaborate a coherent theory of içtihad grounded in the relationship between

the precedents of Sunni discursive tradition and the faculties of human knowledge. Therefore, I

have focused specifically on the concept and practice of içtihad within Turkey’s Nur

110
Nor, for that matter, is contemporary attention to the topic of ijtihad limited to Turkey. To the
best of my knowledge, Yusuf al-Qaradawi (1991) offers the most thorough analysis and
reinterpretation of ijtihad by a current Sunni thinker; strikingly, his own conclusions resemble
those of Nursi closely in most respects (see also Chapter Three, footnote 30 above). Among
social scientists of Islam, Mahmood Mamdani has elevated ijtihad to the very principle of
adaptation that defines majoritarian, non-extemist Islam in the contemporary world. As he
writes,
the attitude toward ijtihad is the single most important issue that divides society-
centered from state-centered—and progressive from reactionary—Islamists.
Whereas society-centered Islamists insist that the practice of ijtihad be central to
modern Islamic society, state-centered Islamists are determined that the “gates of
ijtihad” remain forever closed…my argument is that the theoretical roots of
Islamist political terror lie in the state-centered, not the society-centered,
movement (2005: 60-61).
Needless to say, this simplistic identification of ijtihad with all that is piously progressive and its
denial with all that is politically reactionary demands contextualization; nor does it aid in my
own ethnographic interest in içtihad among the Nur Community (even if the Nur Community
does, in some sense, fit Mamdani’s category of society-centered Islamic movements).
111
Yılmaz 2003, for instance, argues that Gülen’s mission is defined most precisely as a
modernist application of içtihad.
Community, both because içtihad was an ethnographically unavoidable object of speculation and

debate, and because both the writings of Said Nursi and the members of the Nur Community

articulate a systematic theory of içtihad as a hermeneutical means to contemporary piety.

Briefly, this Nursian understanding of içtihad advocates qualified interpretation of the Qur’an,

Sunna, and fiqh in order to offer Islam to the human faculties of the mind and reason (akıl),

which have achieved predominance in the epistemological hierarchy of modernity (in contrast to

the lapsed importance of the ‘heart’, or gönül). On the basis of this understanding, the Risale-i

Nur stands as the definitive instance of modern içtihad;112 furthermore, the Nur Community as a

whole, through the institution of the weekly Risale-i Nur class, benefits from a sort of derivative

içtihad that is necessarily mediated by the Risale-i Nur itself.113

Like the hermeneutics of example practiced by the Journalists and Writers Foundation

and the Gülen Community, the practice of içtihad is a crucial means to reconciling the

potentially competing imperatives of publicness and pious historicity. Indeed, there is a notable

correspondence between the rejection of Sufi brotherhoods on the part of the Gülen Community

112
Interestingly, Şerif Mardin, one of the first Turkish social scientists to take Said Nursi and the
Nur Community as a serious object of study, makes a somewhat parallel claim for sociological
and historical importance of the Risale-i Nur, if on a somewhat narrower scale. Broadly, the
argument of his seminal Religion and Social Change in Modern Turkey: The Case of
Bediüzzaman Said Nursi (1989) is that the Risale-i Nur and the Nur Community provide an
interpretive bridge between the Ottoman Empire, within which Sunni practice maintained a
quotidian universality in Turkey, and the Kemalist Republic, within which Islam has lost its
esteem and public legitimacy. Under this argument, the peculiar potency of Nursi’s içtihad
consisted in his ability to bridge the sociological gap between the Ottoman and Republican eras.
113
To be fair, this is a controversial claim—probably the most controversial in this section—and
one that I never achieved sufficient ethnographic closure concerning. As I have emphasized,
almost all members of the Nursi Community were comfortable asserting Nursi’s own status as a
mujtahid and the indubitable quality of the Risale-i Nur as a work of içtihad. On the other hand,
many of my interlocutors would hesitate to attribute the capacity to perform içtihad to
themselves; rather, they preferred to emphasize their ‘reliance’ on Said Nursi’s içtihad (Üstad’ın
içtihadına dayanıyoruz). It is probably more accurate to say that the recitation and
comprehension of the Risale-i Nur eliminates the need for individual içtihad on the part of the
members of the Nur Community.
and the insistence on the relationship between reason and contemporaneity as the basis for

içtihad among the Nur Community. For Gülen institutions such as the Journalists and Writers

Foundation, the modernity of the ‘community’ implies a rejection of the sociality of mystical

brotherhoods; similarly, for the Nur Community, the contemporary suzerainty of the faculties of

the mind and reason (akıl, mantık), as opposed to the heart (gönül), within the spiritual

anthropology of humankind generally demands the precedence içtihad over the ‘mystical path’

(tasavvuf yolu). Although içtihad participates more directly than the hermeneutics of example

in the established discursive tradition(s) of Sunni Islam, its contemporary importance for the Nur

Community also rests upon its commensurability with the demands of publicness. Reason and

science, as well as piety, are both the means and ends of içtihad, and, metaphorically, provide a

public face for the institutions of the Nur Community. During my first ethnographic foray in

Istanbul, I was surprised and somewhat confused to find myself standing before a drab, prefab

office building adorned with a simple, unornamented sign: “The Istanbul Science and Culture

Foundation”.114 I had come looking for renascent spirituality; I had found “Science115 and

Culture”. Only after several years of research did I realize the double significance of this name.

On a rather obvious level, Nursi invokes and champions ‘science’ (ilim) throughout the Risale-i

Nur. More importantly, however, ‘science’ is a publicly legitimate aim and end of piety in

contemporary Turkey. As a practice of and means to ‘science’, then, içtihad is potent principle

for achieving commensuration between the historicity of Sunni discursive traditions and the

limits upon the pronounceable and thinkable that constitute Turkish publicness.

114
As I discuss in detail in Chapter Four, the Istanbul Science and Culture Foundation changed
location during my fieldwork, leaving their drab office suite behind for a restored, Ottoman-era
medrese.
115
The Istanbul Science and Culture Foundation favors the term Qur’anic ilim for science, rather
than the more common Turkish bilim.
 And yet this labor of commensuration is never entirely complete. Both the Nur

Community and the Gülen Community remain plagued by public, often mass-mediated

suspicions that they are ‘Sharia-ists’ (Şeriatçılar) intent on overthrowing the Kemalist state.116

More mundanely, neither the hermeneutics of example nor modernist içtihad can account for the

fundamental denigration of the Ottoman and Islamic past that still defines the statist, modernist

historicity of Turkey. Even as the Nur Community and the Gülen Community strive to render

pasts of tradition compatible with present publicness, moments of frustration, critique and

idealized nostalgia mark the limits and pitfalls of this project of commensuration. As we will see

in the next section, Turkey’s Alevi Community faces a similar but distinct dilemma, one that

centers on the problematic authenticity of a ‘traditional’ practice, the cem ceremony. In the case

of the cem, liberal piety struggles to reconcile the contemporary, public uptake of a ‘traditional’

practice with the suspicions of inauthenticity that ceaselessly threaten to taint the historicity of

modernity.

A Curious Cem: Labors of Commensuration and the ‘As If’ of Tradition

The basement of the Hacı Bektaş Veli Anatolian Culture Foundation (Hacı Bektaş Veli

Anadolu Kültür Vakfı) was already overflowing with celebrants as my friend Sadegül conducted

me through the sprawling doors and attempted to find a place for two in the VIP section of the

massive wedding salon, a slightly raised, semi-rectangular platform ringing the periphery of the

116
By far the most prominent example of this conspiratorial mentality and public suspicion is the
recently publicized “Plan to Eradicate the Justice and Development Party and Gülen” (AKP ve
Gülen’i Bitirme Plan), an anonymous outline of a potential anti-government coup that emerged
from within military circles in the summer of 2009 (Taraf Gazetesi 2009). See also Chapter One,
footnote twenty-seven.
room, at the same level as the front stage. Our passage was impeded by a plethora of faces and

bodies: wizened men with Rasputin beards, chic young women proudly comparing their knock-

off brand name spectacles, hefty ‘Auntie Ayşes’117 wrapped in immense swaths of billowing

scarves, and preadolescent boys arguing over the latest football scores and recent performances

of stars (a critical Fenerbahçe match was, unfortunately, taking place at the same time as the

ceremony). On the stage, a group of elderly men, the dedes (dedeler), sat in a semicircle,

stoically engaged in lackadaisical conversations. A somewhat younger man in casual dress sat

cross-legged on a large cushion at the position of prominence at the apex of the semicircle; to his

right and left, two young musicians, known as aşıklar or ozanlar, waited calmly for the

ceremony to begin. Near the front edge of the stage, two young men and two young women in

their late teens and early twenties, each dressed nondescriptly, were engaged in a heated

discussion with a large, older man, who was marked by an unkempt red bandana and the large

staff he gripped in his hands. Luckily, Sadegül and I succeeded in finding two empty seats—

many in the audience were left standing—just as the chief dede, the middle-aged man seated at

the apex of the semicircle on the stage, began to explain the night’s coming events.

I had come to Ankara two days earlier, specifically in order to participate in the Aşure

(Ashura) festivities organized by the Hacı Bektaş Foundation. Although Aşure itself fell on the

sixteenth of February in 2007, the celebrations did not occur until two days later, on the

eighteenth. The feast of Aşure is the one of most important religious holidays for Turkey’s Alevi

Community (Alevi Cemaatı, Aleviler), as it is for Shi’a Muslims around the world. Aşure falls

on the tenth day of Muharrem, the first month of the year in the Islamic calendar. While Aşure

117
‘Auntie Ayşe’ (Ayşe Teyze) is a well-known Turkish stereotype for rural women of an
indefinite age, sharp tongue, sturdy build and traditionalist leaning, similar in most respects to
the Slavic stereotype of the ‘Babushka’.
is associated with a number of luminaries from the Islamic and Abrahamic traditions, including

such Hebrew Bible figures as Noah and Moses, it specifically marks the martyrdom of Husayn

ibn Ali (Turkish: Hüseyin), the son of Ali and grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, at the battle

of Kerbala in the year 61 AH/680 CE, at the hands of the Ummayad Caliph Yazid I. While Shi’a

and Sunni Muslims differ on many points of practice and principle—take, for example, their

contrasting attitudes toward Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Muhammad, who is revered as

the fourth rightly-guided Caliph by Sunnis, but exalted to a far greater degree among Shi’a as the

first Imam—the martyrdom of Hüseyin at the battle of Kerbala marks the primary historical and

political cleavage between the two communities, and Aşure is regarded as a day of mourning by

all Shi’a.

The Aşure festivities at the Hacı Bektaş Foundation lasted throughout the day on the 18th

of February. Near noon, the basement wedding salon had hosted a collective Aşure meal,

consisting of the ‘traditional’ (geleneksel) dish of aşure itself, an intensely saccharine pudding

made from cracked wheat, garbanzo beans, almonds and other nuts, dried fruit, cinnamon, and

glucose, often translated as ‘Noah’s Pudding’. Although none of my friends at the Foundation

could attend the aşure meal—indeed, many of them claimed to revile the dish—they insisted that

I descend to the communal kitchen and eat my fill, as I had never had ‘traditional’ aşure—aşure

prepared specifically for the celebration of Muharrem—before. During the meal, several

musicians performed ballads on the saz (a long-necked lute common to Anatolian folk music)

recounting the heroism of Hüseyin at the Battle of Kerbala; following this performance, a

representative from the Foundation congratulated the crowd on the Aşure celebration and

conducted ‘protocol’, a common ritual of official gatherings in Turkey in which the greetings
and wishes of invited guests unable to attend a function are read sequentially, usually to the

dismay of the audience members themselves. The highlight of the day’s program, however, was

certainly the cem ceremony (cem töreni), which occurred in the Foundation’s wedding salon

after the fall of dusk.

As Sadegül and I took our seats, the dede in charge of the cem ceremony began to speak.

Naïvely, I took the dede’s address to mark the beginning of the circumscribed and formalized

ritual of the cem itself, but as I honed my attention to the dede’s remarks, I was quickly

disabused of this assumption. In a rather severe, admonitory tone, the dede introduced the cem

by providing a metadiscursive historical frame for the ritual itself. He began by noting that

contemporary Alevis recognize three different ceremonies as tokens of the ‘cem type. While two

of these ceremonies, the ‘görgü’ and the ‘true cem (gerçek cem) are explicitly figured as

‘traditional’ (geleneksel) rites that punctuate the lives of rural Alevi communities,118 the dede

emphasized that the the third type of cem, the urban cem (kentsel bir cem), is an ‘innovation’

upon tradition (değişiklik, yenilik) that has been necessitated specifically by the realities of

urbanization in Republican Turkey and the concomitant anonymity of urban socialty.119 Here,

one is reminded of Ali Bulaç’s contrast between ‘sects’ (tarikatlar) and ‘communities’

(cemaatler)—like the Gülen Community, Alevis too must negotiate a changed social context in

which the intimacy of earlier forms (rural cems, tarikats) has been replaced with modern, urban

118
For a thorough description of both the görgü and ‘true’ cem ceremonies, as practiced in a rural
village in the province of Sivas, see Shankland 1993: 140-152. For other descriptions of cem
ceremonies, see Birge 1994 [1937], Gökalp 1980, and Stokes 1996.
119
Aykan Erdemir also notes the ambivalence of the urban cem in his wonderful meditation on
the problematic of modernity and tradition for contemporary Alevis: “Once, however, an Alevi
elder warned me not to confuse urban cems with rural cems, and added ‘The contemporary cems
are just folkloric (folklorik) ceremonies’. He meant that the urban cems were nothing more than a
public performance that can never attain the authenticity of the rural practices (2005: 945).”
stranger sociality. According to the dede, the first ‘urban’ cem was conducted in the

Mediterranean city of Antalya in the sixties by a dede who realized the inevitable need to update

the ceremony for an urban Alevi community. The dede went on to emphasize that, in particular,

what one might call the function of solidarity performed by the ‘traditional’ rural cem achieves a

different articulation in the urban context.120 The ‘traditional’, rural cem is, above all, a means to

ensuring good will and resolving disputes within the intimate sociality of a small village

(Shankland 1993, 2003). In order to achieve this regulatory function, the traditional cem requires

that the participants—all of whom are presumably friends, family members, more distant kin and

other acquaintances known to one another—cease to be ‘küs’ prior to the beginning of the

ceremony itself. Küs is a difficult term to translate from Turkish to English in its subtle density

of meaning, but it can be glossed as ‘offended’, ‘angry’ or ‘cross’. The elimination of küslük, the

state of being offended, is a necessary precursor and prerequisite to the traditional cem

(Shankland 1993: 147). As the dede noted, this ritualized cessation of mutual offense presents a

dilemma to the urban Alevi community: How can an end to the state of küslük be projected onto

the anonymous sociality of the metropolis? In other words, what is the nature of offense and its

overcoming in a radically different, disaggregated social world? The innovative, urban cem

attempts to address this dilemma by resorting to counterfactual discourse. As the dede said, “If

this were a true cem ceremony, we would have to make sure that none of us were offended with

one another. But since this is impossible in the city, I am going to assume that we are not

120
Indeed, I was quite stunned by the explicit, neo-Durkheimian metapragmatics of solidarity
that the dede offered in his preamble to the cem.
offended with each other, okay?”121 In broken unison, the five hundred or so people in the hall

voiced their approval, with shouts of ‘Yes!’ (Evet) and the untranslatable ‘Hallahallah!”122

At this point, the ‘actual’—that is to say ritually-sanctioned—portion of the cem began in

earnest, but my thoughts lingered on the dede’s curious introduction to the ceremony. On the

one hand, the dede’s address to the audience was suffused with a melancholy nostalgia for a

traditional mode of sociality and religiosity that is no more. His invocations of a rural Alevi

past, defined by an intimate, village-based Gemeinschaft, were punctuated by both

counterfactual explanations (“If we were at a ‘true cem...) and frequent, performative appeals to a

collective memory (“You all know how it used to be…”/”Geçmişte nasıl olduğunu hepiniz

bilirsiniz”). Simultaneously, however, the dede emphasized the appropriateness of the urban

cem as a legitimate, contemporary iteration of tradition; given inevitable nature of urban life in

Turkey, the dede argued, the cem can only continue to exist in its ‘modern’ form. On the basis of

the preamble to the cem, then, the dede interpellated his audience as both a traditional and

modern subject off ritual practice and religious identity. As I listened to the dede’s explanations,

I heard him articulate, in layperson’s terms, an argument for the very modernity of tradition itself

(see Latour 1993; also Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Herzfeld 2001).123 To be Alevi, the dede

121
Bu gerçek bir cem olsaydı hiç kimsenin küs olmaması gerekirdi. Ancak tabii ki bir şehirde
böyle bir şey olamaz ki siz küs olmazsınız diye varsayıp devam edeceğiz. Tamam mı?
122
As Shankland notes (1993: 144), the yelp of Hallahallah is a crucial illocutionary speech act
on the part of the ‘audience’ of a cem, to indicate approval of the dede’s statements or the
conduct of the dance (sema). It is interesting to note the distinction between the ritualized
Hallahallah (which I have only ever heard in the context of the Cem itself) and the common
expression Allahallah, used to indicate surprise and, often, disapproval, in quotidian
conversation.
123
Bruno Latour writes provocatively that “the modern time of progress and the anti-modern
time of ‘tradition’ are twins who failed to recognize one another: The idea of an identical
repetition of the past and that of a radical rupture with any past are two symmetrical results of a
single conception of time” (Latour 1993: 76, quoted in Boym 2001)
seemed to say, one must have both a commitment to the legitimacy of the past of tradition and to

one’s religious124 identity as fully contemporary and modern.

The cem proper proceeded only after the dede had finished his exhortation. On the

makeshift stage125 to our right— most commonly used in weddings, I later learned—two young

men and two young women walked briskly in the circumambulation of the sema,126 deftly

navigating around the candelabra (alev) at the epicenter of the stage and keeping time to the

music of the bards. As the tempo of the sema waxed and waned, the dede, seated directly behind

the center of the stage, vividly narrated the trials of Hüseyin and his companions at the Battle of

Kerbala, and the insidious perfidy of the Caliph Yazid—“Curses upon the killers of Hüseyin!”127

Throughout the ceremony, I relied on Sadegül’s gracious commentary, as my comprehension of

the sung narration was limited both by my ear and my ignorance of some specifics of the Kerbala

narrative. Moreover, I was continuously distracted by a cantankerous woman seated

immediately behind me, who seemed to keep her own time to the sema with a litany of

complaint: “Their performance is wrong, all wrong. The girl should have her hair wrapped up.

The cem is never right anymore…”128 At the time, I considered the woman’s remarks as an

nuisance, a distraction from the ‘real action’ of the ceremony. Only in retrospect did I recognize

124
‘Religious’ is itself a fraught term here, in as much as many commentators, especially non-
Alevi Sunni Turks, but occasionally Alevis as well, marshal a variety of arguments against
Alevism as a religion per se (Düzel 2005). I consider this vexed question more fully in Chapter
Five.
125
In the context of the cem, the stage is called a square, or meydan.
126
Like the ritual of the Mevlevi whirling dervishes, the circumambulation of the Alevi Cem
ceremony is known as a semah—there is a notable difference in spelling however, as the Sufi
sema is spelled without the final ‘h’ added to the Alevi ritual. Unlike the Mevlevi sema, each
participant in the Alevi semah does not ‘whirl’ her or himself; rather they turn collectively
around the commemorative flame (alev) from which Alevism derives its name. See Shankland
1993, 2003 and Erdemir 2005.
127
Lanet olsun Hazreti Hüseyin öldürenler!
128
Yanlış, çok yanlış yaptılar…kız (şaçlarını) bağlamalı...artık cemler hiç doğru yapılmaz ya!
their significance to the labor of commensurating historicities that defines both the Hacı Bektaş

Aşure cem ceremony and the dilemmas of liberal piety more generally.

This commensuration of historicities—the manner in which the traditional, the modern

and the contemporary come to articulate one another—is a general feature of liberal piety and

public, civil Islam in contemporary Turkey. Like the Gülen Community’s hermeneutics of

example and the Nur Community’s marshalling of içtihad, the Alevi cem ceremony, as practiced

in the urban context described here, renders a traditional discursive objectivity coherent within a

contemporary regime of publicness. The vast number of different Alevi, Gülen, and Nur

foundations and associations alone suggests that these efforts of commensuration are not in vain

—the traditional, the modern and the contemporary are publicly legible historiticies in

contemporary Turkey, and lend legitimacy to the civil, liberal piety that they also constitute.

And yet, these efforts at integrating different historicities in publicly seamless manners are never

fully complete; their efforts of commensuration produce an irreducible remainder. Traditions are

potentially tainted by the counter-factual ‘as if’, and aspirations to the modern risk the

evacuation of content and identity entirely. In the next chapter, we will examine how pious

geographies, particularly those of the city of Istanbul, both articulate and rectify similar

dilemmas. For the moment, however, I would like to recall again the plaintive voice of the

woman who sat behind me at the Aşure cem. Indeed, something is “never right any more.” We

might productively ask whether it ever could “be right” again. But the ideal of the ‘right’, the

possibly recuperable past, nonetheless remains an astounding spur to animated sociality and

articulate discourse in the present, and, one suspects, the future.

 Chapter Four
Pious Aesthetics of Publicness: Making Space and Place Virtuous in Istanbul

Introduction: Piety, Liberality, and the Aesthetics of Space and Place

Maps are ubiquitous commodities in urban Turkey. Street vendors, gift shops and public

institutions alike do a healthy business in maps—from my own casual observations on the streets

of Istanbul and Ankara, maps are second only to flags as purchasable indexes of belonging. The

national map, featuring each of Turkey’s eighty-one provinces, is a particularly common, taken-

for-granted visual commodity. The city of Istanbul is also a frequent object of cartographical

representation and consumption—given this mapping imagination, I was unsurprised when many

of my friends and research contacts began to insist on showing me satellite images of their own

residences and places of business using Google Earth. In recent years, a distinct genre of map,

featuring nostalgic historical ornament rather than satellite precision, has become especially

common in the city’s curio shops. Some of these maps are based upon engravings made by

European visitors and residents such as the German artist Antoine Ignace Melling;129 others are

near-cartoon bird’s eye renderings of the city of an earlier epoch. All of them, however, feature

and glorify Ottoman-era Istanbul.130

Ottoman Istanbul is not only a hot cartographical commodity in contemporary Turkey—a

more thorough Ottoman aesthetics of the city fuels a coherent set of discourses and practices of

space and place for many of the institutions of my study. Taken as a whole, this chapter

iluminates aspirations to liberal, civil Islam by delineating the pious aesthetics of space and place

129
See Pamuk 2003: 66 ff. for a detailed discussion of Melling’s engravings of the Bosporus; in
the English translation of his memoirs (Pamuk 2004), the discussion occupies pp. 62-75.
130
One also encounters maps of Byzantine and even Roman-era Istanbul, but nostalgic
renderings of Ottoman Istanbul are by far the most common in my experience.
that partially constitutes and defines these aspirations. This consideration encompasses and

shuttles among many scales, from the ‘global’ horizons of cosmopolitan Islam articulated in the

luxury of hotel conference rooms to more circumscribed, ‘local’ criticism and praise of specific

Istanbul districts and neighborhoods, public monuments, places of business and worship, and, at

the most microscopic level, particular architectural and decorative features of built structures.

Nonetheless, the scene and backdrop of each of my contexts and anecdotes remains the city of

Istanbul itself, a ceaselessly resistant, dynamic and complex metropolis—as I hope to render

through my ethnography.

