Workshop: Religion and its History in Turkey

Participants AbstractsŞebnem Köşer Migration, Gender, and Religion: Continuity or Change?
Akçapar
The intricate relationship between migration and religion is usually overlooked. Religion is often seen as a source ofDepartment of support providing a space meeting spiritual and cultural needs of migrants in the country of destination, as in thecase of Muslim Turkish immigrants, or Hispanic Catholics in the USA. Yet, religion and religious identity can be a
Sociology
source of conflict during all migration processes, i.e. decision-making before actual migration, while in transit, andin the countries of origin. By giving examples from fieldwork focusing on different nationalities and migrantSocialcategories in Turkey – Iranian and Afghan irregular migrants and asylum seekers who converted from Islam to
Sciences
Evangelical Christianity, international retired migrants from Western Europe, Syrian refugees, Russian andUniversity of
Ukrainian residence permit holders, and Uzbek domestic migrant workers – this paper will demonstrate how andAnkarawhy religion has become a contested place at the intersection of gender, social class, and race. Moreover, migration
may act as an accelerator stepping up social change in religious beliefs and practices not only among migrants
themselves but also in the religious landscape of the local populations.
GökçenBeyinli
Asien-AfrikaInstitut
University of
Hamburg

Living Religion Together as Text: Mevlid Books in the History of Turkey“Lived religion”, which refers to religion as practiced by everyday individuals and groups, has been developing as afield since the mid-1990s (Hall 1997, McGuire 2008, Ammerman 2022). However, the focus of the field has to alarge extent been limited to American-European contexts and dominated by ethnography; the history of lived
religion in the modern period is still underdeveloped. Furthermore, the field has been mostly defined by what it
excludes, i.e., priority was given to practices rather than texts and beliefs or to individual agency and autonomy
rather than collectivities or traditions (Ammerman 2016). This presentation aims a contribution to the field with anempirical focus of the texts of a practice, Mevlid, which is a poem of the Ottoman Sufi and poet Süleyman Çelebi (d.
1422), praising the prophet of Islam, written in Turkish. Reciting Mevlid in a musical manner on special occasions
such as birth, circumcision or death has been a common tradition in Turkey. During the AKP-era, it has been fullytransformed into a Sunni-Muslim practice. However, my research proves that it has been performed by, and for,
Christians and Jews in the history of Turkey. It was also utilized by Islamists to manipulate “religious freedom”. My
focus in this presentation will be the various Mevlid books published in Turkey by İstanbul Maarif Kitaphanesi
from the 1940s to the 1970s. These books included not only the Mevlid text of Süleyman Çelebi with Alevi
influences but also oral religious tales, legendary Alevi-Bektashi stories or poems of Yunus Emre. These texts wereWorkshop: Religion and its History in Turkey
harshly criticized by the Diyanet as being full of superstitions and certain copies were banned from sale. However,they were popular among the population, shared and read out loud in small gatherings or coffee-houses. They were
re-printed and distributed widely, and it was only after the mid-1970s that they disappeared from the market,
replaced by “legitimate” ones. These books demonstrate that lived religion can indeed be textual, traditional andcollective. They furthermore blur binary oppositions that are hegemonic on the scholarship on religion in Turkey
such as textual-oral, official-popular, high-low, orthodox-heterodox Islam or Sunni-Alevi.
ÇiğdemBuğdaycı
Amsterdam
School for
CulturalAnalysis
University of
Amsterdam