Throughout the chapter, I navigate a narrow theoretical tightrope, just as I do over the

dissertation as a whole. While I will argue that the pious aesthetics of space and place that

characterize civil Islam in Turkey are commensurable with, and partially constitutive of, liberal

political sensibilities and subjectivities, I do not mean to imply that they are merely or

unproblematically liberal. Rather—like the concept of liberal piety more generally—the pious

aesthetics of space and place participates in a multiplicity of historicities and discourses, some of

which are identifiably ‘liberal’, others of which are typically associated with Islamic ‘tradition’.

In sum, then, this chapter articulates a contextually specific concern for the ways in which

discourses on spatial aesthetics can be both pious and liberal (or at least amenable to liberal

imperatives and sensibilities). Again, like the dissertation as a whole, this argument departs

unambivalently from the echo chamber of most recent secularism debates, in which the figures

of modern liberality and pious probity stand irreconcilably opposed. As I have already argued,

even critical anthropological and ethnographic interrogations of secularism have tended to re-

erect this echo chamber by virtue of their overweening emphasis on the straitjacket that liberal
publicness places upon the myriad avatars of the religious (see Asad 1999, 2003; Mahmood

2005, 2006). While my study shares the political impulse of this critical anthropology of

secularism, I am more interested in the contextual commensurations of the broad domain of

discourses and practices that are coded as either liberal or religious, secular or Islamic, modern

or traditional. Understood in this light, this chapter’s inquiry into the pious aesthetics of space

and place stands as an example of a study of one particular register of commensuration.

Say ‘Çarşaf!’: Kemalist Fantasies of Urbanity

In recent years, a bevy of anthropologists and social scientists has drawn attention to the

fraught and ideologically over-determined nature of space and place within the urban texture of

Istanbul. On the whole, this critical inquiry into the ideological topography of Istanbul has

focused on secularist alarm, ignorance, and indignation in relation to the newly “Islamicized”

spaces of the city. Yael Navaro-Yashin, for instance, relates a telling anecdote of an

ethnographic day-trip to the ‘conservative’ neighborhood of Fatih, accompanied by a bohemian

friend, Fatma:

Because she was curious, I brought Fatma with me to Fatih one day. We walked
all the way from Beyazıt on the main street to Fatih. Fatma really didn’t know
this part of the city. “It’s as if we have come to a different country,” she said,
repeating what she had imagined in one of our earlier conversations. She noticed
the veiled women on the street with peculiar curiosity. As we were walking, four
young men with brown and black robes, long beards, and white turbans appeared,
walking on the main street with scepters in each of their hands…This was
certainly not common attire in Turkey’s public life. People on the street couldn’t
keep from turning and looking at these turbaned passersby…As some laughed and
as others cast side-long glances, Fatma saw the men and became terrified. “Are
these Turks?” she first asked. “Yes, probably,” I said. Other people on the street
were asking the same question (2002a: 63, emphasis mine).

In a similar vein, both Esra Özyürek (2006: 133) and Alev Çınar (2005: 115) recount the anger

and fear that percolated in secularist circles following the election of the Refah Party to the head

of the Istanbul municipal government during the mid-1990s. For her part, Jenny White has
pointed to mutual articulation class and secularism in the material and ideological construction of

luxury in contemporary Turkey, embodied in places such as Istanbul’s Akmerkez mall (2002:

37).131 This interest in the intersections of political ideology, piety, aesthetics and built space

rides upon the crest of the broader tide of interdisciplinary analysis of Istanbul’s emergence as a

neoliberal, global city (Öncü 1999; Isin 2001; Keyder 2005, 2008; Tureli 2006; Mills 2006;

Potuoğlu-Cook 2006; Bezmez 2007; Göktürk 2008; Tuğal 2008).

On the whole, this recent ethnographic focus on the relationship between urban space and

secularism highlights the ineluctable intersection between laicist politics and laicist aesthetics in

contemporary Turkey. This inseparability of the aesthetic and the political, and the manner in

which they each undergird the possibilities of publicness is second nature to students of Turkey,

and received ample, vivid confirmation throughout my own research. One of the more peculiar

moments during my time in Istanbul involved a photo session for an article focusing on my

research and impressions of Turkey, which was eventually published in the popular weekly

131
White’s lengthy description is as follows:
Working-class areas are segregated by location and by the attribution of a distinct
social typology. But noses are still pressed against the glass, as middle-class
homes encroach on squatter areas and television programs beam the lifestyle of
the elite directly into people’s living rooms. Working-class families, the women
in simple coats and head scarves, stroll the wide corridors of luxurious shops in
the Istanbul Akmerkez mall—unable to purchase even the smallest item, but
taking in the silk, perfume, diamonds, and designer clothing, artfully arranged in
brightly lit windows, and the sleek, self-possessed shoppers, many of the m
women: tall, slim, blond, perfectly coifed, and dressed in elegantly understated
but expansively trademarked and sometimes revealing dresses. On national
holidays, the blue glass towers of the Akmerkez mall, brainchild of a group of
determinedly secularist industrialists, are sheathed in lights that spell out support
for a Kemalist laicist Turkey (White 2002: 37).”
While White’s portrait of the exclusion of meek, lower-class women from the zirconium glitz of
conspicuous consumption risks an exoticist romanticization of blue collar (or, better yet, the
floral-pattern scarf) urban Turks, it does capture the vast aesthetic gulf that separates rich and
poor in Istanbul, in spite of, and as a result of, their stunning proximity.
magazine, Haftalık (literally “Weekly”). My interview with the Haftalık reporter herself took

place at the Ara Café, a well-known establishment owned by Ara Güler, one of Istanbul’s most

famous photographers, and located on a meticulously hip sidestreet in Beyoğlu, just down from

Taksim Square. While the young woman interviewing me was evidently intrigued by my close

relationships with ‘fundamentalists’ (dinciler), we also discussed my research on Alevi

organizations and my passion for the music of famous figures of Anatolian rock music from the

sixties and seventies, such as Cem Karaca and Erkin Koray. Following our casual repartee, the

reporter took several photographs of me sipping tea, which, she said, would appear along with

the interview itself. I was therefore surprised when she called me several weeks later to tell me

that her editors were unhappy with the initial photos, and asked whether I would be available to

have several different shots taken by a staff photographer. Less than an hour later, I squeezed

into the backseat of a Fiat hatchback, accompanied by the photographer, his assistant, and the

chauffeur, and immediately began to inquire why the Haftalık editor had requested new

photographs. The photographer replied mildly: “We just wanted something more representative

of your research.”132 Weaving through the heavy, late-afternoon traffic, the Fiat sped down the

hill from Taksim, past the dilapidated, Ottoman-era facades of Tarlabaşı and toward the Golden

Horn. I soon recognized our probable destination: the neighborhood Eyüp Sultan, a well-known

pilgrimage destination and home to many of the pious foundations of my study. The

photographer confirmed my suspicions: “It would be wonderful if we could get a photo of you

beside a covered woman.”133

After a lengthy, convoluted ballet in front of the entrance to the Tomb of Eyüp Sultan, the

photographer managed to capture his desired image: the tall, foreign researcher smiling

132
Araştırmalarınla ilgili bir fotograph olsun istendi.
133
Fotoğrafta çarşaflı bir kadın senin yanında olsun, çok güzel olur
awkwardly beside a justifiably suspicious, devout woman donned in a black sheet, or çarşaf, one

of the principal icons of ‘fundamentalism’ (aşırı dincilik, şeriatçılık) that is so anathema to the

secular Turkish gaze (Çınar 2005).134 (The photographer never considered asking any of the

women whom he photographed alongside me for permission, in spite of my half-hearted

protestations, thus necessitating the delicate choreography of the photograph.) While I had

already argued with him against such a photograph, noting that my research was neither about

so-called fundamentalism nor gender, he pleaded editorial impotence—the specifics of our

absurd photo shoot had been dictated from above by a senior Haftalık editor, and, besides, as he

noted with a matter-of-fact shrug, “This sort of thing is what readers expect from an article about

religion.”135 Even after our minor tiff, the photographer felt that he had not yet composed the

ideal image, and insisted that we try our luck again in Fatih, the very neighborhood described

above by Navaro-Yashin. Ultimately, however, a two-page spread of the photograph from the

tomb of Eyüp Sultan accompanied the Haftalık interview, which, as one might suspect, I had

come to regret.136

As this anecdote humorously and rather uncomfortably demonstrates, my own

ethnographic experience in Istanbul was marked by the same secular anxieties, fantasies and

topographies of urban space that other ethnographers of the city have identified. I, too, found

Istanbul to consist of a warp and woof of neighborhoods and districts, each ideologically marked

by the binary contrast between the secular and the pious. Like Navaro-Yashin and White, I

134
See, for instance, an article on the ‘headscarf controversy’ published in the secular leftist
Radikal Newspaper at the height of the debate over opening university campuses to women
students who have donned the headscarf, a point a discuss further below (Berkan 2008).
135
Dinle ilgili bir makalede okucular böyle bir fotoğraf görmeyi bekler.
136
My unease over the interview only waxed when I learned that acquaintances and friends of
friends who encountered the article unanimously agreed that I must be a CIA operative—
certainly not an uncommon suspicion for ethnographers in Turkey (and elsewhere) to provoke,
but nonetheless vexatious.
recognized that certain nodal centers—Taksim, Etiler, and Bostancı on one hand, Eyüp, Fatih,

and Üsküdar on the other—provide the cardinal points for this ideologized urban topography. I

worry, however, that a bit too much attention has been devoted to the secular anxieties, fantasies,

and repugnance that are both causes and effects of this geography. In the following sections,

therefore, I will focus specifically on the various ways in which civil Islamic actors criticize,

eulogize, and fantasize the city of Istanbul and many of its particular spaces. In particular, I will

be concerned to render the partial rapprochement between secular and pious ideologies of space

that civil Islamic actors in Istanbul achieve. As we will see, this reconciliation is not devoid of

critique—indeed, it actively cultivates a critical sensibility in relation to urban space. However,

the aesthetic sensibility of this relatively liberal piety also avoids some of the more politicized

contestations of secular space that I will discuss near the end of the chapter.

Together, the pious practices of space and place that I examine articulate a coherent,

public chronotope (Bakhtin 1981) of Istanbul as a devout, neo-Ottoman city. This chronotope is

marked by a nostalgic longing for an idealized past in which piety and urban existence were

seamlessly, unproblematically yoked together. In certain respects, this modernist nostalgia

(Boym 2001) resembles that of Orhan Pamuk’s novels and memoirs (Pamuk 2003; Erol 2008),

although Pamuk’s object of longing is the Istanbul of the 1950s rather than the Ottoman era.

Unlike Pamuk’s Istanbul, however, the neo-Ottoman chronotope of the city characteristic of

Turkish liberal piety is also profoundly optimistic137—as we will see, it imagines and attempts to
137
With etymological precision, Svetlana Boym nicely summarizes the difference between two
principal types of nostalgia, restorative and reflective, which correspond in this instance to the
Istanbul of smoky, black-and-white photographs that Pamuk extols and the neo-Ottoman
nostalgia of my own study:
Restorative nostalgia stresses nostos and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction
of the lost home. Reflective nostalgia thrives in the algia, the longing itself, and
delays the homecoming—wisfully, ironically, desperately. Restorative nostalgia
does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition. Reflective
nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does
produce a reintegrated, pious urban space and place that is also enveloped within a broader

chronotope of global civil Islam and the universal community of believers, the ummah (ümmet).

Constructing Pious Space: The Aesthetics of Nostalgic Devotion among the Nur Community

The offices of the Istanbul Science and Culture Foundation (İstanbul İlim ve Kültür Vakfı,

ISCF) are located in a resplendently restored Sixteenth Century medrese, or Qur’anic school,

designed by Mimar Sinan, the Ottoman Empire’s preeminent celebrity architect, and noted for its

unique octagonal plan. The medrese is tucked away among the more prominent tourist

attractions and municipal government offices in Sultanahmet, the so-called historical peninsula

that is the crown jewel of both Istanbul's and Turkey's historical pride (as well as the object of

endless advertising campaigns). This prized location—an officially designated historical

monument which is, in fact, administered by the Istanbul Science and Culture Foundaiton on

behalf of the General Directorate of Foundations (Vakıflar Genel Müdürlüğü)—is a relatively

new home for the foundation, which moved from its previous location in January 2007, near the

end of my fieldwork. Over the course of our numerous conversations, Faris Bey, the director of

the Istanbul Science and Culture Foundation, emphasized the advantages of the organization’s

new home within the Rüstempaşa Medrese in explicitly aesthetic terms. Even more than the

practical advantages of the new location—centrality, and a larger amount of space—Faris Bey

and others praised the aesthetics and historicity, or better yet, the aesthetic historicity, of the

medrese as consonant with and supportive of the Foundation’s aspirations and activities, which

not shy away from the contradictions of modernity. Restorative nostalgia protects
the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia call it into doubt (2001: xviii).
While I would take issue with Boym’s simple mapping of two different types of politics onto
restorative and reflective nostalgia, and her clear preference for the latter, the distinction itself is
quite valuable.
primarily involve publishing and organizing support for the writings and moral philosophy of

Said Nursi.138

My first arrival at the Rüstempaşa Medrese was a festive affair: The foundation had

invited a swath of luminaries and supporters from throughout Istanbul Nursi circles to join in a

celebratory meal and inaugural Risale-i Nur class at the new location. As it happened, I had

returned from a visit to Ankara that very day, and proceeded from the central Istanbul bus station

to the Foundation without dropping by my apartment beforehand. As any seasoned coach

traveler in Turkey well knows, long routes on buses that serve ample tea and Nescafe without

offering the convenience of an onboard water closet can create quite a strain on one’s bladder; by

the time I reached the medrese, I was aching to go to the bathroom, and immediately asked Fatih,

the young foundation doorman (kapacı)139 to direct me to the facilities. Fatih paused, and

blushed noticably: “I don’t think you’ll like them very much.” I was in no mood to argue over

niceties, however, and insisted that he show me the restrooms, post-haste. As I relieved myself, I

understood the cause for Fatih’s embarrassment: The toilets at the medrese were original, 16th

century installations. Unlike ‘European’ style toilets, with their seats and water basins, these

‘Ala Turka’ toilets were mere sunken cavities in carved marble slabs, cleverly-sloped to

encourage run-off. When I returned to Fatih’s office, I assured him that I had had ample

138
Please refer to Chapter One for a more detailed discussion of Said Nursi and Turkey’s Nur
Community in general.
139
The doorman, or kapacı, is a distinctive social type in contemporary Turkey. Although the
primary duties of the doorman are to monitor arrivals and departures from a building and to
handle custodial tasks, he is also a nexus of gossip and word-of-mouth information. While the
classic figure of a doorman is a middle-aged or older male migrant to the big city from an
Anatolian village, stationed near the door of an apartment building (apartman), businesses and
foundations also employ doormen. In my experience among Nur and Gülen foundations in
particular, I found that doormen were frequently young, unmarried men, who received room and
board in return for monitoring telephones and computers, as well as looking after upkeep of the
premises. For more on the figure of the kapacı, see Özyeğin 2002.
experience with ‘Ala Turka’ toilets, and that he had no cause to worry. He began to beam in

subtle pride: “You know, everything here is original, even the toilets. Mimar Sinan designed the

system himself, it is one of the first functional plumbing systems in the world.140 Even though

European toilets, like the one in the old offices, are more convenient, we prefer these original,

Ottoman ones.”141

Fatih’s proud, if crimson, contrast between the toilets at the old Istanbul Science and

Culture Foundation offices and those in the Rüstempaşa Medrese was representative of the

general opinions of class members and foundation functionaries concerning their new location.

Previously, the offices of the Foundation had been located on the second floor of a rather

anonymous apartment building in the area of Balmumcu, one of the many flourishing white-

collar districts that dot the European of side of Istanbul, particularly north along the Bosporus.

While class participants and others associated with the foundation were content with the old

offices, they were generally lukewarm in their assessments, using descriptives such as

‘anonymous’, ‘sufficient’, and ‘good enough’ (anonim, yeter). There was an even greater degree

of ambivalence, occasionally approaching disdain, for Balmumcu, the Foundation’s previous

neighborhood. Balmumcu, a district within the municipality of Beşiktaş, is decidedly bourgeois

and corporate—its centre, straddling broad Barbaros Boulevard, is home to a variety of upscale

140
I was unable to confirm whether this is, in fact, true, though Mimar Sinan’s engineering
ingenuity on the whole is a well-attested fact. One of his most famous, similar innovations is the
air-conditioning system of Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul. This system, consisting of a
network of concealed ducts and vents, ingeniously prevents candle smoke from collecting in the
main chamber of the mosque, and maintains a steady temperature of approximately sixty-five
degrees Fahrenheit regardless of the outside conditions.
141
Biliyor musun burada her şey orijinaldır, tuvaletler bile…Mimar Sinan kendi kendine su
tesisatı sistemini tasarım etmiş, dünyada ilk su tesisatlarından biriymiş. Eski ofisde bulunan
alafranga tuvaletlerin daha pratik olmasına rağmen bu orijinal Osmanlı tuvaletleri tercih
ederiz.
hotels, financial institutions, high-rise offices, and luxury goods outlets. Beşiktaş as a whole is

one of the more ‘European’ areas of Istanbul, incorporating such chic, upscale neighborhoods as

Nişantaşı, Ortaköy, Arnavutköy and Bebek, and only a brief bus or taxi ride away from Taksim,

Istanbul’s premiere nightlife district. Rather unsurprisingly, most of my friends at the Istanbul

Science and Culture Foundation were unenthusiastic about the previous offices’ placement

within Istanbul’s sociocultural topography; they regularly criticized other residents of the

neighborhood as ‘excessively secular’, ‘irreligious’ and ‘immoral’ (fazla laiktir, dinsiz,

ahlaksızlar).

In contrast to this ambivalence and skepticism over the foundation’s earlier location,

nearly everyone associated with the Foundation voiced unanimous enthusiasm over the move to

Rüstempaşa Medrese. Class members unequivocally preferred the location of the medrese, on

the ‘historical’ peninsula of Sultanahmet, which remains one of the districts of Istanbul most

strongly associated with the Ottoman era (albeit in a tourist-oriented manner) to the earlier

location in Beşiktaş. Moreover, the medrese’s proximity to the Grand Bazaar (Kapalıçarşı) and

the labyrinthine markets of Eminönü helped to attract a new, sizable group of merchants to the

Risale conversations; several new members whom I spoke with noted the ease of stopping by the

Foundation after closing the shutters on their shops in the early evening, after the loose purses

and wallets of the tourists had retreated to nearby hotels.

The medrese itself was the object of even stronger adulation. Foundation members

consistently praised the medrese’s unique, octagonal floor plan, with smaller cubicles and larger

conference rooms surrounding a garden equipped with a fountain at its center, emphasizing the

‘peaceful’ and ‘spiritual’ atmosphere of the medrese (huzurlu, ruhsal, ruhani, manevi). Prior to

the Istanbul Science and Culture Foundation’s occupation, the medrese had been left derelict for
over fifteen years and therefore required extensive renovations. When I queried him concerning

the ongoing renovations, Faris Bey emphasized that the Foundation, along with representatives

from the Istanbul office of the General Directorate of Foundations, had consulted architectural

historians in order to ensure that all alterations would be in keeping with Mimar Sinan’s

‘original’ plan. I encountered this premium on ‘originality’ and ‘authenticity’ constantly in

conversations about the new Foundation headquarters, in particular in reference to the fountain at

the center of the medrese garden and the largest of the conference rooms, where the Risale-i Nur

classes were thenceforth held. On the occasion of the first official Risale–i Nur class following

the full restoration of the conference room, my friend and mentor Mustafa exclaimed, in typical

and telling fashion: “Exquisite! It’s just like Ottoman times.”142

These positive statements concerning the Ottoman authenticity of the Rüstempaşa

Medrese must be understood in conjunction with a less explicit aesthetics of absence. In recent

years, Esra Özyürek (2006) and Yael Navaro-Yashin (2002a) have traced both the proliferation

of Kemalist iconography (in particular, representations of Atatürk) in Turkish public space143 and

the ‘privatization’ of secularist imagery that was previously associated solely with the state (and,

hence, read as ‘public) (see also Hart 1999). Suffice to say that the iconography of Kemalist

secularism remains a crucial means to invoking hegemonic publicness in contemporary Turkey.

While this remains true of such ‘traditional’ public spaces as government buildings, universities,

and city squares, it is also noticeable in less familiar venues of publicness, spaces where the

distinction between public and private is itself a matter of contingency and reflexive practice.

142
Harika bir iş yürüttüler! Tam Osmanlı dönemi gibi…”
143
While both Özyürek and Navaro-Yashin are keen to point out the importance of
distinguishing between spaces that are explicitly coded as ‘state’ or ‘government’ property to a
more generalized, bourgeois notion of publicness, the slippage that allows both types of space to
be understood as ‘public’ in the same fashion remains a troubled feature of their arguments.
Throughout this thesis, I contend that the foundations and associations that form the institutional

matrix of Islamic civil society in Turkey are crucial spaces in which the distinction between

publicness and privacy is pragmatically constituted. In light of this, it is striking that the offices

of the Istanbul Science and Culture Foundation are completely devoid of any visual cue to

Kemalism, or, for that matter, to Republican Turkey at all.

At the risk of conflating two different historical dispensations, one might accurately

characterize the decoration of Rüstempaşa Medrese and the offices of the Science and Culture

Foundation as spartan. With the exception of a few framed calligraphic representations of the

names of God, written in Arabic and printed or painted on fine sheets of marbled paper, the walls

of the medrese are entirely bare. The calligraphy prints are crucial to the creation of a nostalgic,

pious aesthetics: As my friends at the Foundation often noted, both calligraphy and the practice

of marbling paper through a process of water color painting (ebru sanatı) are ‘traditional

Ottoman arts’ (geleneksel Osmanlı sanatları). Other than these few works of devotional art, both

the interior and exterior of the Foundation are austere, lacking entirely in ostentation (süssüz).

As I noted above, the restorations to the marble medrese building have attempted to recreate

‘authenticity’: concrete reinforcements to the structure’s columns and ogees have been made as

unobtrusively as possible, the walls have been painted in solid rose, pink and ivory tones, and

even the electric light fixtures are disguised as tulip-shaped candle holders (although the cheap

halogen bulbs fail to approximate the wink and flicker of a wick). Each of these subtle aesthetic

details functions to create an atmosphere that is understood as at once Ottoman and pious.144 On

144
There is a gentle inconsistency to this ‘invented’ Ottoman tradition, as any historian of
Ottoman architecture will tell you. Although the offices of the Istanbul Science and Culture
Foundation in the Rüstempaşa Medrese do succeed in mimicking a 16th Century Ottoman
structure, this classical Ottoman aesthetic is itself at odds with later Ottoman architectural styles,
such as those of the Baroque Period (Barok Dönemi, 1757-1808) and the Empire Period
(İmparatorluk Dönemi, 1808-1876).
the entire grounds of the Foundation, there is no trace whatsoever of Republican history and

Kemalist affiliation.

A similar analysis of the nostalgic, Ottomanist aesthetics applies to the Foundation’s

adopted insignia. When it came into being in 1979, the Science and Culture Foundation chose to

appropriate Istanbul’s official municipal symbol as its own emblem. This symbol, familiar to

anyone who has frequented Istanbul’s public transportation system or visited any municipal

government office, features four prominent minarets rising above a schematic rendering of the

city’s proverbial seven hills.145 While I often encouraged members of the Foundation to explain

why they had adopted the symbol whole cloth from the municipality—a curious and potentially

ideologically-fraught borrowing, it seemed to me—they consistently deflected this question by

deemphasizing the symbol’s connection to the municipality and foregrounding the importance

Istanbul as a site of traditional Islamic grandeur. This ideologization of Istanbul as an

Islamically-marked place—in sharp contrast to the ‘secular’ place of the capital, Ankara—

emphasizes the priority of Ottoman nostalgia as a central aesthetic principle of the Nur

Community. The following section picks up the theme of Istanbul as a pious place in relation to

questions of Islamic cosmopolitanism and globalization broadly.

While the pious aesthetics of space articulated by the Istanbul Science and Culture

Foundation is particularly rich and illustrative, it is by no means unique. Indeed, although I have

focused specifically the Science and Culture Foundation offices in this section, I could have

marshaled a similar analysis based upon most of the Sunni foundations where I conducted

research. Many of Istanbul’s Islamic foundations and associations are housed in Ottoman

145
Jenny White’s discussion of the changes made to Ankara’s official seal in the 1990s,
following the electoral success of the Virtue Party (Refah Partisi) make for an intriguing
comparison here (2002: 53-54).
structures, a fact that organization members consistently comment upon positively. Three other

foundations that were significant to my research, the New Asia Foundation (Yeni Asya Vakfı), the

Turkish Charitable Organizations Foundation (Türkiye Gönüllü Teşeküller Vakfı) and the Unity

Foundation (Birlik Vakfı) are each housed in restored Ottoman buildings. The setting of the

Charitable Organizations Foundation is particularly notable: It is housed within a restored tekke,

or Sufi dervish lodge, located on the margins of an Ottoman-era cemetery just outside the Old

City’s Justinian Walls. On a broader spatial and ideological plane, the preponderance of Sunni

civil society organizations in Istanbul are located in the city’s older ‘Ottoman’ neighborhoods,

particularly those on the ‘Historical Peninsula’ and adjacent to the Golden Horn: Sultanahmet,

Fatih, Eyüp, and, especially, Sülemaniye.146

Finally, before proceeding to a fuller consideration of the articulation of Istanbul as pious

place, a brief comment is necessary on the politics implied by the aesthetics of pious space in

relationship to secularist-Kemalist ideologies of space in Turkey. As I noted above, a distinct

aesthetics of absence characterizes the spaces of civil Islam in Istanbul: The panoptic gaze of

Mustafa Kemal, so prominent in most public space in Turkey, does not penetrate into the offices

of the ISCF or other Islamic foundations. Put another way, the official insignia of the Turkish

state, and representations of the person of Atatürk in particular, construct a hegemonic

relationship between secularity and public space in Turkey.147 The aesthetic and political effect

146
After the construction of the Sülemaniye mosque and the myriad soup kitchens, medreses,
orphanages and other charitable institutions affiliated with it, the neighborhood surrounding the
mosque and bearing its name became the epicenter of vakıflar during the Ottoman period. It is
therefore unsurprising that it still maintains pride of place for Islamic foundations in Istanbul
today.
147
In his excellent study of Turkish elementary school curricula, Sam Kaplan makes a similar,
elegant argument concerning the role or Atatürk, both in lessons themselves and as national
“headmaster” for all Turkish pupils (2006: 50; 176 ff.).
of their absence in the spaces of Islamic foundations is therefore extraordinary: Contexts such as

the Istanbul Science and Culture Foundation untangle and interrogate the hegemonic relationship

between public space and secularity. There is a politics here, but it is not one of explicit

confrontation or contestation. Although members of the Science and Culture Foundation and

other, like-minded foundations do not mince words in their criticisms of the ‘secular’ spaces of

Istanbul, they prefer disengagement from secular space through the construction of alternative

pious spaces and, to echo Michael Warner (2002) yet again, pious counterpublics (see also

Hirschkind 2006). Crucially, this commitment to an alternative pious aesthetics of space, with

its quietist politics, allows organizations such as the Istanbul Science and Culture Foundation to

remain firmly within the parameters of civility and liberality, even as they endeavor to decouple

liberality and publicness from the assumptions of Kemalist secularity.

Asserting Pious Place: Islamic Cosmopolitanism and the Recentering of Istanbul, Seat of
Imperial Neo-Ottoman Glory

The vast conference room of the luxurious Ramada Kaya Hotel, located in the far western

expanses of European Istanbul, was abuzz with anticipation following the intermission for the

evening call to prayer. Those of us in the audience had already listened to several hours of

welcoming speeches by clerics and representatives from Indonesia, Mauritania, Qatar, Palestine,

China, Indonesia, and even a Muslim convert from Germany, as well as the requisite host of

Turkish dignitaries. But the main event, the keynote speaker, the immeasurably famous

Egyptian-Qatari scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi, was yet to come.

All told, the agenda of the speeches at the Second General Assembly Meeting for the

International Union of Muslim Scholars was rather repetitive and uncontroversial. Al-

Qaradawi’s keynote address underscored the Assembly’s major objects of complaint and for

intervention: appeals for collective action in support of Palestinians, Iraqis, Pakistanis left
homeless by the earthquake of November 2005 and Indonesians affected by the Boxing Day

tsunami of 2004 and the more recent Jogjakarta quake of May 2006, and condemnations of

aggressive ‘Western’ secularism, as expressed both by the war in Iraq and the cartoon

controversy that began in the Danish newspaper, Jyllands Posten. Animating and undergirding

this laundry-list of familiar complaints, however, were two broader, mutually-reinforcing

themes, which, on the whole, did not surprise, as I had already encountered them time and again

during my research: nostalgia for Istanbul as the center and seat of glory (göz bebeği) of a Sunni

Islamic Empire and aspiration toward a cosmopolitan, bourgeois community of Muslims

coextensive with and identical to the ummah (Turkish ümmet).

All of the speakers at the Meeting for the International Union of Muslim Scholars, both

foreign and Turkish alike, regaled the audience with the importance of the location of the

meeting: Istanbul, former and potential future nexus of the Islamic world. In his laudatory

address introducing Al-Qaradawi, Necmi Sadıkoğlu, the chairman of one of the principal

foundations that had sponsored the conference, waxed poetic over the charms of Mimar Sinan’s

mosques, the virtues of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent’s tolerant, forward-thinking Islamic

imperialism, and the lessons of Sultan Abdulhamit the Second’s delicate rapprochement with

Western European political forms and scientific learning. Al-Qaradawi himself was adamant in

his exhortation for Muslim unity, a community based upon universal, cosmopolitan faith that

would find its moral and spiritual center in the charitable actions of Islamic organizations rather

than political parties. In the context of the evening and the event, it was not difficult to identify

this center as the idealized space and place of Istanbul itself. To summarize the historical

vantage and aspirations of the conference rather schematically: Just as Istanbul was once the
political center of imperial Islam, and, hence, the seat of the ummah, so too can it potentially be

the moral center of civil, depoliticized Islam (and, hence, the seat of the ummah yet again). This

civil Islam was evident at the conference, embodied and practiced by the panoply of non-

governmental organizations, both Turkish and non-Turkish, represented at the Ramada Kaya.

While a pious aesthetics orients and constitutes the particular spaces of civil Islam in

contemporary Turkey, an ideology of and aspiration to pious cosmopolitanism, with the city of

Istanbul as its geographic, social, and ethico-religious center, defines the broader geopolitical

and geocultural horizons of possibility for Turkey’s Sunni civil society organizations. This

aspiration to pious cosmopolitanism positively evaluates globalization (kureselleşme) as a means

to greater communication and consensus within the ummah. And while this cosmopolitanism

does not discount the importance of Mecca as the spiritual loci of the Islamic ecumene—to do so

would be unimaginable for a devout Muslim, given the status of pilgrimage to Mecca as one of

the five pillars of the faith—it nonetheless foregrounds a neo-Ottomanist ideal of Istanbul as a

second center of the Islamic world. In so doing, this civil Islamic cosmopolitanism renders

entire historical periods and districts of the city illegible and invisible—it is marshals a

chronotope of the city that necessarily defies the expectations and ideologies of Kemalist urban

space.

As usual, I was late to my appointment with Cemal Bey at the Turkish Journalists and

Writers Foundation (Türkiye Gazeteciler ve Yazarlar Vakfı)—one of the few foundations of my

study located in one of the newer, ‘secular’ districts of Istanbul, in its case Harbiye, a

neighborhood strongly associated with finance, and, due to the presence of a large barracks and

war museum, the military. Cemal Bey was one of my most energetic and articulate interlocutors
—he regularly assessed the importance of theorists such as Habermas and Huntington to the

activities and goals of the Journalists and Writers Foundation—and I eagerly anticipated our

conversations, confident that he would touch upon a fascinating diversity of subjects without

losing sight of my particular research interests. As the elevator ascended the six floors to the

offices of the Journalists and Writers Foundation, I prepared an apology for my tardiness, but

when I erupted into Cemal Bey’s office I found him sitting distracted in front of the I-Mac on his

large pine desk. He had recently returned from a trip throughout the Middle East, which had

included stops in Damascus, Amman and Jerusalem, and was busy arranging his digital

photographs; he had forgotten our appointment entirely.

Rather than a dissertation on the importance of the Sufi poet Rumi (Mevlana) to

contemporary Turkish Islam or a discussion of multiculturalism during the Ottoman Empire, my

conversation with Cemal Bey on that afternoon focused entirely on his passport. After I had

recovered from my breathless entrance with a cup of hearty tea, I noticed that he had tossed his

passport casually beside a stack of papers on his desk, and asked whether I might thumb through

it. Cemal Bey readily assented to my request, but insisted that he serve as tour guide through the

passport for me. From its width, I guessed that he had had extra pages added; nonetheless, every

page brimmed with stamps and visas. As he turned the pages, he paused to note recent

destinations: Tblisi, Dusseldorf, Dushanbe, Moscow, London, Washington D.C., Astana, Tokyo,

Cairo, Paris. His thoughts were clearly still on his voyage to the Levant, and he waxed poetic

over the ineffable spiritual charms of Jerusalem in particular. When I interrupted to ask him

what he enjoyed most about travel, his reply was immediate: “I am able to travel throughout the

entire world, not so much for my own pleasure, but for charitable service.”148

148
Keyfimden ziyade hayır hizmetleri için bütün dünyayı gezerim.
 Cemal Bey’s global travel credentials were hardly surprising—our schedules frequently

conflicted due to both of our international peregrinations. That summer, he was especially

preoccupied with travel for the Abant Platform, one of the Journalists and Writers Foundation’s

major interreligious dialogue programs, which sponsors multiple conferences each year, both

within and outside of Turkey. More remarkable, however, was Cemal Bey’s understanding and

interpretation of his mobility. Cemal Bey was reflexively aware of his privilege as a member of

Turkey’s elite Muslim bourgeoisie, for whom urban affluence and cosmopolitan opportunities

have become second nature. Crucially, however, Cemal Bey understood cosmopolitan travel

only as a means to the end of pious service on behalf of the Muslim community as a whole (see

also Roy 2004). In sum, the ummah that Cemal Bey imagines and practices is not a mere

concatenation of believers, but a global charitable and civil dispensation distinct from the

fragmented map of nation-states. This civil, cosmopolitan imaginary of and for the ummah

contrasts sharply with other modalities of globalized contemporary Islam, particularly those of

the al Qaeda genus that articulate a bifurcated vision of a globe divided between the dar al-harb

and dar al-Islam, the world of war and world of Islam or peace. Notably, I never encountered

this common jihadist distinction during my research, a testament to the substantially different

global imaginary espoused by my informants.

Coincidentally, I did not see Cemal Bey again until I spotted him across the conference

hall at the Second General Assembly Meeting for the International Union of Muslim Scholars

described above. This fact alone testifies to the dense relations among Istanbul’s different

Islamic foundations and associations; the meeting was organized by the Charitable Organizations

Foundation, but Cemal Bey was in attendance as the representative of the Journalists and Writers
Foundation. More generally, conferences and meetings of this sort are the currency of

cosmopolitan civil Islam in Turkey. Over the two odd years of my research, rarely did a week

pass in which I was not invited to multiple conferences of different scales and themes. In 2007

alone, the Journalists and Writers Foundation sponsored large conferences in Cairo and Paris, as

well as a number in Istanbul itself; the Charitable Organizations Foundation, an umbrella

organization with connections throughout the world of Turkish civil Islam, contributed its

support to at least twenty conferences; the Istanbul Science and Culture Foundation, with more

limited funds, nevertheless sponsored two scholarly conferences on theological themes in Said

Nursi’s Risale-i Nur, as well as smaller charity tours in the Philippines and Indonesia.

Academic-style symposia are equally a staple activity of Alevi organizations such as the Cem

Foundation and Hacı-Bektaş Foundation. Moreover, participation in most of these conferences

is, in my experience, diverse and enthusiastic—it would be difficult to overestimate the number

of occasions that I serendipitously encountered an acquaintance from one organization at a

conference sponsored by another. While participation in some of these conferences—especially

those of Alevi organizations—sometimes consists exclusively of Turkish citizens, many of the

conferences I attended emphasized cosmopolitan attendance, with speakers and participants both

from throughout the ‘Islamic world’ and from ‘the West.’ Unsurprisingly, conferences tend to

be trilingual, with simultaneous translation among Turkish, Arabic and English.

While the specific themes of the many conferences I attended varied widely, from the

role of Kemalism in Turkey’s European Union Membership process to the difference between

Christian and Islamic conceptions of resurrection of the dead, the city of Istanbul was both stage

and star of every gathering. In conversations before and after a conference, foundation members

frequently underscored introducing Istanbul to foreign guests as a seminal purpose of the

conference itself. Certainly, Istanbul inspires pride in most of its residents, regardless of

orientation to questions of Islam and secularism, but the particular, pious imaginary of the city I

have outlined here exceeds mere civic esteem. For the devout Muslims of Turkey’s Islamic civil

sphere, Istanbul is by definition a religious place; for this reason the imperial Ottoman history of

the city maintains a privileged, evidential status in pious imaginaries of the city. This piety of

place qualifies it as a possible center for an Islamic cosmopolitanism of global reach, and

demands proud demonstration to the sympathetic visitor, especially if she is a Muslim herself.149

Before concluding this section of the chapter, a few words on the elisions and lacunae

that undergird the imaginary of Istanbul as the center of cosmopolitan piety are in order. Just as

the pious aesthetics of space discussed above relies partially on the explicit absence of semiotic

representations of Kemalism, ‘the nation’ is a tellingly absent category within the religiously-

inflected, cosmopolitan geography that locates Istanbul at its center. For all that has been made

of the ‘Turkish-Islamic’ synthesis, in which the imperatives of Turkish nationalism achieve

articulation in an Islamic idiom (Akın and Karasapan 1988; Yavuz 2003a: 69-70; Turam 2007:

153), the Turkish nation is remarkably insignificant as a site or geographic category within the

pious cosmopolitanism of the Islamic civil society organizations of my study. Even the frequent

praise that my interlocutors expressed for the Ottoman Empire focused more on the imagined

public legitimacy of Islam during the Ottoman era than on ethnolingusitic or nationalist pride;

149
Nor are the municipal officials and travel agents of Istanbul unaware of the special, pious
status of their city. Religiously-oriented tours of Istanbul and other sites in Turkey are
commonplace for both Christians and foreign Muslims, and rein in large commissions for the
agents who organize them. During my own time in Istanbul, I guided two African-American
Muslims, friends of a friend visiting on their honeymoon, through some of the more impressive
mosques—when I asked what had led them to choose Istanbul for their celebratory destination,
they replied that they had seen frequent advertisements for the city and were struck by its ‘holy’
character.
indeed, as I will discuss in more detail in Chapter Five, Ottoman pluralism and tolerance for a

multiplicity of religions, languages, and ethnic groups is a central theme for many liberal Turkish

Muslims. In this regard, it is also worth noting that the institutions of Islamic civil society in

Turkey have been much more accommodating to Turkey’s Kurdish community than either the

institutions of the Turkish state or those civil society organizations of a more secularist-

nationalist bent, such as the Kemalist Thought Association (Atatürkçü Düşünce Derneği) or the

Atatürk Foundation (Atatürk Vakfı).150 Indeed, organizations within the Nursi Community such

as the Zehra Foundation (Zehra Vakfı) have even gently proposed a sort of ‘Kurdish-Turkish-

Islamic’ synthesis, based primarily upon the fact that Said Nursi himself was a Kurd.

Although I have argued that ‘the nation’ and ‘nationalism’ are not particularly salient

aspects of the pious, cosmopolitan geography articulated by the institutions of Turkey’s Islamic

civil society, this does not imply that civil Islamic actors are therefore anti-nationalist. On the

contrary, most of my informants vehemently (and, I believe, sincerely) asserted their

commitment to the Turkish nation and state, and seem quite comfortable with the nexus of

linguistic, territorial and ethnic identification that Benedict Anderson so influentially outlined in

his classic study of nationalism (1983). More pragmatically, Turkish state authorities have not

hesitated to intervene when the imperatives of Islam have seemed to supercede those of the

nation and state, as the so-called postmodern coup against the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi)

150
This point does not apply to leftist organizations, of course, which have typically been the
most open to Kurdish political aspirations. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note the alienation
of many pious Kurds from explicitly Communist or Socialist organizations, in which religious
devotion is often considered an impediment to revolutionary mobilization. The problematic
relationship between Kurdish national and territorial aspirations in Turkey, as articulated by the
Communist-oriented PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party; Kurdish Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan) and
its imprisoned commander Abdullah Ocalan, and the ‘Islamic’ revival that is taking place among
some relatively affluent Kurdish communities in Turkey is a fascinating topic, deserving of a
much fuller treatment than I can offer here.
government of Necmettin Erbakan in February 1997 famously demonstrated.151 Rather than

radicals, then, the prominent voices and actors of Turkish civil Islam are better understood as

committed liberals. Through aspiring to articulate a passive separation from the imperatives and

intrusions of state institutions and ideologies, civil Turkish Islam has gradually succeeded in a

liberal depoliticization of practices, discourses and identities that have been politically over-

determined for most of Turkish Republican history. The chronotope of Istanbul as a pious,

cosmopolitan center that I have delineated in this section is an indicative case in point. Pious

cosmopolitanism represents a novel, liberal achievement on the part of civil Turkish Islam

precisely because it is neither nationalist nor anti-nationalist: The very notion of a category of

belonging that resists this dichotomy expresses a profoundly new horizon of possibility for

Turkish liberalism. Like the pious aesthetics of space discussed above, Sunni cosmopolitanism

in Turkey contests Kemalist and statist presuppositions of space and publicness by means of

liberal resistance to the explicit confrontations of more traditional modalities of democratic and

partisan politics. As we will see in the next section, explicit, politicized contestations of

Kemalist space and publicness also occur in contemporary Turkey; the specificity of quietist,

civil contestations of secularist presuppositions emerges fully in contrast to these more

obstreperous political skirmishes.

Explicit Contestations of Laicist Space: The Headscarf Controversy

On the whole, the subtle, implicit challenges to Kemalist understandings of public space

and place considered in this chapter have avoided overt controversy, and, concomitantly, have

151
From the perspective of state-civil society relations in Turkey, a more interesting case is the
legal closure of the National Youth Foundation (Milli Gençlik Vakfı) in 2004 (Atar 2004). The
National Youth Foundation was itself associated with more ‘conservative’ elements within
Erbakan’s Welfare Party, and its successor, the Virtue Party (Fazilet Partisi), which was also
ultimately shut down by judicial order. Following its closure, the National Youth Foundation
reemerged as the Anatolia Youth Association (Anadolu Gençlik Derneği).
not typically become the objects of official scrutiny or media scandal. As I argued above, this

‘invisibility’ or political neutrality is a crucial achievement of the liberal aspirations of civil

Islam in Turkey. On the other hand, the past fifteen years or so of Turkish political life has

witnessed a series of spectacular challenges to secular space, each of which stands in stark

contrast to the subtle refashioning of space and place achieved by Islamic civil society

institutions. Following the electoral success of the Welfare Party in Istanbul’s municipal

elections in 1994, panic erupted in secularist circles when Party officials proposed the

construction of a large mosque complex in Taksim Square, the geographical and ideological

epicenter of ‘secular’ Istanbul (White 2002: 117; Özyürek 2006: 97; see also Çınar 1997). More

recently, a group of students associated with a network of nationalist ‘hearths’ (Alperen

Ocakları) opted to protest Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Turkey by performing prayers (namaz

kılmak) in Ayasofya (Haghia Sophia) Museum (Soncan and Cansev 2006; see also my discussion

in Chapter Two). Although Ayasofya was used as a mosque throughout the Ottoman period—

indeed Sultan Fatih the Conqueror’s first act upon his victorious entry into Constantinople was to

ride directly to Haghia Sophia and proclaim it a mosque—it has been administered as a museum

by the state since the beginning of the Republic, and is a frequent target of criticism and

intervention on the part of Muslim groups who would prefer to see it revert to its status as a

house of worship. By far the most sustained, prolonged and controversial challenge to the

Kemalist dispensation of public space, however, has been the campaign to allow the wearing of

the headscarf (başörtüsü, türban) by pious Muslim women in official buildings and spaces,

universities in particular.

While the headscarf controversy (başörtüsü meselesi) has achieved exceptional public

and political prominence in Turkey over the past few years, its history stretches back to the series
of secularizing reforms enacted by Atatürk in the 1920s, immediately following the foundation

of the Republic. Among the most important of these reforms was the ‘Hat Law’ of 1924, which

prohibited the headscarf and other attire associated with ‘traditional Islam’, including the fez and

other headwear that allowed men to place their foreheads to the ground in prayer without doffing

them (Kasaba 1997: 25; Göle 1998:14; Özden 2009). More recent crises and junctures in the

headscarf debate include the turbulent clashes between the Turkish Left and Right during the

seventies, which prepared the ground for the revival of political Islam during the eighties, and

the expulsion of Merve Kavakçı, a former Parliamentarian from the Virtue Party (Fazilet Partisi,

VP), after she entered Parliament with her head covered in May 1999.152 The past two years

have witnessed a particularly vocal and often vociferous series of debates over the headscarf,

beginning in the Spring of 2007 with the election of Abdullah Gül, a prominent Justice and

Development Party politician to the Turkish Presidency. 153 Politically, Gül’s election was

momentous because it created the possibility of a consensus between Parliament and the

executive branch on the question of the headscarf; overturning the ban on the headscarf has been

a central aspect of the Justice and Development Party’s platform since it achieved a

Parliamentary majority 2002. Perhaps more importantly, however, Gül’s election directly

challenged the symbolic order of the laicist state due to the fact that his wife, Hayrünnissa, wears

a headscarf herself. From the perspective of Turkey’s Kemalist establishment, the prospect of a
152
Kavakçı was stripped of her Parliamentary office soon after the affair, and, eventually, her
Turkish citizenship, on the grounds that she had failed to disclose her simultaneous American
citizenship. She left Turkey for the United States shortly thereafter, and is currently a professor
at George Washington University.
153
The election itself was a turbulent affair, marked by massive, ‘pro-secular’ and ‘anti-AKP’
protests, a boycott on the part of the members of the secularist Republican People’s Party (CHP),
a successful challenge of the initial election in the constitutional court, rumblings of a possible
coup from the staunchly secular military, and, finally, a second successful election that only
came about through an unprecedented alliance between the Justice and Development Party and
the National Movement Party (MHP), a right-wing party that had previously staked its identity
and electoral success on dogmatic Turkish nationalism of an explicitly anti-Kurdish stripe.
veiled, devout first lady living in Ankara’s Çankaya Presidential Palace, one of the most

strongly-marked ‘secular’ places in the nation, was anathema, a flagrant violation of the aesthetic

taboos of Kemalism. Even more recently, in February 2008, the Turkish Parliament, with its

substantial Justice and Development majority, successfully amended the Turkish Constitution to

legalize the wearing of the headscarf on university campuses. Less than four months later,

however, Turkey’s Constitutional Court (Anayasa Mahkemesi) overturned the amendment,

thereby reinstating the status quo on the ban; as of this writing, headscarves remain verboten on

Turkish university campuses and in other official state buildings.

So much, then, for our truncated political history of the headscarf controversy in Turkey;

for my purposes here, I would like to draw out the parallels and differences in the articulation of

public space that characterize the headscarf controversy and the institutions of Islamic civil

society in Turkey. As Nilüfer Göle has argued in her seminal book on the topic (1996), the

debate over the legalization of the headscarf hinges on a fundamental ambivalence in the

relationship between citizen and state in Turkey. Should the state privilege the imperative of

individual liberty, and therefore overturn the ban in the name of free self-expression?

Alternately, should the principle of equality take precedence, thereby justifying the state’s

prohibition of the headscarf under the logic that a veiled woman can never be ‘equal’ to her male

or unveiled female peers?154 Göle demonstrates that this political question of the relationship

between citizen and state is inseparable from the long history of Western-oriented modernization

in both the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, and, above all, the unique salience of

154
For an intriguing comparison from a different context, see also Partha Chatterjee’s prolonged
meditation on the tensions among liberty, equality and neutrality that the relationship between
secularism and minority politics in India bring to the fore (1998). I discuss Chatterjee’s
arguments in greater detail in Chapter Five.
gender and femininity as the objects and targets of modernizing reforms. The anthropologist

Saba Mahmood (2001) has made a broadly similar argument concerning the seemingly insoluble

dilemma that the headscarf creates for Euro-American feminism more generally. Given this

tension, it is not entirely surprising that opponents of the ban on the headscarf voice their

criticisms in a classically liberal mode. The keywords for the progressive Muslims who have

rallied against the ban are ‘freedom of choice’ and ‘liberty’. Within the context of this debate,

proponents have championed the headscarf as a symbol of the freedom of personal choice that

must be guaranteed to all citizens of the Republic, including devout Muslim women. Indeed, the

specific change to the Constitution suggested by the Justice and Development Party read: “No

one should be denied their right to higher education due to their appearance or clothing.”

Strikingly, the proposal contains no explicit mention of religion as such.

Like the practices and discourses of civil Islam in Turkey, the campaign to overturn the

ban on the headscarf in officially-designated public space articulates a distinctly liberal mode of

piety, or, perhaps more appropriate in this instance, a pious liberalism. In both contexts,

religious belief and practice are understood to be the exclusive domain of personal choice, upon

which the Kemalist state should not interfere. Civil Islam and the campaign to overturn the ban

on the headscarf—in this context, we might gloss the second as ‘political’ Islam—differ

substantially, however, in their means and ultimate aspirations. Politicized Islam makes direct

demands upon the state for recognition and equal protection: Devout young Muslim women who

choose to don the headscarf should be recognized as equal citizens by the state and guaranteed

the civil rights that accrue to them as such (e.g. equal access to educational facilities). The

liberal piety of civil Islam, on the other hand, generally operates within less explicit political
horizons.155 State practice, party politics, and legal reforms are not of primary interest to the

actors of civil Turkish Sunni Islam (even if most of them are personally sympathetic to the

campaign to overturn the ban on the headscarf and the political platform of the Justice and

Development Party more generally). Rather, the liberal piety discussed in this chapter seeks to

carve out spaces and identify places separate from the hegemonic presuppositions of Kemalism.

In so doing, it aspires to a more fully Islamic civil society, in relation to which the state is

hypothetically irrelevant. Rather than confront the state or make demands of it, liberal piety in

the civil sphere seeks to render it insignificant to questions of public religiosity. In this respect,

the very distinction between state and society—a premise of liberalism itself—becomes the point

of intervention and emphasis for Islamic practice that aspires to something potentially

paradoxical, publicness without politics. By achieving this ‘civil society effect’, discourses and

practices of liberal piety performatively establish the very (liberal) distinction between state and

civil society that they also presuppose.

Conclusion: The Achievement, and Limitations, of the Ottoman Chronotope of Istanbul

Pious urban citizenship, rooted in a deep nostalgia for the Ottoman era and the aesthetics

that this era inspires, is an aspiration and cherished ideal for a great many Istanbulites. As I have

endeavored to show through a constellation of ethnographic examples, this aspiration and ideal

achieves coherence and legitimacy within the types of sociality and organization that the

institutions of Turkish civil society encourage. In a sense, these institutions, their discourses, and

constitutive modes of publicness seek to organize and fix the definition of the city of Istanbul as

155
Although, as we will see in Chapter Five, the relationship of Alevi civil society institutions to
the state is much more explicitly ‘politicized’ than that of the Sunni groups discussed in this
chapter.
definitively Ottoman. The pious chronotope of neo-Ottoman Istanbul, like any chronotope, is

inhabitable, but only up to a point—in particular, as a formation that aspires to liberal publicness,

it necessarily tolerates alternative chronotopes and imaginations of space and place. To draw but

one contrastive instance from my research, Alevi organizations such as the Cem Foundation do

not articulate or participate in the neo-Ottoman chronotope of Istanbul. Indeed, Istanbul is not a

site within the Alevi chronotope at all—as I discuss in Chapters Three and Five, Alevi

organizations tend to idealize the bucolic authenticity of rural Anatolia and, occasionally, the ur-

motherland of central Asia. In as much as Alevism was primarily a rural socio-religious

community during Ottoman times, residing on the peripheries of the Empire, the former Ottoman

capital has not ideological or aesthetic premium for Alevis. On the other hand, as I discuss at

greater length in the next chapter, Alevi institutions are far more receptive to Kemalist aesthetics

than their Sunni peers.

There are, of course, other competing ideologies of the city—most notably, the Kemalist

chronotope that I have mentioned on several occasions. Beyond the play of multiple

chronotopes, however, the intractable heterogeneity of urban existence also gives pause to the

all-encompassing aspiration of neo-Ottomanism as a public ideology of place and space. To

adopt a motif from Michel de Certeau, which I already considered in my Introduction:

“networks of…moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author

nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to

representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other (1984: 93).” No chronotope, neo-

Ottoman or otherwise, can contain or predict all of these trajectories. And as an ethnographer of

and in the city, I have difficulty imagining otherwise. For my paths, too, were diverse, disparate,
occasionally uncharted. They often begged contradiction and inspired challenge. Above all,

they demanded critical respect for the constant struggle that defines the city, the shuttling

between singularity and multiplicity that is, in the end, a suitable definition of both urban

existence and the ethnographic endeavor.

 Chapter Five
Confessional Pluralism and Liberal Piety:
Aspirations to Legitimate Religious Difference in Contemporary Turkey

Introduction: “Our Brown vs. the Board of Education”

The dreary lot, stretched across the slope of a low hill on the far eastern fringes of Asian

Istanbul, was an unlikely setting for a dream. Yet, as I was soon to learn, this very construction

site had become a cause célèbre for Turkey’s Alevi Community, a crucial epicenter in their

struggle for recognition as a legitimate religious minority. As February’s grey clouds continued

to dump sleet upon us, Sadegül Hanım, my Alevi friend whom we already encountered at the

cem ceremony in Chapter Three, directed my attention to an unfinished concrete slab from which

a cluster of steel rods protruded, like a porcupine’s quills: “The cem156 house (cem evi) will be

located here. Near the top of the hill will be the funeral home.157 Just down the way a bit will be

the school and education center.”158 She beamed with clear, resolute pride, but I had difficulty

imagining the elaborate campus she described emerging from the mud and piles of PVC pipe

spread out before me. The sleet began to worsen, and Sadegül suggested that we retire to the

only complete building on the site, a ramshackle gecekondu159 hut that temporarily served as the

156
The cem is the definitive ritual practice of Alevism. There are variety of different types of
cem, often coordinating a reenactment of the Prophet Muhammad’s ascent into heaven (Arabic
mi’raj, Turkish miraç) and glorifying Ali, Muhammad’s son-in-law and the first of the Shi’a
imams. In general, a cem features circumambulatory semah performances by both men and
women, accompanied by bards (ozanlar) playing lutes such as the bağlama and saz. For more
detailed descriptions of the cem, see Chapter Three, Shankland 1993: 140 ff. and Stokes 1996.
See also Chapter Three, footnote 41.
157
Alevi funerary practices are substantially different than those of Sunnis, and my Alevi friends
frequently complained of being forced to carry out funeral in mosques rather than cem houses.
158
Cem evimiz burada, cenaze evi tepede bulunacak. Aşağıda okul ve eğitim merkezi dikilecek..
159
Gecekondu—literally ‘put up at night’—is the catch-all term for ‘unofficial’ constructions or
‘squatter settlements’ in Istanbul, Ankara, and Turkey’s other urban centers. The phenomenon
of gecekondular began in earnest with the migration from rural to urban areas in the 1950s; some
estimates put the percentage of gecekondu housing in Istanbul at as high as fifty percent or more.
See Yalçıntan and Erbaş 2003 and Keyder 1999b.
offices of the Sultanbeyli Pir Sultan Abdal160 Association and Cem House (Sültanbeyli Pir Sultan

Abdal Derneği ve Cem Evi). Shivering, I readily agreed.

Inside the low, tin-roofed structure, a clutch of graying, paunchy men squatted

unceremoniously in a semi-circle in front of a wood and coal-burning stove, smoking tobacco

pipes and chatting idly in staccato Sivas accents. Sadegül encouraged me to join them, and

introduced me to the Association’s senior dede161 before retreating to a makeshift kitchen in

order to brew another samovar of tea. I eagerly took up a place near the stove, and glanced with

curiosity at the walls of the modest room. Mass-produced posters of Ali, Hüseyin, Hacı

Bektaş,162 and Pir Sultan Abdal—staples in all of the Alevi organizations that I visited during my

fieldwork—competed for space with yellowed newspaper articles detailing the legal struggles of

the Sultanbeyli Cem House. As my eyes wandered, the dede and several other wizened men

began to quiz me on my research, and readily responded to my questions about the Cem House

in particular and the historical precedents of Turkish Alevism (Alevilik) in general. The jovial

dede underscored the inimitable importance of the Ehl-i Beyt (the quasi-family unit of the

Prophet Muhammad, his daughter Fatma, his son-in-law Ali, and Ali’s two sons Hasan and

Hüseyin) to all Muslims, and an earnest, younger man explained the unique role played by Hacı

160
Pir Sultan Abdal was a Turcoman Alevi poet and bard (ozan) who lived in Sivas during the
15 and 16th centuries CE. He was unsparing in his criticism of the local Ottoman governor, and
th

was eventually hung for his insurgent tendencies. He is still cherished as an icon of resistance
among contemporary Alevis, and many Alevi organizations bear his name. See Bezirci 1986.
161
Alevis are generally divided into two genealogical lineages, dedeler (literally, ‘grandfathers’,
but in this context closer to ‘instructors’ or ‘ritual specialists’) and talipler (‘suitors’). Dedes
constitute approximately ten percent of all Alevis; members of dede lineages still accord great
respect among Alevis in general. See Shankland 1993: 86-87.
162
Hacı Bektaş Veli was a Persian mystic and philosopher who lived in Anatolia during the 13th
Century CE, and is considered to be one of the principal codifiers of Alevism as it known in
Turkey today. See Sezgin 1990.
Bektaş in the articulation of Alevism in Anatolia. An hour or so passed easily before Sadegül,

who had been distracted by an urgent telephone call, returned with fresh tea.

I had first met Sadegül Hanım, the chairwoman (başkan) of the Sultanbeyli Pir Sultan

Abdal Association, several weeks earlier during a research trip to Ankara to attend the Aşure

festivities held at the Hacı Bektaş Foundation, which I described in Chapter Three.

Serendipitously, she was participating in an educational seminar on discrimination hosted by the

Hacı Bektaş Foundation on that very day; Cahit, my friend and contact at the Foundation,

insisted that I meet her, describing her with open admiration as one of the leaders of the “Alevi

struggle for civil rights (Aleviler’in siyasi haklar mücadelesi).” Cahit introduced us, and Sadegül

immediately invited me to visit her in Sultanbeyli upon my return to Istanbul. My primary goal

in traveling to Sultanbeyli—easily 30 km distant from my home in Şişli, on the European side of

Istanbul—on that frigid February afternoon was to learn more about this Alevi civil rights

struggle. As Sadegül refreshed my tea, I prompted her to narrate the story of the Sultanbeyli

Cem House, and its unique importance to Turkish Alevism. With interrupting help from several

of the assembled men, she gladly obliged: “As you know, the state and the Presidency of

Religious Affairs do not recognize Alevism. They do not fund cem houses, they insist that we

worship in mosques like Sunnis. We decided to build a cem house here, in one of Istanbul’s

most conservative Sunni neighborhoods, to challenge this discrimination. We too have a right to

be recognized.”163

Sadegül went on to enumerate the history of court cases (davalar) between the

Sultanbeyli Municipal Government (Sultanbeyli Belediyesi) and the Association. The municipal

163
Bildiğiniz gibi, devlet, Diyanet Alevliği tanımaz. Cem evlerimizi desteklemiyorlar, Sunniler
gibi camiilerde ibadet etmemizi istiyorlar. İşte bu yüzden İstanbul’un en tutucu mahallelerinden
biri cem evimizi inşa etmeye karar verdik, böylece ayrımcılığa karşı mücadele ediyoruz.
Tanınmaya hakımız var.
mayor from the Sunni-affiliated Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AK

Partisi), in conjunction with the Presidency of Religious Affairs, had attempted to close the

Association on a number of different grounds. Initially, the municipal government had proposed

a compromise: They would agree to recognize the Cem House as a mosque, thereby qualifying

it to receive funding from the Presidency of Religious Affairs. The Association rejected this

compromise outright—the entire point of their campaign, Sadegül emphasized, was to achieve

recognition as a religious minority (dini azınlık) characterized by a different form of worship

than that of Sunni Muslims.164 Following this, the Municipality had sued for the closure of the

Association on the basis of a technicality concerning building permits, a cynical argument

considering the vast number of unofficial residences (gecekondular) in Sultanbeyli generally.

Over the course of these court cases, the Sultanbeyli Cem House had become a rallying cry and

object of admiration for other Alevi organizations, and Sadegül soon found herself fielding calls

from Alevi organizations throughout Turkey hoping to model their own struggles for recognition

on the Sultanbeyli precedent. She ended her summary of the history of the Sultanbeyli Cem

House with a provocative comparison: “The importance of our struggle is huge. This is our

Brown vs. the Board of Education.”165 As she finished speaking, the dede removed his pipe from

his mouth, and beamed proudly. I was unsure whether he understood the substance of her

analogy to the U.S. Supreme Court Case that ended racial segregation in American public

schools, but he clearly understood its implication.

164
Diyanet, or the Presidency of Religious Affairs, is responsible for training all of Turkey’s
imams and overseeing all mosques. Its understanding of Islam derives entirely from the Sunni
Hanafi School. Although the minority status of Turkey’s Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox
and Jewish Communities was protected by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, the Presidency of
Religious Affairs (and the Turkish state in general) does not recognize any ‘Muslim’ minority
religious communities. I expand further on this point below.
165
Mücadelemizin önemi koskocaman. Sizde Brown vs. Board of Education var, bizde
Sultanbeyli Cem Evi.
The Kemalist Project of Homogeneity and Aspirations to Legitimate Religious Difference

Sadegül Hanım’s overt comparison between the obstacles facing Turkey’s Alevi

Community and the mid-Twentieth Century struggle for legal equality and civil rights on the part

of African Americans was striking, but not wholly unanticipated. Throughout my two years of

fieldwork among Turkey’s Islamic civil society organizations, I encountered many permutations

on the relationship between religious identity and the ideals of tolerant multiculturalism. More

so than at any previous juncture in Turkish Republican history, the politics of pluralism and the

politics of piety mutually affect and entail each other in the current moment. In this chapter, I

marshal ethnographic examples to argue that liberal piety is both an ineluctable means to and a

significant end of confessional pluralism in contemporary Turkey. My presentation shuttles

among the institutions and communities of civil Turkish Islam that have oriented my argument

through the dissertation: urban Alevi organizations, such as the Sultanybeyli Pir Sultan Abdal

Association, as well as foundations affiliated with Turkey’s Nur and Gülen Communities. On the

one hand, my ethnographic rendering will demonstrate that a commitment to confessional

pluralism is crucial to establishing the legitimacy of pious practices and identities that are not

(yet) recognized by the institutions of the Turkish state. On the other hand, I will argue that a

liberal interpretation of Islamic piety is itself a central to the broader project of cultural and

political pluralism within Turkey today.

As I outlined in Chapter One, contemporary Turkish politics, and the pious organizations

of Turkish civil society in particular, are defined by a fundamental, (neol)iberal reorientation of

the relationship between étatist Kemalism and Islam. Concomitant with a partial retreat of the

homogeneous ideal of Kemalism, Islamic civil society institutions have come to champion
liberal piety and, in many cases, pious liberalism—earlier, I described this dynamic as a

negotiation between the imperatives of ‘the laicist’ and ‘the secular’, between the hegemony of

political society and the depoliticized imagination of liberal governmenality. Within this shifting

context of the present, the civil Islamic organizations of my study have become political actors

and interlocutors in a pluralist atmosphere defined by a “politics of recognition” (Taylor 1994;

see also Markell 2003), a new formation on the topography of the political in Turkey. To

varying degrees, most of Turkey’s civil Islamic groups champion narratives of religious

authenticity as a basis for political legitimacy and recognition. For the Alevi Community, the

authenticity of traditional practice rooted in Central Asian and Anatolian tradition undergirds the

demand for recognition and equal protection from the state. For Sunni groups affiliated with the

Nur and Gülen Communities, pious authenticity is a principal justification for public

independence from the homogeneous Sunni Islam produced and maintained by the Presidency of

Religious Affairs.

The processes that shape and demand ‘recognizable’ political identities are, of course, not

limited to Turkey alone. In the Indian context, Partha Chatterjee (1998) has admirably

delineated the contradictions that result when a liberal politics of recognition, premised on an

individual citizen-subject, is applied to collective cultural and religious groups. As he argues,

the very aspiration to legitimate difference on a collective level demands a homogeneous,

‘recognizable’ identity that militates against variation within a collectivity; the difference of a

collective cannot tolerate difference within the collective (Ibid.: 376). My ethnographic analysis

in this chapter traces similar tensions in the Alevi, Nur and Gülen Communitites, where the

production of ‘recognizable’ liberal pious identities necessarily privileges some discourses and
practices over others. Thus, I focus generally on pluralism and multiculturalism as projects that

entail the production of meaningful differences, rather than mere ‘reflections’ of pristine,

preexisting identities (cf. Kymlicka 1995; Grillo 1998).166

Another principal challenge of my research addresses one of the constitutive paradoxes of

pluralism itself: Are the objects of representation artifacts of the process of representation itself?

In other words, do the categories of ‘pluralism’, ‘publicness’, and ‘liberal piety’ produce the very

diversity of practices and precepts that practitioners themselves claim precede the venture of

representation in pristine, coherent ways? These are indeed vexatious questions. Certainly, as

Taylor and others have amply noted, the logic of authenticity presupposes that the objects of

representation logically precede the process of representation itself. Nonetheless, critical studies

of liberal multiculturalism by anthropologists such as Elizabeth Povinelli (2002) have

persuasively argued that one of the unique powers of modern, state-based pluralism is the ability

to produce coherent objects of and for recognition (a process that necessarily denies practices

that defy liberal expectations and sensibilities). I do not claim to unravel these difficult

conceptual and political dilemmas concerning multicultural pluralism and its means of

recognition here. Rather, I seek purchase on my own ethnographic context that both

acknowledges the power of claims to pre-representational authenticity on the part of my

interluctors while also remaining alert to the creative and productive aspects of multicultural

recognition itself. Above all, my aim is not to demonstrate that the institutions and practices of

the Alevi, Nur, and Gülen communities—not to mention other civil Islamic groups—are all

somehow ‘the same’ merely because they invoke and participate in the same logics of

166
It is worth noting that anthropological theorists of ‘antagonistic tolerance’, like many theorists
of pluralism and multiculturalism, also tend to rest their arguments on the pediment of
problematic, essentialized identities. See, for example, Hayden 2002.
recognition and representation. Anyone who possesses a passing familiarity with Turkish

politics, religion and civil society understands that this is clearly not the case. Rather, I aspire to

render the productivity of the paradox of pluralism—the manner in which the aspiration and

process of recognition exerts both centripetal and centrifugal force upon religious practices and

identities, and the means by which commitments to inter-confessional diversity and plurality

produce new modes of pious singularity.

Negotiating between the Difference of the Community and Difference within the Community:
Confessional Pluralism of and for Turkey’s Alevi Civil Society Organizations

Huddling against the cold at the bus stop in Sultanbeyli, on the first leg of my protracted

journey back to the center of Istanbul, I pondered the lessons of the day. As usual, I had been

struck by the curious, almost contradictory project of Alevism in the context of civil society.

Both on that afternoon in Sultanbeyli and several weeks earlier at the Hacı Bektaş Foundation in

Ankara, I had the keen sense of witnessing an exemplary instance of liberal identity politics.

Sadegül Hanım’s striking comparison between the legal struggle to establish the religious

legitimacy of the Sultanbeyli Cem House and Brown vs. Board of Education certainly bolstered

this impression. More generally, my interlocutors in both contexts regularly rattled off the key

words and phrases of identity-based civil rights movements: equal protection before the law, end

to discrimination, tolerance and respect, recognition. Clearly, it seemed to me, these claims

presuppose a coherent, circumscribed identity as the grounds for recognition and equal

protection. And yet, in these same contexts, I witnessed impassioned, often contentious

arguments over the very definition of Alevism itself. At the Hacı Bektaş Foundation, an

assembly of dedes hotly debated whether there are Kurdish, as well as Turkish, Alevis.167 During

167
The Zaza-speaking Kurds of the province of Tünceli (Dersim in Kurdish) generally consider
themselves to be Alevis, but frequently experience resistance to this claim from Turkish Alevis.
On this particular occasion, I witnessed an argument over this very question between a Kurdish
my afternoon at the Sultanbeyli Cem House, a smaller group of Alevi men argued over the

‘sources’ (kökler) of Alevism, with particular disagreement over the importance of the

inheritance of central Asian ‘shamanistic’ (şamanizm) traditions.

In the midst of this ethnographic muddle, I was faced by a somewhat naïve but

provocative question: How can a community demand collective recognition when there is no

consensus on the identity of the collectivity in the first place? This section of the chapter

represents a more prolonged, articulate attempt to grapple productively with this dilemma. In

order to do so, I will compare and contrast the aspirations, activities, and definitions of Alevism

practiced and promoted by three different Alevi civil society organizations. Two of these

organizations, the aforementioned Hacı Bektaş Foundation and the Cem Foundation (Cem

Vakfı), are among the most prominent Alevi institutions in all of Turkey; the third, the Ehl-i Beyt

Foundation (Ehl-i Beyt Vakfı) fascinates me precisely because of its marginality to Alevism as a

whole. Over the course of my discussion, I will outline the tensions and occasional

reconciliations between the commitment to confessional pluralism as a means to advocating a

singular, collective Alevi identity and the plurality of histories and practices that this identity

only partially succeeds in commensurating.

Traditional Coherence and Aspirations to Equality: The Cem Foundation

The sprawling offices of the Cem Foundation were one of my more frequent destinations

during my fieldwork. The building that houses the Foundation—a modern, box-like, six story

structure built from thick steel beams covered by a carapace of bluish reflective glass—

dominates the surrounding neighborhood of Kocasinan, one of the many anonymous, lower

man from Dersim/Tünceli and a Turkish dede from Erzincan. See Munzuroğlu 2004.
middle class and blue collar residential districts that have rapidly sprung up on the outskirts of

Istanbul over the past half century (see also Erdemir 2005: 944). Upon my arrival at the Cem

Foundation, I was conveyed immediately to the Foundation chairman and vice president for the

ritualized greeting offered to “esteemed guests” (değerli misafirler), especially foreign

researchers such as myself. Following this brief presentation, I descended to the library and

conference room, where Ayhan Bey, one of the Foundation’s staff researchers (araştırmacılar),

had his office.

From the perspective of the Cem Foundation, Ayhan Bey explained, Alevism is above all

a coherent religious tradition that incorporates elements of both Central Asian

mystical/shamanistic practices and Shi’a Islam (though Shi’ism itself is far different from

Alevism in spite of their similar heritage). One of the primary activities supported by the Cem

Foundation is research into the historical roots of Alevi traditions in order to provide a

comprehensive definition of Alevism generally. Ayhan Bey summarized this definition of

Alevism as devotion to the Ehl-i Beyt, Hacı Bektaş, Pir Sultan Abdal, and other Alevi saints

(pirler, veliler) as practiced in the cem ceremony, within the unique ritual space of the cem

house. He was adamant concerning the necessary relationship between Alevi identity and the

cem: “Those who do not perform the cem cannot call themselves Alevis.”168 Additionally,

Ayhan Bey championed the ‘traditional’ (geleneksel) lack of gender segregation in the Cem

Ceremony as evidence for the ‘primordial’ (ilkel) modernity and liberalness of the Alevi

Community.

Over the course of our many conversations, I gently pressed Ayhan Bey to reflect upon

the emphasis on coherence that frames the Cem Foundation’s research on and definition of

168
Cem yapmayanlar kendileri ‘Alevi’ demez.
Alevism. Gradually, Ayhan presented me with an intriguing answer rooted in a political

rationalization. He began by pointing out the continual refusal of the Turkish state, as embodied

by the Presidency of Religious Affairs, to recognize Alevism as a ‘true minority’ (gerçek bir

azınlık)—the very dilemma that the Sultanbeyli Pir Sultan Abdal Association has attempted to

rectify through legal means. This lack of recognition has two tragic consequences: Alevis,

unlike their Sunni counterparts, do not receive state funding for their places of worship (Cem

Houses), and Alevi children are forced to learn Sunni beliefs and practices in the mandatory

religion classes (zorunlu din dersleri) taught in Turkish public schools. After reciting these

typical Alevi complaints, Ayhan Bey adduced an explanation for the state’s discrimination that

was, surprisingly, rooted in the social history of Alevism itself. While he acknowledged

morosely that the Presidency of Religious Affairs remains a staunchly Sunni institution, he also

lamented the lack of organization and dispersion of Alevis, both socially and doctrinally. The

Presidency of Religious Affairs is able to ignore Alevis’ collective demands for recognition

because, unlike the supposed homogeneity of Sunni Islam, so many different practices and

beliefs characterize Alevism. To make matters worse, the association of Alevis with leftist

political movements and the claims made by certain prominent Alevis that Alevism is ‘outside of

Islam entirely’ (İslamiyet’in dışında)169 only reinforce Sunni and state-based biases against

Alevism. The Cem Foundation struggles to counteract this bias by lobbying the state, primarily

through informal means, to recognize Alevism as a coherent religion, defined by its own

distinctive traditions. This lobbying is rooted strongly in the ideal of confessional pluralism:

The Cem Foundation has no interest in denying the right of Sunnis to practice their own

traditions—it merely wants to establish Alevism on an equal footing with Sunni Islam. The two
169
See for instance, the interview in Radikal Gazetesi with Kazım Genç, chairman of the
Federation of Pir Sultan Abdal Asssociations, titled “Alevism is not Part of Islam” (“Alevilik
İslamiyet’in içinde değil”) (Düzel 2005).
principal criteria of equality are the inclusion of Alevism in mandatory religion classes and the

provision of public funding for cem houses and other Alevi institutions, in proportion to the

monies that the Presidency of Religious Affairs provides for the construction and upkeep of

mosques, the training of imams, and other Sunni religious matters.

Although he did not say so specifically, Ayhan Bey’s remarks nonetheless evinced a

precise interpretation of the nature of secularism in contemporary Turkey. By arguing that

Alevis should receive proportional representation in religion classes and proportional funding for

matters of religious practice, Ayhan Bey tacitly accepted the statist dispensation of Kemalist

laicism. In rather simplistic terms, from the perspective of the Cem Foundation, the ‘system’ is

not flawed in and of itself; it merely needs to live up to the liberal, pluralist goal of allowing

equal participation and representation of minority religious communities. For instance, the Cem

Foundation does not lobby for the removal of the Presidency of Religious Affairs entirely, and

tends to emphasize equality and brotherhood among Sunni and Alevi Muslims. From the Cem

Foundation’s perspective, then, liberal piety and confessional pluralism are not necessarily at

odds with the state’s influence in matters of religion; rather, a commitment to confessional

pluralism requires a better state. As we will see, however, this political optimism does not apply

to all Alevi organizations.

Horizons of Liberal Secularism: The Hacı Bektaş Veli Anatolian Culture Foundation

On a sweaty, dusty afternoon in August 2006, I met with Cahit, a young employee of the

Hacı Bektaş Foundation, in a smoky, leftist café near the metropolitan bustle of Kızılay Square

in downtown Ankara. Our chosen meeting place spoke volumes: It would be unlikely to find a

member of the Cem Foundation in such an establishment. Over incessant cigarettes and cups of
tea, which eventually transformed into large mugs of Efes, the de facto national brand of pilsner

in Turkey, Cahit described his duties and activities at the Hacı Bektaş Foundation, along with the

aims of the organization as a whole. Gradually, the conversation turned inevitably to the

Prsidency of Religious Affairs, and its regrettable role in Alevi life. Cahit’s comments, and his

comparison between the Cem Foundation and the Hacı Bektaş Foundation in particular, were

striking: “We don’t want anything to do with the Presidency of Religious Affairs. We’d prefer

if it didn’t exist. And that’s the basic difference between us and the Cem Foundation: They

claim that the state should support both Sunnis and Alevis. In our opinion, the state should

support neither Sunnis nor Alevis. Each community should attend to its own needs, separate

from the State. This is the true meaning of secularism.”170

Unlike Ayhan Bey at the Cem Foundation, Cahit was not content merely to demand equal

representation and compensation from the state as it already exists in Turkey. To adapt Partha

Chatterjee’s argument again, the Cem Foundation emphasizes the principle of equality, which

requires that the state “not give preference to one religion over another,” while the Hacı Bektaş

Foundation argues that the principle of liberty—“that the state permit the practice of any

religion”—necessitates a principle of nonintervention (Chatterjee 1998: 358). For the Hacı

Bektaş Foundation, a more thoroughly liberal model of secularism as the nonintervention of the

state in all religious affairs, which many of my informants referred to as the ‘American model’

(Amerikan model, Amerika örneği), trumps the principle of equality. One of the primary

activities of the Foundation is to sue for the removal of institutions that are perceived to act as an

170
Diyanet’le işimiz yok. Bizce Diyanet olmasın, öylece daha iyi olurdu. Cem Vakfı ve bizim
aramızda en önemli fark budur, onlara göre devlet hem Sunniler hem de Aleviler desteklesin,
bizce ise ne Sunniler ne de Aleviler desteklemesin. Bütün cemaatler, topluluklar kendi
ihtiyaçlara baksın, karşılaşsın. İşte laikliğin gerçek anlamı bu zaten.
impediment to the principle of religious liberty and the ‘true meaning of secularism’—in

Asadian (2003) terms, a valorization of ‘the secular’ as a foil to ‘the laicist’. In pursuit of this

aim, the Foundation has opened several court cases suing for the removal of the Presidency of

Religious Affairs and an end to mandatory religion classes. While the suits against the

Presidency have been unsuccessful, the Foundation’s lawyers have made partial inroads against

mandatory religion classes: In a 2006 decision, a mid-level court held that Alevi children could

not be forced to learn from textbooks that only teach Sunni beliefs and practices.

As with the Cem Foundation, the politics of representation that the Hacı Bektaş

Foundation espouses and marshals is inseparable from its interpretation of Alevi beliefs and

practices. While the Cem Foundation demonstrates intense concern for streamlining and

formalizing a unitary corpus of beliefs and practices that constitute Alevism, the Hacı Bektaş

Foundation is far more content to allow for a plurality of Alevisms. This relative acceptance of a

plurality of Alevi beliefs and practices corresponds to a more lenient attitude toward the ‘Central

Asian’ and shamanistic aspects of Alevism. More precisely, the definition of Alevism as a

‘religion’, with a characteristic tradition or set of traditions, is not of particular interest to the

Hacı Bektaş Foundation.171 Concomitantly, the Hacı Bektaş Foundation champions a

substantially different ideal of confessional pluralism than the Cem Foundation. For the Cem

Foundation, the state is the necessary guarantor of pluralist equality among different religious

communities. For the Hacı Bektaş Foundation, on the other hand, religious pluralism can only

exist in the absence of State intervention in religious identification and practice.

The Compelling Marginality of the Ehl-i Beyt Foundation

171
In this respect, it is telling that several of my friends affiliated with the Hacı Bektaş
Foundation described themselves as ‘irreligious’ or ‘atheist’ (dinsiz, ateist), and understood
Alevism more as a cultural rather than religious tradition.
 “Most Alevis have no idea what Alevism is, you know. They think that it’s mysticism, or

communism. That’s why our Foundation is so important: We are trying to teach Alevis to

understand and to be themselves.”172 I was sitting in the gleaming offices of the Ehl-i Beyt

Foundation, on the second floor of an office building overlooking the central square of

Zeytinburnu, a middle-class neighborhood located on the shore of the Marmara Sea near

Istanbul’s Atatürk Airport. As I did my best to finish the ample meal of kuru fasulye (stewed

beans) that had been placed in front of me, Fermani Bey, the chairman of the Foundation,

explained the Foundation’s plans for an international Alevi University. Fermani Bey’s son, a

chic, New York-educated man several years my junior, had joined us (for my benefit and

comfort, I imagined), and underscored or revised his father’s presentation as he felt necessary.

After I had finished struggling with my yoghurt and dried beans in tomato sauce, I opened the

question that had brought me to their offices that day: How does the Ehl-i Beyt Foundation

understand Alevism? What beliefs and practices constitute it? Fermani Bey proceeded to

explain that Alevism is, at its basis, no more nor less than ‘the essential truth of Islam’ (İslam’ın

özu), as practiced and believed by Muslims throughout the world. In particular, he emphasized

the centrality of the Ehl-i Beyt as the inspirational light of Islam. He mentioned the tragedy of

Hüseyin’s death at Kerbala, and the importance of Hacı Bektaş as a renewer and reanimator

(canlandırıcı) of Islam. On the other hand, he bemoaned the ‘infiltration’ of Central Asian

mystical and shamanic practices within Alevi ritual, as well as the association of Turkish Alevis

with leftist political movements, which he described as ‘reactionary’ (irtica).173

172
Çoğu Aleviler Aleviliği bilmiyorlar, anlamıyorlar. Mistisizm, komünizm filan diye
düsünüyorlar. Bu yüzden vakfımız önemlidir, Alevilere kendileri olmayı, kendiliğini anlamayı
öğretmeye çalışıyoruz.
173
‘Reactionary, or ‘irtica’, is a frequent term used in media and political debates to delegitimize
opponents as contrary to the best interests of the nation and state. Therefore, its use in this
context is rather provocative.
 Perhaps the most interesting aspects of Fermani Bey’s understanding of Alevism were

latent, revealed in what he did not say. For instance, although his emphasis on the Ehl-i Beyt

and the Battle of Kerbala are typical of Shi’a Islam, he strictly avoided the term Şia in

association with Alevism (to make such an association is almost politically impossible in Turkey,

given the strong association of Shi’a Islam with Iran, and the bugbear of fundamentalism or

Şeriatçılık). Nor did Fermani Bey mention the cem ceremony, which many Alevi consider to be

definitive of Alevism itself (recall, for instance, the Cem Foundation researcher Ayhan Bey’s

remarks above). From the perspective of the organizers of the Ehl-i Beyt Foundation, the cem is

considered to be a ‘ritual innovation’ (adet değişikliği), with roots in Central Asian (rather than

Arab-Islamic) religious traditions, and therefore contrary to the ‘essence’ of Islam. A similarly

inspired, careful choice of wording is found in the description of the Ehl-i Beyt Foundation’s

activities and goals on the Foundation website. A section describing the annual celebration of

the philosophy of Hacı Bektaş sponsored by the Foundation states that “ceremonies which honor

Hacı Bektaş Veli in a traditional manner are coordinated by the Ehl-i Beyt Foundation every

year.”174 Although these ‘traditional’ ceremonies almost certainly resemble a cem, the word cem

itself is avoided. Equally provocative is the fact that, as the website goes on to say, the

Foundation organizes activities dedicated to Rumi (Mevlana), the famous Sufi philosopher and

poet from the Turkish city of Konya, who was decidedly not Alevi or Shi’a.175

As I quickly learned during my research with a variety of Alevi civil society

organizations, the Ehl-i Beyt Foundation is not well-liked in the Alevi Community at large.

When I mentioned that I had interviewed officials from Ehl-i Beyt to other Alevi friends, I was

174
Ehl-i Beyt Vakfı tarafından her yıl geleneksel bir şekilde kutlanan Hacı Bektaş-ı Veli anma
törenleri… (Emphasis mine).
175
For reference, see http://www.ehlibeyt.org.tr/tr/oku2.asp?gd=21.
frequently greeted with a scoff and a comment along the lines of “they’re Alevis who want to be

Sunnis” or, more succinctly, “they’re members of the Justice and Development Party.”176 One

of the primary reasons that the Ehl-i Beyt Foundation is frequently criticized as ‘assimilationist’

(asimilasyoncu) by other Alevis is precisely because they have been sought out and accepted a

role as a representative Alevi voice within political and civil society circles associated with

Sunni revivalism in Turkey. Tellingly, the Ehl-i Beyt Foundation was first recommended to me

by a member of the Turkish Charitable Organizations Foundation (Türkiye Gönüllü Teşeküller

Vakfı), an ‘umbrella organization’ (şemsiye kuruluşu) dedicated to fostering cooperation among

Sunni Turkish charities. Ehl-i Beyt’s links to the governing Justice and Development Party are

equally evident. The Foundation website features prominent photographs of Fermani Bey with

such AKP luminaries as President Abdullah Gül and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan;

moreover, on the very day that I first met him, Fermani Bey had just returned from a memorial

service (anma töreni) commemorating the death of former Prime Minister Turgut Özal, who is

now revered as the architect of neoliberalism and the political legitimization of Sunni Islam in

Turkey (Öniş 2005).177 From the limited perspective of party politics, the idea of a chairman of

an Alevi foundation rubbing elbows with the Sunni-oriented political establishment is rather

shocking, yet Fermani Bey and the Ehl-i Beyt Foundation have readily accepted this mantle, and

have therefore been dismissed as cynical political opportunists by other Alevis.

It is not my desire or place to evaluate the specific political aspirations of the members of

the Ehl-i Beyt Foundation. Rather, I am interested in delineating how Ehl-i Beyt coordinates a

176
Sunni olmak isteyen Aleviler onlar, AKP’liler ya!
177
I also frequently encountered Fermani Bey at functions organized by groups such as the
Turkish Charitable Organizations Foundation, where he was present as the sole Alevi
‘representative’ of the Turkish nongovernmental sphere dedicated to pious charity. For instance,
I ran into him unexpectedly at the yearly Ramadan fast-breaking meal (iftar) sponsored by the
Turkish Charitable Organizations Foundation in both 2006 and 2007.
politics of representation on the basis of a specific interpretation of Alevi tradition. The Ehl-i

Beyt Foundation’s conception of Alevism actively downplays both the Central Asian roots of

Alevi practices and, more generally, all differences within Islam as a whole. As the Foundation

website proclaims, “From the perspective of the Ehl-i Beyt Foundation, there is no disagreement,

there is unity, compassion and affection, there is no Alevi-Sunni distinction, there is the

brotherhood of Islam and the brotherhood of humankind.”178 With this quote in mind, one might

say that the Ehl-i Beyt Foundation unravels the dilemma of collective representation by denying

that Alevism constitutes a difference that must be recognized altogether. This denial of much of

what is generally considered to be ‘Alevi tradition’ (e.g. the cem), and the political possibilities

of representation that accrue to this denial, have provoked marked skepticism and disdain on the

part of those Alevis (in my experience, the vast majority) who continue to aspire to a space for

legitimate religious difference.

Above all, the marginality of the Ehl-i Beyt Foundation reveals one of the fundamental

tensions of the Alevi commitment to confessional pluralism. As I have discussed, organizations

such as the Hacı Bektaş Foundation promote tolerance of a multiplicity of definitions of

‘Alevism’ itself. Moreover, heated debate concerning the sources and constituent practices of

Alevism has by no means ceased—indeed, the vast diversity of civil society organizations

devoted to Alevi concerns suggests that these very differences of interpretation and practice both

bolster and rely upon institutional plurality. Nonetheless, there is one difference within the Alevi

Community that cannot be tolerated: The interpretation of Alevism that denies its difference

altogether. Although the members of the Ehl-i Beyt Foundation do not necessarily claim to deny

178
Dünya Ehl-i Beyt Vakfı’nın meşalesinde ayrılık yoktur, birlik vardır, sevgi vardır, muhabbet
vardır, Alevilik-Sunnilik yoktur, İslam kardeşligi vardırü insane kardeşliği vardır.
the difference of Alevism entirely, their proximity to Sunni political parties and civil society

organizations, along with their dismissal of Alevism’s Central Asian precedents, has led most

Alevis to condemn them as ‘assimilationist’. Simultaneously, the very marginality of the Ehl-i

Beyt Foundation to the collective concerns expressed by the Sultanbeyli Cem House, the Cem

Foundation and the Hacı Bektaş Foundation has encouraged its emergence as a privileged

interlocutor within a broader field of Sunni organizations. While a politics of difference defines

the general Alevi commitment to confessional pluralism, the Ehl-i Beyt has succeeded in

establishing a space within Turkish Islamic civil society on the basis of a politics of in-

difference.

On the whole, the Alevi civil society organizations of contemporary Turkey invoke and

idealize liberal piety in two mutually-inflecting ways. As I was told so frequently throughout my

fieldwork, the distinctive piety of Alevis—best represented by the cem ceremony and its gender

integration—is primordially liberal. In order to preserve this primordial liberal piety, Alevis

must counter the discriminatory attitude of the Turkish state. Notably, ‘the state’ in this context

is synonymous with the Presidency of Religious Affairs—Alevis rarely criticize Kemalism, and

generally voice sincere respect for Atatürk himself. Indeed, oversized images of Atatürk

himself, worthy of any dyed-in-the-wool Kemalist, are frequently displayed at Alevi

organizations, cheek-to-jowl with those of Pir Sultan Abdal and Hacı Bektaş. For Alevi civil

society organizations, then, the problem of confessional pluralism is by definition a problem of

the state’s definition and promulgation of a certain type of religion. If the state were to treat all

religious communities equally, or not interfere with their ability to worship as they chose, then

religious pluralism would necessarily flourish. For Turkey’s Sunni civil society organizations,
on the other hand, the dilemmas of confessional pluralism and liberal piety are not so clearly

defined as a problem of state discrimination among religious communities. As the remaining

sections of this chapter show, groups such as the Nur Community and the Gülen Community

practice confessional pluralism and liberal piety as a means to countering the Kemalist definition

of religion, and its proper, privatized place, in general.

“Positive Action” (Müspet) as a Principle of Liberal Pluralism: The Nur Community

A clutch of nine and ten year old boys ricocheted around the narrow room, some

wrestling, others bearing trays of fresh fruit and tea. Can Hoca, an elegant, bright-eyed man in

his sixties, raised his voice to restore order: “Youngsters! We haven’t fully understood the

passage yet!”179 I had arrived late to the weekly Risale class in this modest dormitory in Üsküdar,

the bustling, relatively devout neighborhood on the Asian side of Istanbul already mentioned in

earlier chapters, but had nonetheless managed to catch the substance of the lesson (ders). Can,

the teacher (hoca) who regularly conducted the class, had related a parable from Said Nursi’s

opus, the Risale-i Nur, concerning two brothers. Each of the brothers had fallen down a well

after being chased by a lion, but their fates were ultimately opposite. The first brother had grown

hungry, and gnawed through the very root that had kept him from falling further down the well,

while the second brother had restrained his hunger and stoically allowed a mouse to nibble away

at the root. Miraculously, the second brother’s patience and forbearance caused the lion above to

be transformed into a horse, which immediately whisked him away to salvation and paradise.

Can Hoca continued: “So do you understand? The first brother pursued selfish, negative actions

(menfi hareketler), and therefore fell to his death and damnation. The second brother pursued

179
Gençler! Metni daha anlamadık!
selfless, positive actions (müspet hareketler), and was saved and conveyed to heaven.”180

My weekly visits to the rambunctious Risale class in Üsküdar were one of the most

important aspects of my research with Turkey’s Nur Community. Over the course of my visits

to this class, I myself became a student of Said Nursi’s double ethical principle of positive and

negative action (müspet ve menfi hareketler), and the precedent for this ethical duality that

Nursi’s life itself provided. Ultimately, the distinction between positive actions and negative

actions provides a general template for both the practice of liberal piety and the project of

confessional pluralism for the Nur Community.

As I was often told by my friends within the Nur Community, Said Nursi is considered to

have been the most recent ‘Restorer’ or ‘Renewer’ (yenileyici) of Islam, the individual who

reinterpreted Islam’s timeless precepts to apply specifically to this trying era (Nursi’s honorary

title, Bediüzzaman or ‘Wonder of the Age,’ reflects this fact) (Vahide 2005: 106-107). In his

role as the rejuvenator of Islam for the modern era (and, indeed, the modernity of the Risale-i

Nur is regularly emphasized by his followers), Nursi streamlined and rationalized Islamic ethics

into a pair of mutually opposing principles, positive and negative action. Nursi makes one of

the clearest statements of positive and negative action in his final letter, which theological

scholars have compared to the final sermon of the Prophet Muhammad himself (Basar 2007: 1).

In this letter, he writes: “Our duty is to act positively; it is not to act negatively. It is only to

serve belief in accordance with Divine pleasure; it is not to meddle in God's business. We are

charged with responding with patience and thanks to all the difficulties we may encounter in this

positive service of belief which results in the preservation of public order and security (Nursi

180
Anladınız mı artık? Hikkayede birinci kardeş menfi hareketler takip etti. İşte duyduğunuz gibi
düşerek öldü, cehennem mahkumiyetini aldı. İkinci kardeş ise müspet hareketler takip etti ki
kurtuldu kendisi, cennete gitti.
1996: 241).” Importantly, positive action is a means to both living “in accordance with Divine

pleasure” and to assuring a harmonious, stable social order in this world. Aladdin Basar, a

prominent contemporary interpreter of Nursi, illustrates the distinction between positive and

negative action through an incisive example: “If you build a house on what was empty ground

and then offer it for habitation, that is a positive act. But if you destroy it and make it

uninhabitable, it would be negative (Basar 2007: 1).”

Above all, positive action is an ethical principle in which both ends and means are

subordinated to the probity and ethical status of the actor her or himself. Nursi emphasizes that

actions which seem identical both from the perspective of means and ends can, in fact, be

morally contrary to each other. For example, a wealthy merchant might give to charity, thereby

benefiting the poor, but if the merchant has conducted this action out of pride or self-love, it is

nonetheless negative (because self-interested). Only charity given with a “pure, divine heart”

(temiz bir kalp, saf bir gönül) qualifies as positive action. A list of polar moral deeds, taken from

Basar’s analysis of positive and negative action in the Risale, helps to elucidate this point:

To work solely for God’s pleasure is positive; to struggle hypocritically for self-
interest and self-advertisement is negative. Service of belief is positive; to work
for unbelief, misguidance, sin, and vice is negative. Reliance on God is positive;
interfering in God’s business is negative. The maintenance of public order is
positive; causing conflict and differences, and disturbing public order and security
is negative. Patience and thanks are positive; impatience and rebellion, negative
(Ibid.: 2).

As this passage emphasizes, positive action provides a comprehensive religious ethos for the

devout Muslim, which allows her to live in harmony with both society at large and divine will.181

181
Members of the Nur Community tend to consider Said Nursi himself to be the ultimate model
of positive ethical practice. Although Nursi was often adamant that his writings, rather than his
life, be taken as exemplary (Vahide 2005: 336), his quietism and irreproachable morality in
contexts of extreme harassment and hardship are frequent objects of adulation and emulation
within the Nur Community.
This ethos of positivity necessitates a liberal mode of piety and translates into a public

commitment to tolerance and confessional pluralism.

A deep individualism defines positive action and circumscribes its limits. Above all, the

ethics of positive action must emerge voluntarily from within the individual believer.182 In

contrast to negative action, which frequently imposes upon the wills of others, positive action is

strictly unenforceable. The necessarily voluntary aspect of positive action, and the criterion of

individual ethical freedom that it implies, help to explain the popularity of one of the Nur

Community’s mantras, drawn from the Cow Sura in the Qur’an (verse 256): “There shall be no

coercion in matters of faith (dinde zorunluluk/zorlama yok) (Asad, Muhammad 2003 [1980]:

69).” Because positive action, emerging voluntarily from the individual, is the only legitimate

type of ethical conduct, the notion of compulsion in matters of religion or ethics is paradoxical

(if an action is compelled, it cannot be positive, regardless of its end). The ineluctable

relationship between free volition and ethics also informs the understanding of Islamic Law, or

Shari’a (Şeriat), prominent in the Nur Community. On one occasion, I asked a young Risale

student whether he would support the political enforcement of Shari’a. His response was

nuanced and telling: “I don’t see any need for this. I already enact Shari’a in my life. If the

state enforced Shari’a, then it wouldn’t be voluntary, it wouldn’t be positive action.”183

The seeds of a liberal politics of piety are readily apparent in this brief quote. One might

summarize this politics as a quietist liberalism rooted in the primacy of the moral autonomy of

182
This emphasis on individual probity and piety is characteristic of modernist Islam generally,
and dovetails with our discussion of public historicities of liberal piety in Chapter Three.
Muhammad Qasim Zaman, in his study of the Deobandi ulama of colonial and postcolonial
South Asia, provides an interesting comparison in this regard. As he writes, “the ‘ulama
wanted…to focus on individual reform, on inculcating a renewed sense of personal religious
responsibility as a way of coping with new challenges (2002: 13; see also Metcalf 1982).”
183
Buna gerek yok, zaten hayatımda Şeriat uygulanıyorum, yaşıyorum. Devlet hukuki bir şekilde
Şeriat zorlasaydı kendiliğinden olamazdı, müspet olamazdı.
the individual. This is not to say that ethical suasion and disciplines of the self are unimportant

for the Nur Community—quite the opposite. Creating and fostering a moral self capable of

positive action is the ultimate goal of the Risale classes, and animates the community as a sort of

revivalist ethical movement. Nevertheless, in the final instance, ethical practice itself is

dependent upon the free will and moral probity of the individual believer; therefore, it is not

subject to the constraints and compulsions of political mobilization. By and large, the Nur

Community dismisses partisan politics as irredeemably ‘negative’ (menfi, olumsuz) because the

means of partisan politics inevitably serve worldly, self-interested ends. Notably, the Nur

Community applies this critique even to those Sunni-inspired political blocks, such as the Justice

and Development Party, with which they share similar demographic bases and ideals.

Positive action and the conviction that there is no compulsion in religion provide the

basis for an active project of confessional pluralism and interreligious tolerance on the part of the

Nur Community. This pluralism should not be mistaken for relativism—the members of the Nur

Community are above all devout Sunnis who believe that Islam is the ultimate expression of God

in the material and human world. Here, again, we encounter a mode of liberal piety that is not

necessarily identical to pious liberalism. Nontheless, members of the Nur Community are also

adamant in their belief that other interpretations of Islam and other monotheistic religions—

Judaism and Christianity in particular—are ‘legitimate paths’ (doğru yollar) to God. As Faris

Bey, the chairman of the Istanbul Science and Culture Foundation (İstanbul İlim ve Kültür Vakfı)

once said to me, “There is truth in every monotheistic religion, in Judaism and Christianity as

well. Just as they should learn from us, we too should learn from them.”184 This belief in the

184
Bütün semavi dinler, hani Hristiyanlık ve Yahudilik, hakikatları yansıtır. Onlar bizden
öğrensinler, biz de onlardan öğrenelim.
legitimacy of other monotheistic traditions has led the Istanbul Science and Culture Foundation

and other organizations within the Nur Community to promote interreligious dialogue, typically

in the form of academic and theological conferences.185 As we will see below, the Gülen

Community has carried the project of interreligious dialogue as a means to tolerant confessional

pluralism to an even further extent.

In comparison to the Alevi organizations discussed earlier, Turkey’s Nur Community

practices a politically passive form of confessional pluralism. Rather than actively pursuing a

brand of identity politics in order to secure religious legitimacy, the liberal piety of positive

action necessitates and implies a quietist commitment to interreligious tolerance. Yet the Nur

Community also unsettles, irritates and criticizes the dispensation of Kemalism in myriad ways.

As a hegemonic mode of publicness, Kemalism continues to imagine and broadcast an ideal of

homogenized irreligiosity. From within the purview of Kemalist laicism, Islam is only

legitimate in the form of a privatized, personalized, and indifferent faith, and religious pluralism

has little meaning at all. And while the Nur Community eschews politics in the familiar mode, it

is resolutely public—or, better, counterpublic—in its commitment to positive action as a means

to liberal piety and confessional pluralism.

Neo-Ottoman Liberalism and Pluralist Publicness: The Gülen Community

Slightly bewildered, I stood in the middle of the luxurious, Ottoman-style conference

room as Cemal Bey, the vice-president of the Turkish Journalists and Writers Foundation

(Türkiye Gazeteciler ve Yazarlar Vakfı) whom we have already encountered frequently in earlier

chapters, restored the lights to their full luminescence. We had just finished viewing the

185
For example, during my stay in Istanbul the Science and Culture Foundation hosted a large
conference on Theodicy and Resurrection of the Dead in Islam and Christianity.
Foundation’s promotional video, a prolonged meditation on the themes of “Love, Peace,

Tolerance, and Interreligious and Inter-Civilizational Dialogue” (Sevgi, Barış, Hoşgörü, Dinler

Arası ve Medeniyet Arası Diyalog). The mise-en-scène of the brief film was a curious pastiche,

featuring snapshots of Fethullah Gülen embracing Pope John Paul II spliced with stock images of

hawks and eagles soaring regally through clear skies. Cemal Bey beamed proudly and asked

perfunctorily whether I had liked the video before drawing my attention to the framed

photographs lining the walls of the room. These photographs were remarkably consistent: Each

of them pictured either Fethullah Gülen or Harun Bey, the former president of the Foundation,

shaking hands with a politician, celebrity, or religious leader and smiling broadly. Many of the

featured luminaries were predictable: Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of the Justice and

Development Party, when he was still the wunderkind mayor of Istanbul; the leaders of Turkey’s

Greek Orthodox, Armenian and Jewish Communities; the head of Istanbul’s Vatican Consulate;

and, for a second time, Gülen with John Paul II. Others, however, were more surprising: a

notable Kemalist author; the deceased Turkish rock-n-roll icon Barış Manço; Deniz Baykal, the

leader of the Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP), the primary Kemalist

opposition party in Parliament. I realized that Cemal Bey had presented a carefully arranged

tableau to me, a formalized series of images and words that he had dictated in the exact sequence

many times before. He punctuated his presentation, almost needlessly: “You see, our

Foundation does not discriminate. We seek dialogue with everyone—Alevis, Christians, and

Jews, yes, but also Buddhists, Hindus, secularists, even atheists.”186

Of all of the pious organizations with which I conducted research during my time in

Turkey, the Journalists and Writers Foundation is the most overtly dedicated to a cosmopolitan

186
Gördüğünüz gibi vakfımız ayrım yapmaz. Aleviler, Hristiyanlar, Yahudiler, Budistler,
Hinduler, laikçiler, ateistler bile…herkesle diyalog kurmaya çalışıyoruz.
project of tolerant confessional pluralism. The overarching goal of the Foundation is to provide

both domestic and international support for the Gülen Community’s global project of

interreligious tolerance, dialogue and pious love for humanity as a whole.187 The Journalists and

Writers Foundation carries the banner of Gülen’s aspirations with enthusiasm. In addition to

publishing widely on topics of religion, tolerance, and dialogue (including Gülen’s own works),

the Foundation organizes a staggering number of international conferences, typically based on

themes and ideals championed by Gülen himself.

As a representative institution of the Gülen Community, the Journalists and Writers

Foundation thoroughly articulates the horizons of possibility that define confessional pluralism

in Turkey today. Like most Alevi civil society organizations, the Journalists and Writers

Foundation deems confessional pluralism necessary to ensuring religious freedom and equality.

Pluralism, in this sense, is a necessary means to liberal piety. On the other hand, like the Nur

Community, the Foundation’s commitment to confessional pluralism is considered to be a

necessary outgrowth and reflection of pious belief and practice. Liberal piety, then, is also a

necessary means to pluralism. More so than either the Alevi Community or the Nur Community,

the Journalists and Writers Foundation has constructed a particularly effective mode of

publicness on the basis of this dialectic of confessional pluralism and liberal piety. This public,

confessional pluralism has boasted many successes in fostering dialogue among representatives

of different religious communities; simultaneously, its promotion of liberal, public piety has

gently pushed against Kemalist logics of publicly legitimate and recognizable modes of sociality

and subjectivity.

At an initial glance, the ideals of the Journalists and Writers Foundation might appear to
187
This theme of global tolerance and love is expressed in the titles of many of Fethullah Gülen’s
own works, for example, Toward a Global Civilization of Love and Tolerance (2004) and
İnsanın Özündeki Sevgi (The Love at the Heart of Humankind) (2003).
be a whole-cloth borrowing of the values of multicultural pluralism and tolerance as practiced in

the liberal democracies of Western Europe and North America. However, the members of the

Foundation consistently emphasize that their liberalism springs from an entirely separate

historical tradition, that of Ottoman Islam. Over the course of several interviews, Cemal Bey

outlined for me the Ottoman heritage of cultural tolerance that inspires both Fethullah Gülen’s

philosophy and the activities of the Foundation. This nostalgic version of Ottoman liberalism

rests on two separate bases: the Ottoman millet system and the Ottoman foundation system

(vakıf sistemi).

The millet system, for its part, provides an Islamic precedent for a liberal politics of

tolerance and coexistence among religious and ethnic communities. According to Cemal Bey’s

rather nostalgic perspective, the Ottoman millet system ensured both political autonomy and

political equality for the minorities of the Empire—Jews, and a variety of ethnically and

doctrinally distinct Christian communities.188 Each community was allowed self-governance

under the overarching sovereignty of the Sublime Porte; this guarantee of self-governance was

itself the principle of equality among communities. This spirit of equality and autonomy of

communities directly inspires the contemporary liberal activism of the Foundation itself. I had

the opportunity to witness a demonstration of the rekindling of the millet ideal at many of the

conferences sponsored by the Foundation. One particular symposium, focusing on global hunger

and poverty, brought together representatives from Turkey’s different religious populations, the

Armenian, Greek, and Syriac Orthodox Churches, as well as Jewish and Sunni Muslim

188
Ali Bulaç makes a similar argument for interreligious co-existence on the basis of the ‘Medina
Document’ (1998). Written by the Prophet Muhammad following the Hijra from Mecca to
Medina, the ‘Medina Document’ provides a charter for the rights and mutual obligations among
Medina’s religious communities, primarily Jews and Muslims. See also Chapter Three, pp. 112-
114
communities—in short, the contemporary heirs to the Ottoman millets. In this context,

interreligious dialogue based upon a recuperation of the millet ideal acted as both a means to

confessional pluralism and sufficient demonstration of pluralism in its own right. Certainly, my

interlocutors at the Journalists and Writers Foundation believe that dialogue is necessary step in

the process of achieving and promoting tolerance. Nonetheless, as instantiations and signs of a

sincere commitment to pluralism, these spectacles of interreligious dialogue clearly count as

moments of tolerance in and of themselves.

While the Ottoman millet system informs the confessional pluralism promoted by the

Journalists and Writers Foundation, the institutional form best suited to a tolerant, religiously-

plural society is provided by the category of the foundation itself, as understood in its Ottoman

form, rather than its later, contemporary/post-Republican iteration. Cemal Bey emphasized that

foundations, rather than the Sultanic state, were the primary providers of community services—

ranging from soup kitchens to orphanages to religious schools—during the Ottoman era.

Furthermore, he explicitly advocated this civil dispensation of service over a state-based model.

As he put it, “The Ottoman state wasn’t really engaged in anything other than military affairs.

All of the services people needed were provided by the foundations (vakıflar). And, in this way,

the services were also separate from politics.”189 Although this quote from Cemal Bey

emphasizes the importance of a pious civil dispensation rather than questions of identity and

recognition, it nevertheless marshals a critique of the state similar to that made by Alevi

organizations. In both cases, the state is an agent of unnecessary interference and an inevitable

detriment to the organic relationship between piety and pluralism.

189
Şavaş yapmaktan başka Osmanlı devlet pek bir iş yürütmedi. Bütün insani ihtiyaçlar
vakıflarca karşılandı. Ki hizmetler siyasetten ayrı tutuldu.
 On an early evening near the end of my time in Turkey, I sat over espresso with two

friends at a bustling, chic café—located in a building that is owned, in fact, by the famous

Armenian-Turkish photographer Ara Güler—just off of İstiklal Boulevard in Beyoğlu, the

epicenter of Euro-cosmopolitan, ‘secular’ Istanbul. Idly, I mentioned that I had walked to

Beyoğlu from the offices of the Journalists and Writers Foundation in Harbiye, only fifteen

minutes distant for the nimble pedestrian. In unison, my friends—each of whom was of a

decidedly leftist, Kemalist bent—registered surprise and upset: “Why do you talk to those

fundamentalists (Şeriatçılar)? Aren’t you afraid of them? They’re dangerous, you know…”190 I

smiled in stoic, expected disappointment, and trotted out my typical disclaimers and words of

praise for my pious friends. I had encountered this very anxiety before, and I would encounter it

again.

As is surely clear from my discussion thus far, I never witnessed anything during my

research among the Gülen Community (or in any other ethnographic context, for that matter) that

might be construed as ‘fundamentalism’ (a deeply problematic category that does little for

serious analysis in any case; see Mamdani 2003: 36-37). Rather, I was inundated with

proclamations of tolerance, love and pluralism. But while it would be easy to dismiss my

friends’ anxieties as mere paranoia, I believe that their discomfort does register an actual

ideological and sociopolitical tension. For the Journalists and Writers Foundation, religion is

neither private nor singular. Piety cannot be circumscribed within spaces of individualistic

belief; nor can a single, hegemonic definition of religion encompass the plurality of piety. In

order for tolerance and dialogue to serve as both a means to and a reflection of confessional

pluralism, legitimate religious plurality must be publicly recognizable. Moreover, in the

190
Şu Şeriatçılar’la niye konuşuyorsun? Korkun yok mu? Onlar tehlikeli ya ağabey…
idealized gaze of tolerance between unfettered, equal religious subjects, there is no room for an

authorizing and delimiting third party such as the state. In this respect, the ideal of dialogue and

tolerance promoted by the Journalists and Writers Foundation defies and exceeds the public gaze

of Atatürk himself, who continues to keep watch over most forums of publicness in Turkey in

the form of myriad statues, posters, lapel pins and banners (Navaro-Yashin 2002a: 85 ff.). It is

precisely because the ideals of tolerance, dialogue and pluralism promoted by the Gülen

Community contradict this legitimating Kemalist gaze that my friends registered acute anxiety

over my research with the Journalists and Writers Foundation, even if they misconstrued this

anxiety for the threat of ‘fundamentalism’.

Conclusion: Confessional Pluralism as Political Aspiration and Emergent Practice

A mere month after the end of my fieldwork in March 2007, the Journalists and Writers

Foundation hosted a symposium on Alevism, in which “Many atheist, Sunni and Alevi scholars,

academics, intellectuals, etc. came together and discussed various aspects of the Alevi reality,

socio-legal situation of Alevis, state-secularism-Alevi relations, Alevi identity, definition of

Aleviism (sic), Sunni-Alevi relations and so on (Yılmaz 2007).” This conference received wide

media coverage and praise as a watershed moment of inter-confessional cooperation and

rapprochement between Alevis and Sunnis.191 Only two months later, Sadegül Hanım and

several of her colleagues at the Sultanbeyli Cem House were arrested by municipal police

191
While violent Sunni-Alevi clashes date back to at lest the 1970s, the definitive moment of
Sunni-Alevi strife occurred on 2 July 1993, when 37 Alevi intellectuals died in a hotel blaze in
the city of Sivas. A colloquium of Alevi civil society organizations had sponsored a conference
and festival at the hotel on that weekend. Reportedly, a group of incensed, conservative Sunnis
ignited the building due to the presence of the famous writer Aziz Nesin, who had translated
Salman Rushdie’s controversial novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), into Turkish. See also Kaleli
1994.
officers on the basis of a technicality after they objected to an attempt by the Sultanbeyli

Municipality to build a road directly through the middle of the Association’s property. Later that

summer, the Justice and Development Municipal Administration of Sultanbeyli initiated yet

another court case to close the Cem House, sparking protests throughout Istanbul’s Alevi

Community.192

As these two events briefly indicate, the topography of confessional pluralism in Turkey

today is still extraordinarily uneven. On the one hand, liberal piety and the pluralism that it

supports and presupposes constitute a potent ideal for an array of religious civil society

institutions, Sunni and Alevi alike. On the other hand, the practice and legitimacy of this ideal

remain contingent and frequently subject to curtailment. Nor can confessional pluralism,

understood as a means of producing recognizable, legitimate religious difference, necessarily

accommodate all communities or identities that might aspire to its imprimatur. As I have already

noted, certain strains of Islam—notably Nakşibendi and Süleymancı Sufi orders (Mardin 1991;

Silverstein 2008a)—remain illegal in Turkey. In the context of my own research, I recall the

exasperation of a Greek-Turkish friend and board member of a foundation responsible for one of

Istanbul’s Greek Hospitals.193 When I asked him to reflect on the changing opportunities of

Istanbul’s Greek Community, he replied, with a hint of exhaustion: “Of course, the EU Process

has improved our lot, but the Community is so small that even full rights and recognition won’t

192
For reportage in Turkish on both of these events, see the Sultanbeyli Pir Sultan Abdal
Association website: http://www.pirsultanbeyli.org/index.php?
option=com_content&task=view&id=101&Itemid=41.
193
The Treaty of Lausanne, which ended the Turkish War of Independence in 1923, stipulated
specific minority rights for three of Turkey’s communities, Greek Orthodox Christians,
Armenian Christians and Jews. These three ‘Lausanne Minorities’ (Lozan Azınlıkları) were
allowed to organize self-governing foundations (vakıflar) for their churches, synagogues,
hospitals and other institutions. See Chapter Chapter One, footnote eighteen above.
make much of a difference.”194 Complicating the practice of confessional pluralism still further

are the specters of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink’s assassination, the crepuscular

nationalist organization Ergenekon and repressive Law 301, each of which suggests that ideals of

ethnic, linguistic and (ir)religious homogeneity in contemporary Turkey continue to exert a

cultural and political pull of their own.195

Taking into account this variegated, often turbulent terrain, this chapter has attempted to

delineate both the ideals and practices of confessional pluralism and liberal piety among

Turkey’s Islamic civil society organizations. My aim has not been to champion the arrival of

‘diasporic liberalism’ and pluralism on yet another national shore (Povinelli 2002: 5), but rather

to examine how aspirations to confessional pluralism produce both recognizable religious

difference and innovative pious practices. Aporias of recognition and empty spaces upon the

map of confessional pluralism in Turkey still exist, of course. Nonetheless, the vibrant and

industrious dedication of groups such as the Alevi Community, the Nur Community and the

Gülen Community suggests that ideals and practices of confessional pluralism attain a more

prominent role in Turkish civil society and politics in years yet to come.

194
Unlike all of my other interviews, my discussions with my Greek friend Yani were conducted
in English, which he speaks perfectly.
195
For a meditation on the relationship among conspiracy, fantasy and the politics of national
homogeneity in Turkey, see my forthcoming article “Hungry Wolves, Inclement Storms (Walton
2010).”
 Conclusion
Walking Away from the Dershane

In the neighborhood of Üsküdar, the weekly Risale-i Nur class has drawn to a close. The

final ezan of the day has echoed in stereo—or, rather, quadro—from the four nearby mosques.

Some of the men have already left to perform their prayers elsewhere, while others have gathered

in a small mescit within the study hall for the same purpose. A few young men crowd the small

bathroom in the hallway in order to perform their ablutions (abdest). As the youngest

participants of the class, adolescent and pre-adolescent boys, distribute tea and fresh fruit to the

remaining participants, I quietly make my goodbyes, recover my boots from a low shelf near the

doorway, and step out of the apartment. Soon, I am on my way back to European Istanbul, and

the night’s unpredictable spectacle. I find my back to one of the city’s principal centers, Taksim

Square, and wander down incomparable İstiklal Street, a pedestrian boulevard that becomes

crowded to the point of near-impassability on weekend nights. As I amble down İstiklal, I often

hear my name spoken by an acquaintance or friend, and rejoice at being individuated from the

anonymity of the crowd. Usually, such interpellations come from one of my younger, relatively

elite friends, exemplars of the new ‘White Turks’ (Beyaz Türkler) for whom secular

cosmopolitanism is a creed and Islam a bugbear—İstiklal is, after all, ground zero and lodestar of

Turkey’s secularist culture industry and collective playground of the nation. On one particular

Saturday night, however, I am addressed by an unexpected voice: Mehmet, a university student

and occasional participant in one of the Risale-i Nur classes I regularly attended. He blushes

when I register my surprise—clearly, he realizes that I had not expected to encounter him here—
but quickly recovers. “I learn a lot from the Risale-i Nur classes, of course—I’m a Muslim, after

all. But, you know, there are many sides of Istanbul. You can’t only focus on one.”196

This dissertation has primarily focused on and delineated the labor of pragmatic,

discursive, and political fixation, the coming to be coherent of a public genre of Islamic practice

in contemporary Turkey that I have identified as liberal piety. As my ethnography moved among

the foundations and associations of the Nur Community, the Gülen Community, the Alevi

Community, and other constitutive communities of Turkey’s civil-Islamic sphere, I have

examined how laicist Kemalism and secular liberalism coexist in public tension in Turkey, and

provide the political and discursive topography for the emergence of new modes of public piety.

Liberal piety is the most vivid and conceptually demonstrative genre of religiosity to have

achieved articulation in the specifically Turkish context of the politics of publicness. In a

comparative vein, however, one might ask how the general relationship between laicist

secularism and liberalism, especially in conjunction with the projects of multiculturalism and

identity politics, comes to exist in contexts in which state and civil society achieve reciprocal

definition elsewhere across the globe. In this regard, the concept liberal piety has broader

implications. The new Muslims bourgeoisie in Indonesia, affluent Muslim immigrants to the

metropolises of the United States, and even the African-American churches that provided the

crucible for the American civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s are each communities

and contexts that, I suspect, also participate in the practices and discourses of liberal piety that I

have delineated here. Within the context of my own study, the globalized organizations of the

196
Risale’lerden çok şey ögrenirim, muhakkak ki Müslümanım. Ancak biliyorsun İstanbul’un
yönleri çok. Tek bir taneyi odaklamak mümkün değil.
Gülen Community (and, to a lesser extent, the Nur and Alevi Communities) outside of Turkey

itself demand assessment from the perspective of liberal piety, even as the politics of pious

globality inevitably differs from the domestic Turkish context in myriad ways.

As I have emphasized throughout the dissertation, my research and argument are both an

elaboration of and a departure from the Asadian subdiscipline of the anthropology of secularism

and the relationship between secularism and religiosity. Asad broke new, fertile ground in the

anthropology of religion with the argument that secularism and piety cannot be analytically or

methodologically circumscribed from each other within modern and postmodern political

contexts; my own work would have been unthinkable without this intervention and reorientation.

Nonetheless, as I have endeavored to argue through my presentation, the Asadian focus on the

constraints and practices of power that undergird liberal publicness and governance have tended

—ironically perhaps—to foreclose ethnographic inquiry into the creative ventures by which

piety itself becomes liberal and public, by which liberality and publicness become pious. In

contemporary Turkey, at any rate, the oil-and-water relationship between Islam and the means

and ways of modern governance, both liberal and illiberal, that both classic Orientalism and

Asadian critique posit, does not satisfy ethnographic curiosity. If nothing else, I hope that this

dissertation has amply demonstrated this point.

Inevitably, elisions and aporias persevere. “Istanbul has many sides.” So, too, of course,

does piety, does publicness, do liberal and illiberal systems of political governance—in Turkey

and beyond. Certain themes and arguments have not emerged as prominently as I had expected

or hoped. Questions of class and ethnicity are particularly vexatious in the context of Turkish

civil Islam precisely because liberal piety conceives of these differences as contingent and
politically transcendable. Even as liberal piety encourages the public articulation, management

and occasional valorization of differences of religiosity, it also militates against the legitimacy of

differences based upon class and ethnicity. If I have largely ignored questions of ethnicity and

class, then, I can only plead to have done so because my object of study and orienting concept

tends to foreclose these questions.197 In a rather different, quotidian piety continues to fix the

limits and to highlight the limitations of my argument. Although I have gestured at particular

junctures to the complex relationships between liberal piety and quotidian piety, this exploration

remains incomplete. Finally, laicist Kemalism itself deserves a more thorough consideration in

relation to liberal piety. While I have restricted my presentation in this dissertation to the role of

Kemalism as a state practice and statist ideology, numerous civil society institutions, such as the

Atatürkist Thought Association (Atatürkçü Düçünce Derneği) and Atatürk Foundation (Atatürk

Vakfı), also evince a commitment to illiberal laicism; the public, political, and discursive

relationships between these institutions and those of my study surely invites further research.

I close my argument on a rather ambivalent note, perhaps, but an instructive one. As I

evoked in the Introduction, walking was both a literal and figurative method for me throughout

197
As a demonstration of the strength with which many actors in Turkey’s civil Islamic sphere
dismiss the salience of class, I gesture again to one of my favorite interlocutors, Ali Bulaç. I am
now able to receive Zaman newspaper on a daily basis at my apartment in Manhattan—yet
another indication of the global, cosmopolitan articulation of the Gülen Community—and came
across an editorial by Ali Bey on the very evening that I prepared the final draft of the
dissertation for submission. In his column, titled in this instance “The Politics of Class and the
Politics of Value (Sınıf ve Değer Siyaseti) Bulaç argues that politics in the Islamic world, unlike
the ‘West’ (Batı) has always been based upon culture and values (değer) rather than economic
class formations (sınıflar), which, he claims, have no autochthonous history in Islam generally
and Turkey in particular. He does not mince words: “In Turkey, people have never placed much
importance on matters of class. For example, on any given Friday you might see a worker and
that worker’s boss praying together sincerely (at the same mosque) (Dahası Türkiye’de insanlar
hala sınıf farkına pek değer vermemektedirler. Bir işçiyle işvereni pekala bir cuma günü, aynı
safta birlikte namaz kılarken görebilirsiniz) (Bulaç 2009).” Undoubtedly, any member of one of
Turkey’s fervent Marxist-Leninist groups would reject this whole-cloth dismissal of class.
my research, and through my constitutionals, scrambles, sprints and saunters, I came to

appreciate the importance of the de Certeauean emphasis on both the panoptically visible and the

practices that exceed and precede the threshold of visibility. My concern throughout has been to

render conceptually and ethnographically visible the very liberal piety that my interlocutors

continuously make pragmatically visible. But conceptual, discursive and political visibility and

fixation did not exhaust my ethnography, even if they demarcate the perimeters of my argument.

Many sides of the city, the nation, the globe and the practices of piety that inhabit these nested

spaces and places, frequently remained beyond my pedestrian gaze. And when they did not, I

was struck anew by both the achievement of liberal piety, and its limitations.
 Bibliography198

Abdelkah, Fariba 2000 Being Modern in Iran. Jonathan Derrick, trans. New York: Columbia
University Press.

‘Abduh, Muhammad 1966 The Theology of Unity. Ishaq Masa’ad and Kenneth Cragg, trans.
London: Allen & Unwin.

Abu Lughod, Lila 1990 “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power
Through Bedouin Women.” American Ethnologist 17, no. 1: 41-55.

Abu Rabi, Ibrahim 1996 Intellectual Origins of Islamic Resurgence in the Modern Arab World.
Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

_____, ed. 2003 Islam at the Crossroads. On the Life and Thought of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi.
Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Agrama, Hussein 2009 “Secularism, Sovereignty, Indeterminancy: Is Egypt a Secular or

Religious State?” Unpublished paper. Chicago: University of Chicago Department of
Anthropology.

Akın, Erkan, and Ömer Karasapan 1988 “The ‘Turkish-Islamic Synthesis’.” Middle East
Report. No. 153, Islam and the State (Jul.-Aug.): 18.

Akın, Fatih 2005 İstanbul Hatırası/Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul. Film.
Germany/Turkey: Corazon International and Norddeutscher Rundfunk.

Aktay, Yasin 2003 “Diaspora and Stability. Constitutive Elements in a Body of Knowledge.”
Pp. 131-155 in Turkish Islam and the Secular State. The Gülen Movement. Hakan
Yavuz and John Esposito, eds. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

Algar, Hamid 2000 The Sunna: Its Obligatory and Exemplary Aspects. Oneonta: Islamic
Publications International.

Al-Qaradawi, Yusuf 1991 Islamic Awakening between Rejection and Extremism. Herndon, VA:
International Institute of Islamic Thought.

Anderson, Benedict 1983 Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. London: Verso.

Arat, Yeşim 2004 Rethinking Islam and Liberal Democracy: Islamist Women in Turkish
Politics. Albany: SUNY Press.

Arkoun, Mohammed 2005 Humanisme et Islam: Combats et Propositions. Paris: Vrin.

198
Please note that I follow Turkish alphabetizing convention, so that the letter ‘C’ precedes ‘Ç’,
‘I’ precedes ‘İ’, ‘O’ precedes ‘Ö’, ‘S’ precedes ‘Ş,’ ‘U’ precedes ‘Ü’ and so forth.
_____. 2006 Islam: To Reform or Subvert? London: Saqi Books.

Armajani, Jon 2004 Dynamic Islam: Liberal Muslim Perspectives in a Transnational Age.
Lanham, Maryland and Oxford: University Press of America.

Asad, Muhammad 2003 [1980] The Message of the Qur’an. Translated and explained by
Muhammad Asad. Dubai: Oriental Press/The Book Foundation.

Asad, Talal 1986 “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam.” Occasional Paper Series, Center for
Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University. Washington DC: Georgetown
University Center for Contemporary Arab Studies.

_____. 1999 “Religion, Nation-State, Secularism.” Pp. 178-196 in Nation and Religion.
Perspectives on Europe and Asia. Peter van der Veer and Hartmut Lehmann, eds.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

_____. 2003 Formations of the Secular. Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.

_____. 2007 “Responses.” In Powers of the Secular Modern. Talal Asad and His Interlocutors.
David Scott and Charles Hirschkind, eds. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

_____. 2008 On Suicide Bombing. New York: Columbia University Press.

Aslan, Ahmet 1999 Islam, Civil Society & Market Economy. Ankara: Liberte
Books/Association for Liberal Thinking.

Atar, Ersan 2004 “Milli Gençlik Vakfı için Kapatma Kararı.” Sabah Gazetesi, 6 April.
Accessed at http://arsiv.sabah.com.tr/2004/06/04/siy112.html.

Aydın, Ayhan 2002 Günümüz Alevi Ozanlar. İstanbul: Cem Vakfı Yayınları.

_____. 2003 Erenler Kitabı. İstanbul: ASPAŞ.

Aydoğan, Osman 1999 “Gülen’in Askerleri.” Radikal, 23 June. Accessed at

http://www.radikal.com.tr/1999/06/23/turkiye/01gul.html.

Bakhtin, Mikhail 1981 The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays. Caryl Emerson and Michael
Holquist, trans. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Balcı, Bayram 2003 “Fethullah Gülen’s Schools in Central Asia and their Role in Spreading
Turkism and Islam.” Religion, State and Society 31 (2): 151-177.

Basar, Aladdin 2007 “A Lifelong Principle: Positive Action.” Published on Nur Webpages,
http://www.nur.org/index.php?WS=9&ItemID=169&Page=ItemPrint.

BBC News 2006 “Pope sorry for offending Muslims.” 17 September. Accessed at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5353208.stm.
Benhabib, Seyla 1991 “Models of Public Space.” Pp. 73-93 in Habermas and the Public
Sphere. Craig Calhoun, ed. Boston, MA: MIT Press.

Benard, Cheryl 2003 Civil Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources and Strategies. Santa
Monica: RAND Corporation.

Berkan, İsmet 2008 “Serbestse Hepsi Serbest, Yasaksa Hepsi Yasak!”, Radikal Gazetesi, 12
Şubat (February). Accessed at http://www.radikal.com.tr/index.php?tarih=12/02/2008.

Berkes, Niyazi 1973 Türkiye’de Çaşdaşlaşma. Ankara: Bilgi Yayınevi.

Beşikçi, İsmail 1990 Bilim, Resmi İdeoloji, Devlet, Demokrasi ve Kürt Sorunu. İstanbul: Alan
Yayıncılık.

Bezmez, Dikmen 2007 “The Politics of Urban Regeneration: The Case of the Fener and Balat
Initiative.” New Perspectives on Turkey No. 37: 69-86.

Bezirci, Asım 1986 Pir Sultan: Kişiliği, Yaşamı, Sanatı, Etkisi, Şiirleri, Sözlük, Kaynakça.
İstanbul: Say.

Bilgrami, Akeel 2003 “The Clash within Civilizations.” Daedalus Journal of the American
Arts & Sciences (Summer): 88-93.

Bilici, Faruk 1994 “Introduction.” Pp. 9-15 in Le Waqf dans le Monde Musulman
Contemporain (XIXe – Xxe Siecles). Faruk Bilici, ed. Istanbul: Institut Francais d’Etudes
Anatoliennes.

Bilkam, Ali Fuat 2007 “Mevlana’da Evrensel Barış Düşüncesi/Rumi’s Concept of Universal
Peace.” Jeremy Walton, trans. Turkish Journalists and Writers Foundation (unpublished
paper).

Birge, John Kingsley 1994 [1937] The Bektashi Order of Dervishes. London: Luzac Oriental.

Bolak, Ahmet Aydın 1994 “Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Devletinde Vakıfların Yeniden Doğuşu.” Pp.
85-96 in Le Waqf dans le Monde Musulman Contemporain (XIXe – Xxe Siecles). Faruk
Bilici, ed. Istanbul: Institut Francais d’Etudes Anatoliennes.

Bonner, Michael, Mine Ener and Amy Singer, eds. 2003 Poverty and Charity in Middle
Eastern Contexts. Albany: SUNY Press.

Boym, Svetlana 2001 The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books.

Briggs, Charles and Richard Baumann 1992 “Genre, Intertextuality, and Social Power.” Journal
of Linguistic Anthropology 2 (2): 131-172.

Brown, Daniel 1996 Rethinking Tradition in Modern Islamic Thought. Cambridge, UK and
New York: Cambridge University Press.

_____. 2004 A New Introduction to Islam. Malden: Blackwell.

Bulaç, Ali 1998 “The Medina Document.” Duygu Köksal and Betigül Ercan, trans. Pp. 169-178
in Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook. Charles Kurzmann, ed. Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press.

_____. 2007 Din-Kent ve Cemaat: Fethullah Gülen Örneği. İstanbul: Ufuk Kitap.

_____. 2009 “Sınıf ve Değer Siyaseti.” Zaman Gazetesi Amerika 11 Kasım (November): 10.

Casanova, Jose 1994 Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.

Chatterjee, Partha 1998 “Secularism and Tolerance.” Pp. 345 – 379 in Secularism and Its
Critics. Edited by Rajeev Bhargava. Oxford, New York and New Delhi: Oxford
University Press.

_____. 2004 Politics of the Governed. Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World.
New York: Columbia University Press.

Çınar, Alev 1997 “Refah Party and the City Administration of Istanbul: Liberal Islam, Locality,
and Hybridity. New Perspectives on Turkey 16 (3): 23-40.

_____. 2005 Modernity, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey. Bodies, Places, and Time.
Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff 1999 “Introduction.” In Civil Society and the Political
Imagination in Africa. Critical Perspectives. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, eds.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Constitution of the Republic of Turkey 1982 [2001] Available at

http://www.anayasa.gov.tr/images/loaded/pdf_dosyalari/THE_CONSTITUTION_OF_T
HE_REPUBLIC_OF_TURKEY.pdf.

Cooper, John, Ronald Nettler, and Mohamed Mahmoud, eds. 1998 Islam and Modernity:
Muslim Intellectuals Respond. London and New York: I. B. Tauris.

Crapanzano, Vincent 1996 “‘Self’-Centering Narratives.” Pp.106-127 in Natural Histories of

Discourse. Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban, ed. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.

Çakır, Ruşen and Irfan Bozan 2005 Sivil, Seffaf ve Demokratik bir Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı
Mümkün Mü? İstanbul: Tesev Yayınları.

Çarkoğlu, Ali and Binnaz Toprak 2006 Değişen Türkiye’de Din, Toplum ve Siyaset. İstanbul:
Türkiye Ekonomik ve Sosyal Etüdler Vakfı

Çızakçı, Murat 2000 A History of Philanthropic Foundations: The Islamic World From the
Seventh Century to the Present. İstanbul: Boğaziçi University Press.
Davison, Andrew 1998 Secularism and Revivalism in Turkey. A Hermeneutic Reconsideration.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Steven Rendall, trans. Berkeley:
University of California Press.

Debord, Guy 1994 The Society of the Spectacle. Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans. New York:
Zone Books.

Doğan İbrahim 2006 ‘Üstad’ın Mezarını Taşıyan Askerler,” Aksiyon Dergisi, Sayı 590, August
28th.

Durkheim, Emile 1995 The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Karen Fields, trans. New
York: Free Press.

Dündar, Can and Celal Kazdağlı 2008 Ergenekon: Devlet İçinde Devlet. Ankara: İmge
Kitabevi.

Düzel, Neşe 2005 “Alevilik İslamiyet’in içinde değil.” Radikal Gazetesi, 10 October.
Accessed online at: http://www.radikal.com.tr/Radikal.aspx?
aType=RadikalHaberDetay&ArticleID=759688&Date=27.02.2009&CategoryID=97.

Eickelman, Dale F. and James P Piscatori 1996 Muslim Politics. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press.

Eickelman, Dale F. and Jon W. Anderson, eds. 2003 [1999] New Media in the Muslim World.
The Emerging Public Sphere. 2nd Ed. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press.

Erdemir, Aykan 2005 “Tradition and Modernity: Alevis’ Ambiguous Terms and Turkey’s
Ambivalent Subjects.” Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 41 (6), November: 937-951.

Ernst, Carl 2003 The Shambhala Guide to Sufism. Boston & London: Shambhala.

____. Following Muhammad. Rethinking Islam in the Contemporary World. Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press.

Erol, Sibel 2008 “The Chronotope of Istanbul in Turkish Literature.” Paper presented at the
conference Orienting Istanbul, Berkeley University, Berkeley California, September 25th-
27th.

Esposito, John and Francois Burgat, eds. 2003 Modernizing Islam: Religion in the Public
Sphere in the Middle East and Europe. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Esposito, John and Azzam Tamimi, eds. 2000 Islam and Secularism in the Middle East. New
York: New York University Press.
Foreign Policy 2008 “Meet Fethullah Gülen, the World’s Top Public Intellectual.” August.
Accessed at http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4408.

Foucault, Michel 1991 “Governmentality.” In The Foucault Effect. Studies in Governmentality.

Burchell, et. al., eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Fraser, Nancy 1992 “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually
Existing Democracy.” Pp. 109-142 in Habermas and the Public Sphere. Craig Calhoun,
ed. Boston, MA: MIT Press.

Freud, Sigmund 1928 The Future of an Illusion. W.D. Robson-Scott, trans. New York: H.
Liveright.

Gal, Susan 1995 “Language and the Arts of Resistance.” Cultural Anthropology 10: 407-424

Geertz, Clifford 1968 Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia.
New Haven: Yale University Press.

_____. 1973 The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books.

Gellner, Ernst 1994 Conditions of Liberty. Civil Society and Its Rivals. London: Hamish
Hamilton.

Gökalp, Altan 1980 Tetes Rouges et Bouches Noires. Une Confrerie Tribale de l’Ouest
Anatolien. Paris: Publications de la Societe d’Ethnologie.

Göktürk, Deniz 2008 “Sound Bridges and Travelling Tunes.” In Congress Book: XVIIth
International Congress of Aesthetics. Jale Erzen, ed. Ankara: Sanart.

Göldaş, İsmail 1999 Lozan: Biz Türkler ve Kürtler. İstanbul: Avesta.

Göle, Nilüfer 1996 Forbidden Modern. Civilization and Veiling. Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press.

_____. 1997 “The Quest for the Islamic Self within the Context of Modernity.” Pp. 81-94 in
Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey. Sibel Bozdoğan and Reşat
Kasaba, eds. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press.

_____. 2000 “Modernist Kamusal Alan ve İslami Ahlak.” In İslam’ın Yeni Kamusal Yüzleri.
Nilüfer Göle, ed. İstanbul: Metis Yayınları.

Göle, Nilüfer and Ludwig Ammann, eds. Islam in Public. Turkey, Iran and Europe. Istanbul:
Istanbul Bilgi University Press.

Gözaydın-Tarhanlı, İştar 1993 Müslüman Toplum, ‘Laik’ Devlet: Türkiye’de Diyanet İşleri
Başkanlığı. İstanbul: Afa.

_____. 1995 Türkiye’de Diyanet. İstanbul: Yeni Yüzyıl Books.

_____. 2006 “A Religious Administration to Secure Secularism: The Presidency of Religious
Affairs of the Republic of Turkey.” In Marburg Journal of Religion, Vol 11, No. 1
(June).

Gramsci, Antonio 1971 Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Quentin Hoare and Geoffry
Nowell Smith, trans. New York: International Publishers.

Grillo, R. D. 1998 Pluralism and the Politics of Difference. State, Culture and Ethnicity in
Comparative Perspective. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Gülen Fethullah 2003 İnsanın Özündeki Sevgi. Ö Faruk Tüncer, hazırlayan (editor). Istanbul:
Ufuk Kitapları.

_____. Toward a Global Civilization of Love and Tolerance. Mehmet Ünal et al. translated.
Istanbul and Somerset New Jersey: The Light Publishing/Işık Yayınları.

Habermas, Jurgen 1989a The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. An Inquiry into
a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. by Thomas Burger. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.

_____. 1989b The Theory of Communicative Action. Volume Two: Lifeworld and System: A
Critique of Functionalist Reason. Thomas McCarthy, trans. Boston: Beacon Press.

Hallaq, Wael 1984 “Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed?” International Journal of Middle East
Studies, vol 16, issue 1 (March 1984): 3-41.

_____. 1986 “”On the Origins of the Controversy about the Existence of Mujtahids and the
Gate of Ijtihad.” Studia Islamica 63: 129-141.

Hanafi, Hasan 2002 “Alternative Conceptions of Civil Society: A Reflective Islamic

Approach.” In Alternative Conceptions of Civil Society. Simone Chambers and Will
Kymlicka, eds. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Hanks, William 1987 “Discourse Genres in a Theory of Practice.” American Ethnologist 14

(4): 668-692.

Harmancı, Destan 2006 “Bu Amerikalı’nın tez konusu İslami Tarikatlar” Haftalık 168
(June/Haziran 23rd-29th): 34-36.

Hart, Kimberly 1999. “Images and Aftermaths: The Use and Contextualization of Atatürk
Imagery in Political Debates in Turkey.” Political Anthropology 22 (I): 66-84.

Hashemi, Nader 2009 Islam, Secularism and Liberal Democracy: Toward a Democratic
Theory for Muslim Societies. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Hayden, Robert M. 2002 “Antagonistic Tolerance.” Current Anthropology 43, No. 2 (April):
205-231.
Heffner, Robert 2000 Civil Islam. Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.

_____. ed. 2005 Remaking Muslim Politics. Pluralism, Contestation, Democratization.

Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Hendrick, Joshua 2007 “The Regulated Potential of Kinetic Islam: Antitheses in Global Islamic
Activism.” Pp. 12-33 in Muslim Citizens of the Globalized World. Contributions of the
Gülen Movement. Robert Hunt and Yüksel Aslandoğan, eds. Somerset, NJ, and
Houston: The Light, Inc. and IID.

_____. 2008 “Transnational Religious Nationalism: Globalization, Muslim Networks, & The
Turkish Movement of M. Fethullah Gülen.” Paper presented at the Ben Gurion
University Conference, A Different Approach to Debates on Political Islam: Micro-Level
Studies, 2-4 June 2008.

Heper, Metin 1973 Modernleşme ve Bürökrasi: Karşılaştırmalı Kamu Yönetimine Giriş.

Ankara: Sosyal Bilimler Derneği.

_____, ed. 1991 Strong State and Economic Interest Groups: The Post-1980 Turkish
Experience. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter.

Herbert, David 2003 Religion and Civil Society. Rethinking Public Religion in the
Contemporary World. Hampshire, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

Herzfeld, Michael 2001 Anthropology: Theoretical Practice in Culture and Society. Malden,
MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Hirschkind, Charles. 2006 The Ethical Soundscape. Cassette Sermons and Islamic
Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press.

Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger, eds. 1983 The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge (UK)
and New York: Cambridge University Press.

Hollander, Jocelyn, and Rachel Einhower 2004 “Conceptualizing Resistance.” Sociological

Forum 19, No. 4 (Dec.): 533-554.

Hunt, Robert, and Yüksel Aslandoğan, eds. 2007 Muslim Citizens of the Globalized World.
Contributions of the Gülen Movement. Somerset, NJ: The Light Publishing, Inc.

Huntington, Samuel 1996 The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New
York: Simon & Schuster.

Isin, Engin 2001 “Istanbul’s Conflicting Paths to Globalization: Islamization and

Globalization.” In Global City-Regions: Trends, Theory, Policy. Allen J. Scott, ed. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Islahi, Abdul Azim 1999 “Prerequisites for Ijtihad: A Reappraisal.” Available at http://islamic-
finance.net/research/ijtihad-islahi.html.

James, William 2002 [1902] Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature.
London and New York: Routledge.

Kaleli, Lütfi 1994 Sivas Katliamı ve Şeriat. İstanbul: Alev Yayınevi.

Kant, Immanuel 1960 Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. Theodore M. Greene and
Hoyt H. Hudson, trans. New York: Harper.

Kaplan, Sam 2006 The Pedagogical State. Education and the Politics of National Culture in
Post-1980 Turkey. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Kara, İsmail 2002 “Din ile Devlet Arasında Sıkışmış bir Kurum: Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı.”
Marmara Üniversitesi İlahiyat Fakültesi Dergisi, Sayı 18. İstanbul: Emre Matbaası.

Kasaba, Reşat. 1997. “Kemalist Certainties and Modern Ambiguities.” Pp. 15-36 in Rethinking
Modernity and National Identity in Turkey. Sibel Bozdoğan and Reşat Kasaba, eds.
Seattle and London: University of Washington Press.

Kaya, Kamil 1998 Sosyolojik Açıdan Türkiye’de Din-Devlet İlişkiler ve Diyanet İşleri
Başkanlığı. İstanbul: Emre Matbaası.

Keyder, Çağlar 1997 “Whither the Project of Modernity? Turkey in the 1990s.” Pp. 37-51 in
Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey. Sibel Bozdoğan and Reşat
Kasaba, eds. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press.

_____. 1999a “A Tale of Two Neighborhoods.” In Istanbul: Between the Global and the Local.
Çağlar Keyder, ed. Lanham: Roman & Littlefield Publishers.

_____. 1999b “The Housing Market from Informal to Global.” In Istanbul: Between the Global
and the Local. Çağlar Keyder, ed. Lanham: Roman & Littlefield Publishers.

_____. 2005 “Transformations in Urban Structure and the Environment in Istanbul.” In

Environmentalism in Turkey: Between Democracy and Development? Fikret Adaman
and Murat Arsel, eds. Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing.

_____. 2008 “A Brief History of Modern Istanbul.” In Turkey and the Modern World. Vol.4,
The Cambridge History of Turkey. Reşat Kasaba, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.

Keyman, Emin Fuat, ed. 2007 Remaking Turkey. Globalization, Alternative Modernities and
Democracy. Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books.

Khatami, Mohammed 2003 Islam, Dialogue and Civil Society. New Delhi: Centre for Persian
and Central Asian Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Korkman, Zeynep 2008 “Consuming Nostalgia: Fortune Telling Cafes in Istanbul.” Paper
presented at the conference Orienting Istanbul, Berkeley University, Berkeley California,
September 25th-27th.

Kurzman, Charles, ed. 1998 Liberal Islam: A Source Book. New York: Oxford University
Press.

Kymlicka, Will 1995 Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. New
York: Oxford University Press.

Latour, Bruno 1993 We Have Never Been Modern. Catherine Porter, trans. Cambridge and
London: Harvard University Press.

Le Bon, Gustave 2001 The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Mineola, NY: Dover
Publications.

Lewis, Bernard 1961 The Emergence of Modern Turkey. London, Oxford, New York: Oxford
University Press.

_____. 1990 “The Roots of Muslim Rage.” The Atlantic Monthly, Vol 266, No. 3 (September):
47-60.

_____. 2002 What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response. New York:
Oxford University Press.

Luckmann, Thomas 1967 Invisible Religion. The Problem of Religion in Modern Society. New
York: MacMillan.

Luhmann, Niklas 1982 The Differentiation of Society. Stephen Holmes and Chalres Larmore,
trans. New York: Columbia University Press.

MacIntyre, Alisdair 1981 After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. South Bend, IN: University of
Notre Dame Press.

_____. 1988 Whose Justice? Which Rationality? South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame
Press.

Mahmood, Saba 2001 “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections
on the Egyptian Islamic Revival.” Cultural Anthropology 6 (2): 202-236.

_____. 2003 “Questioning Liberalism, Too: A Response to ‘Islam and the Challenge of
Democracy’.” Boston Review: A Political and Literary Forum. May/April.

_____. 2005 Politics of Piety. The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.

_____. 2006 “Secularim, Hemeneutics, Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation.” Public
Culture 18(2): 323-347.
Makdisi, George 1981 The Rise of the Colleges. Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Malinowski, Bronislav 1936 The Foundations of Faith and Morals: An Anthropological

Analysis of Primitive Beliefs and Conduct with Special Reference to the Fundamental
Problems of Religion and Ethics. London: Oxford University Press, H. Milford.

_____. 1992 Magic, Science, and Religion, and Other Essays. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland
Press.

Mamdani, Mahmood 1996 Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late
Colonialism. Princeton: Princeton University Press; London: James Currey.

_____. 2004 Good Muslim, Bad Muslim. America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror. New
York: Three Leaves Press/Doubleday.

Mango, Andrew 2002 Ataturk. New York: Overlook Press.

Manoukian, Setrag 2005 “Power, Religions and the Effects of Publicness in 20th-Century
Shiraz.” Pp. 57-84 in Religion, Social Practice, and Contested Hegemonies. Armando
Salvatore and Mark LeVine, eds. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

March, Andrew 2009 Islam and Liberal Citizenship. The Search for an Overlapping
Consensus. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Mardin, Şerif 1989 Religion and Social Change in Modern Turkey: The Case of Bediüzzaman
Said Nursi. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

_____. 1991 “The Nakşibendi Order in Turkish History.” Pp. 121-142 in in Islam in Modern
Turkey. Richard Tapper, ed. New York: I.B. Tauris & Co.

_____. 1995 “Civil Society and Islam.” In Civil Society: Theory, History, Comparison. J.A
Hall, ed. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

_____. 2006 Religion, Society and Modernity in Turkey. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University
Press.

Markell, Patchen 2003 Bound by Recognition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Markham, Ian and İbrahim Özdemir, eds. 2005 Globalization, Ethics and Islam. The Case of
Bediuzzaman Said Nursi. Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

Mazower, Mark 2004 Salonica: City of Ghosts. Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950.
New York: Harper Collins.

Mazzarella, William 2006 “Internet X-Ray: E-Governance, Transparency and the Politics of
Immediation in India.” Public Culture 18 (3).
_____. 2009 “Affect: What is it Good For?” In Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation,
Globalization. S. Dube, ed. New York: Routledge.

_____. 2010a “The Obscenity of Censorship: Rethinking a Middle Class Technology.” In

‘We’re Middle Class’: The Cultural Politics of Dominance in India. A Baviskar & R.
Ray, eds. New York: Routledge (forthcoming).

_____. 2010b “Who’s Afraid of the Crowd?” Critical Inquiry (forthcoming).

Mbembe, Achille 2003 On the Postcolony. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of
California Press.

Meeker, Michael 1991 “The New Muslim Intellectuals in the Republic of Turkey.” Pp. 189-
217 in Islam in Modern Turkey. Richard Tapper, ed. New York: I.B. Tauris & Co.

_____. 2002 A Nation of Empire. The Ottoman Legacy of Turkish Modernity. Berkeley, Los
Angeles and London: University of California Press.

Melikoff, Irene 1998 Anadolu Aleviliği ve Pir Sultan Abdal. Ankara: Pir Sultan Abdal Kültür
Derneği.

_____. 2001 Au Banquet des Quarante: Exploration au Coeur du Bektaschisme –Alevisme.

Istanbul: Editions Isis.

Messick, Brinkley 1993 The Calligraphic State. Textual Domination and History in a Muslim
Society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Metcalf, Barbara 1982 Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860-1900. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.

Mills, Amy 2006 “Boundaries of the Nation in the Space of the Urban: Landscape and Social
Memory in Istanbul.” Cultural Geographies No. 13: 367-394.

Mitchell, Timothy 1999 “Society, Economy and the State Effect.” Pp. 76-97 in State/Culture.
State Formation after the Cultural Turn. George Steinmetz, ed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.

Mottahedeh, Roy 1995 “Clash of Civilizations: An Islamicist’s Critique” Harvard Middle

Eastern and Islamic Review 2, 1: 1-26.

Munzuroğlu, Doğan 2004 Dersim Aleviliği: Toplumsal Yapı ve İnanç Bağlamında. İstanbul:
Kalan Yayınevi.

Navaro-Yashin 2002a Faces of the State. Secularism and Public Life in Turkey. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
_____. 2002b “The Market for Identities: Secularism, Islamism, Commodities.” Pp. 221- 253 in
Fragments of Culture. The Everyday of Modern Turkey. Deniz Kandiyoti and Ayşe
Saktanber, eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Negt, Oskar and Alexander Kluge 1993 The Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis
of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

Nereid, Camilla 1998 In the Light of Said Nursi: Turkish Nationalism and the Religious
Alternative. London: C. Hurst Publishers.

Nursi, Bediüzzaman Said 1996 [1959] Emirdağ Lahikası. İstanbul: Envar Neşriyat

_____. 2004a The Words. On the Nature and Purposes of Man, Life, and All Things. Şükran
Vahide, trans. Istanbul: Sözler Publications.

_____. 2004b Kastamonu Lahikası. İstanbul: Söz Basım Yayım.

_____. 2005 Sözler. İstanbul: Söz Basım Yayım.

Obsession. Radical Islam’s War against the West. 2005 Wayne Kopping, director.
Documentary film. Clarion Fund

Olsson, Tord, Elisabeth Özdalga and Catharina Raudvere, eds. 1996 Alevi Identity: Cultural,
Religious, and Social Perspectives: Papers Read at a Conference Held at the Swetish
Research Institute in Istanbul, November 25-27. Istanbul: Svenska Forskninginstitutet;
Richmond, England: Curzon Press.

Oran, Baskın 2004 Türkiye’de Azınlıklar: Kavramlar Teori Lozan İç Mevzuat İçtihat
Uygulama. İstanbul: İletişim Yayınevi.

Öncü, Ayşe 1997 “The Myth of the ‘Ideal Home’ Travels across Cultural Borders to Istanbul.”
Pp. 56-72 in Space, Culture and Power. New Identities in Globalizing Cities. Ayşe Öncü
and Petra Weyland, eds. London and New Jersey: Zed Books.

_____. 1999 “Istanbulites and Others. The Cultural Cosmology of Being Middle Class in the
Era of Globalism.” In Istanbul: Between the Global and the Local. Çağlar Keyder, ed.
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Öniş, Ziya 2004 “Turgut Özal and His Economic Legacy: Turkish Neoliberalism in Critical
Perspective.” Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 40 (no. 4), July.

Özdalga, Elisabeth and Sune Persson, eds. Sivil Toplum, Demokrasi, ve İslam Dünyası.
Translated by Ahmet Fethi. İstanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları.

Özdemir, Ibrahim 2007 “Mevlana’nın Çağdaş İnsana Mesajı/Rumi’s Message to Modern

Humankind.” Jeremy Walton, translated. Turkish Journalists and Writers Foundation
(unpublished paper).
Özden, Canay 2009 “The Wardrobe Republic: A Summary.” Anthropology News 50/7
(October): 55.

Öztürk, Nazif 1994 “Osmanlılar’da Vakıfların Merkezi Otoriteye Bağlanması ve Sonuçları.”

Pp. 19-41 in Le Waqf dans le Monde Musulman Contemporain (XIXe – Xxe Siecles).
Faruk Bilici, ed. Istanbul: Institut Francais d’Etudes Anatoliennes.

_____. 2003 Azınlık Vakıfları. Ankara: Altınküre.

Özyeğin Gül , 2002. The Doorkeeper, the Maid and the Tenant: Troubling Encounters in the
Turkish Urban Landscape. In Fragments of Culture: The Everyday of Modern Turkey,
edited by Deniz Kandiyoti and Ayşe Saktanber, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press.

Özyürek, Esra 2006 Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in
Turkey. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Pamuk, Orhan 1999 “Bir İstanbul Romancısıyım.” İstanbul 29 (Nisan/April): 84-87.

_____. 2003 İstanbul. Hatıralar ve Şehir. İstanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları.

_____. 2004 Istanbul. Memories and the City. Maureen Freely, trans. New York: Vintage
Books/Random House.

Pipes, Daniel 2002 Militant Islam Reaches America. New York: W.W. Norton

Potuoğlu-Cook, Öykü 2006 “Beyond the Glitter: Belly Dance and Neoliberal Gentrification in
Istanbul.” Cultural Anthropology Vol. 21, no. 4: 633-660.

Povinelli, Elizabeth 2002 The Cunning of Recognition. Indigenous Alterities and the Making of
Australian Multiculturalism. Durham & London: Duke University Press.

Qutb, Sayyid 1981 Milestones. S. Badrul Hasan, trans. Karachi: International Islamic
Publishers.

Rahman, Fazlur 1979 Islam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

_____. 1982 Islam and Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.

Ramadan, Tariq 2004 Western Muslims and the Future of Islam. New York: Oxford University
Press.

Reed, Fred. 1999 Anatolia Junction. Burnaby, Canada: Talonbooks.

Roy, Olivier 2004 Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah. New York: Columbia
University Press.

Rushdie, Salman 1988 The Satanic Verses. New York: Picador/Henry Holt
Sajoo, Amyn B. 2002 “Introduction: Civic Quests and Bequests.” In Civil Society in the
Muslim World. Contemporary Perspectives. Amyn Sajoo, ed. London and New York:
I.B. Tauris.

Said, Edward 1978 Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.

Salame, Ghassan, ed. 1994 Democracy without Democrats? The Renewal of Politics in the
Muslim World. London & New York: I. B. Tauris.

Salomon, Noah 2009 “The Salafi Critique of Islamism: Doctrine, Difference and the Problem
of Political Action in Contemporary Sudan. In Global Salafism: Islam’s New Religious
Movement. Roel Meijer, ed. New York: Columbia University Press.

Salvatore, Armando and Dale F. Eickelman 2004 Public Islam and the Common Good. Boston
and Leiden: Brill.

Scott, David and Charles Hirschkind 2006 “Introduction: The Anthropological Skepticism of
Talal Asad.” Pp. 1- 11 in Powers of the Secular Modern. Talal Asad and His
Interlocutors. Scott and Hirschkind, eds. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Sells, Michael 2007 Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations. Ashland: White Cloud
Press.

Sezgin, Abdülkadir 1990 Hacı Bektaş Veli ve Bektaşilik. Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı.

Shankland, David 1993 Alevi and Sunni in Rural Turkey; Diverse Paths of Change. Ph.D.
dissertation. Cambridge, UK: Darwin College, University of Cambridge.

_____. 1999 Islam and Society in Turkey. Huntingdon: Eothen

_____. 2003 The Alevis in Turkey. The Emergence of a Secular Islamic Tradition. London and
New York: Routledge and Curzon.

Silverstein, Brian 2008a “Disciplines of Presence in Modern Turkey. Discourse,

Companionship, and the Mass Mediation of Islamic Practice.” Cultural Anthropology 23
(1): 118-153.

____. 2008b “Temporal Heterogeneity and the Status of the Present in Istanbul.” Paper
presented at the conference Orienting Istanbul, Berkeley University, Berkeley California,
September 25th-27th.

Singer, Amy 2002 Constructing Ottoman Beneficence: An Imperial Soup Kitchen in Jerusalem.
Albany: SUNY Press.

Soncan, Emre and Ali Cansev. 2006. “Papa’yı Protesto Etmek için Ayasofyaida Namaz
Kıldılar.” Zaman Gazetesi, 23 Kasım (November): 1A. Accessed at
http://zaman.com.tr/haber.do?haberno=459445.
Soydemir, Ç. Begum 2003 “İslami Burjuvazi Nerelere Gidiyor?” Istanbul Life, October: 26 –
30.

Spivak, Gayatri 2006 “Reading Orientalism Thirty Years Later, in Istanbul.” Keynote address
delivered at the conference Edward Said Anısına Oryantalizm, Istanbul, Turkey,
December 9th-10th. Text provided from author in personal communication.

Stillman, Norman 1979 The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Sourcebook. Philadelphia:
Jewish Publication society of America.

Stokes, Martin 1992 The Arabesk Debate: Music and Musicians in Modern Turkey. Oxford:
Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press.

_____. 1996 “Ritual, Identity and the State: An Alevi (Shi’a) Cem Ceremony.” Ch. 12 in
Nationalism, Minorities and Diasporas: Identities and Rights in the Middle East. Kirsten
Schulze, Martin Stokes, and Colm Campbell, eds. London & New York: Tauris
Academic Studies.

_____. 2004 “Music and the Global Order.” Annual Review of Anthropology, no. 33: 47-72.

Surush, Abd al-Karim 2000 Reason, Freedom & Democracy in Islam: Essential Writings of
Abdolkarim Soroush. Mahmoud Sadri and Ahmad Sadri, translated and edited. New
York: Oxford University Press.

Tambar, Kabir 2009a “Secular Populism and the Semiotics of the Crowd in Turkey” Public
Culture 21:3 (Autumn): 517-537.

_____. 2009b Stones of Kerbala: Sectarian Dimensions of Secularism in Turkey. Dissertation

submitted to the Anthropology Department of the University of Chicago.

Tambiah, Stanley 1996 Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in
South Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Taraf Gazetesi 2009 “AKP ve Gülen’i Bitirme Planı.” 12 Haziran (June): Front Page.

Taylor, Charles 1994 “The Politics of Recognition.” Pp. 25-73 in Multiculturalism. Examining
the Politics of Recognition. Amy Gutmann, ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.

Tuğal, Cihan 2008 “The Greening of Istanbul.” New Left Review 51, May-June: 65-80.

Turam, Berna 2003 “National Loyalties and International Undertakings. The Case for the Gülen
Community in Kazakhstan.” Pp. 184-207 in Turkish Islam and the Secular State. The
Gülen Movement. Hakan Yavuz and John Esposito, eds. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse
University Press.

_____. 2007 Between Islam and the State. The Politics of Engagement. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Tureli, İpek 2006 “Modeling Citizenship in Turkey’s Miniature Park.” Traditional Dwellings
and Settlements Review 17, no. 2: 55-69.

Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Anayasası 1982 [2001] Available at

http://www.harran.edu.tr/harran/mevzuat/anayasa.pdf.

Trilling, Lionel 1972 Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Uşak, Cemal 2007a “Yüzyılların Işığı: Mevlana; Rumi: Light across the Centuries.” Jeremy
Walton, translated. Turkish Journalists and Writers Foundation (unpublished paper).

_____. 2007b “Hz. İbrahim’in Ahlakı ve Aile Değerleri/The Prophet Abraham’s Ethical and
Familial Values.” Jeremy Walton, translated. Turkish Journalists and Writers Foundation
(unpublished paper).

Vahide, Şükran 2005 Islam in Modern Turkey. An Intellectual Biography of Bediuzzaman Said
Nursi. Albany: SUNY Press.

Walton, Jeremy 2009 “Towards a (New) Anthropology of Liberal Islam: A Summary.”

Anthropology News 50/8 (November): 47-48.

_____. 2010 “Hungry Wolves, Inclement Storms.” In Anthropology and Global

Counterinsurgency. John Kelly, Bea Jauregui, Sean Mitchell and Jeremy Walton, eds.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press (forthcoming).

Warner, Michael 1992 “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject.” Pp. 377-401 in Habermas and
the Public Sphere. Craig Calhoun, ed. Boston, MA: MIT Press.

_____. 2002 Publics and Counterpublics.. New York: Zone Books.

Weber, Max 2003 [1958] The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Talcott Parsons,
trans. New York: Dover/Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Wedeen, Lisa 2008 Peripheral Visions. Publics, Power and Performance in Yemen. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.

White, Jenny 1999 “Islamic Chic.” In Istanbul: Between the Global and the Local. Çağlar
Keyder, ed. Lanham: Roman & Littlefield Publishers.

_____. 2002 Islamist Mobilization in Turkey: A Study in Vernacular Politics. Seattle:

University of Washington Press.

White, Paul, and Joost Jongerden, eds. 2003 Turkey’s Alevi Enigma: A Comprehensive
Overview. Leiden and Boston: Brill.

Wilders Geert 2008 Fitna. Documentary Film. Liveleak Distribution.

Yalçıntan and Erbaş 2003 “Impacts of ‘Gecekondu’ on the Electoral Geography of Istanbul.”
International Labor and Working-Class History, 64: 91-111.
Yaman Ali 1996 “Alevilikte Dedelik Kurumu Üzerine Araştımalar I.” Cem 62
(December/Aralık): 66-68.

_____. 2002 “Türkistan’dan Anadolu Aleviliğine Bakışlar (1)” Alevilerin Sesi 59

(November/Kasım): 20-21.

Yavuz, Hakan 2003a Islamic Political Identity in Contemporary Turkey. New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

_____. 2003b “The Gülen Movement: The Turkish Puritans.” Pp. 19-47 in Turkish Islam and
the Secular State. The Gülen Movement. Hakan Yavuz and John Esposito, eds.
Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

_____. 2004 “Is there a Turkish Islam? The Emergence of Convergence and Consensus.”
Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Vol. 24, No. 2 (October): 213-231.

_____, ed. 2006 The Emergence of a New Turkey: Democracy and the AK Parti. Salt Lake
City: University of Utah Press.

_____. 2009a Secularism and Muslim Democracy in Turkey. Cambridge, UK and New York:
Cambridge University Press.

_____. 2009b “Silencing the Secular Opposition in Turkey: The Case of Ergenekon.” Lecture
delivered at the Indiana University Ottoman and Modern Turkish Department, 19
February.

Yavuz, Hakan, and John Esposito, eds. 2003 Turkish Islam and the Secular State. The Gülen
Movement. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press

Yeni Şafak Gazetesi 2006 “Papa’nın en zor seferi.” 24 Kasım (November). Accessed at
http://yenisafak.com.tr/Politika/?t=24.11.2006&i=16356.

Yılmaz, Ihsan 2003 “Ijtihad and Tajdid by Conduct. The Gülen Movement.” Pp. 208-237 in
Turkish Islam and the Secular State. The Gülen Movement. Hakan Yavuz and John
Esposito, eds. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

_____. 2005 Muslim Laws, Politics and Society in Modern Nation States: Dynamic Legal
Pluralisms in England, Turkey and Pakistan. Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT:
Ashgate.

_____. 2007 “Abant Platform, Alevis, and Diaspora.” Today’s Zaman, 26 March. Accessed at
http://www.fethullahgulen.org/press-room/columns/2320-abant-platform-alevis-and-
diaspora.html.

Zaman Gazetesi 2006 “Saadet, Papa Mitingi’ne 1 milyon kişi bekliyor.” 23 Kasım (November).
Accessed at http://www.zaman.com.tr/haber.do?
haberno=459463&keyfield=C3A761C49F6C6179616E.
_____. 2007 “Mevlana, Muhteşem bir Törenle Anıldı.” Zaman Gazetesi, 1 Ekim (October).
Accessed at http://www.zaman.com.tr/haber.do?haberno=595297.

Zaman, Muhammad Qasim 2002 The Ulama in Contemporary Islam. Custodians of Change.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Zarcone, Thierry 1994 “Waqfs et Confreries Religieuses a l’Epoque Moderne: L’Influence de la

Reforme des Waqfs sur la Sociabilite et la Doctrine Mystique (Un Essai de Synthese).”
Pp. 236-248 in Le Waqf dans le Monde Musulman Contemporain (XIXe – Xxe Siecles).
Faruk Bilici, ed. Istanbul: Institut Francais d’Etudes Anatoliennes.

Zubaida, Sami 1989 Islam, the People and the State. London and New York: I.B. Tauris & Co.
Ltd.

Zürcher, Erik 2004 Turkey: A Modern History. New York: I.B. Tauris.