Medicalization of Sufism: The Norm of being a Secular Turkish Citizen
After the 1925 implementation of the ban on Sufi lodges, titles, and ceremonies, little is known about the fate ofsuch institutions and individuals. In Turkish literature, however, the motif of the “corrupt sheikh” is frequently used
to describe the dangers and pitfalls of Sufism in modern society. 1 This tendency for a “secularist master narrative”
elucidates the nature of the binary oppositions between secularity and religion in Turkey. 2 In Refik Halid Karay’s(1888–1966) 1956 novel Women’s Lodge, the themes of the “corrupt sheikh” and the “insatiable lust of female
disciples” are repeated; however, this time their abnormality is explained as a result of their success in fusing
Western and Eastern civilizations and customs, as opposed to their failure in being a modern, secular, and Western
citizen in other earlier examples. To explain this discrepancy, I refer to the secularization thesis of the earlytwentieth century, which asserted that religion would disappear in a secularized modern society. I explain Karay’s
use of the ambivalent sheikh as an anomaly in modern secularized society by referring to Foucault’s explanation of
how knowledge production delineated the abnormal from the normal and led to the emergence of psychopathology
as a science in the nineteenth century.3 This differentiation, which originated in psy-sciences, not only defined thenormal (in our case secular) citizen but also pathologized Sufism as an anomaly. This pathologization of Sufism
leads, however, to a medicalization of Sufism in both senses: on the one hand, their devotion that borders on
madness becomes a clinical case, and on the other hand, the Sufi method of disciplining the self (nafs) is referred toas a traditional method of psychiatry when practiced by the right hands. I argue that Karay’s psychiatric perspective
on Sufism is consistent with contemporary secularist and Islamist critiques of Sufism and its alleged dangers to themodern world.

Beatrice Hendrich, “Träume, Reime, Laptops: Die Medialisierung religiöser Erfahrung in drei türkischen Romanen,” European Journal of Turkish Studies, no.
25 (2017): 1–28.
2Erdağ Göknar, “Secular Blasphemies: Orhan Pamuk and the Turkish Novel,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 45, no. 2 (2012): 301–26.
3
Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975, ed. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni, trans. Graham Burchell (NewYork: Picador, 2003).
1

Workshop: Religion and its History in TurkeyAyşe Çavdar

To "Be Oneself": Ethical and Political Dynamics of Bottom-up Secularization in AKP's "New Turkey"

Bard College
BerlinYoung women who have abandoned their headscarves or pious lifestyle have become one of Turkey's essential
subjects of political debate in the last few years. Regardless of their numbers, they are becoming more visible with
their testimonies and objections to the religious and political circles in which they grew up. Moreover, by simply
existing, they testify to the existence of a political buffer zone paradoxically recreated by the ruling party's persistentpolicy of polarization in recent years. The stories of these young women, most of whom come from middle andupper-middle-class families, and their stories of distancing themselves from the faith and lifestyle in which they
grew up display that a new wave of secularization is taking shape from below. For the representatives of this newwave of bottom-up secularization, what does the state, nation, religion, family, community, and secularism in thesense/practices known in Turkey so far mean? In this presentation, I will discuss the nature and content of this newwave of secularization by sharing excerpts from the research I have been conducting for nearly four years using
digital ethnography.

Bekir Zakir
Çoban

Religiosity in Turkey as Local and Political

Birgivi
Theology
Faculty
Ege
University

The inability to modernize with religion has led to a chronic problem of religion in Turkey. The neglect of religion
in the idea of modernization of the republic prevented the development of a local religiosity and createdan opposition with a predominant religious tone. During the AKP era, religious communities had the opportunity towork freely and religion has become more effective in the public sphere, in relation with the government’s aim ofraising a religious generation. Some argue that Turkey has become more religious, but others believe that thisreligiousness is just on the surface, because people have become tired of religion. I observe that certain members of
religious institutions such as theology faculties and Diyanet feel under more pressure than before. According
to them, this “religious oppression” is not very different from the secular oppression of previous times. I also
observe that opponents of the government from the secular segment actually make a distinction between religion andgovernment. Although the political conjuncture partially hinders them, these people actually have an interest in
religion. The fact that they sympathize with those who criticize the dominant understanding of religion from within
is an indicator of this approach. Another remarkable matter is that the various religious debates in Turkey are notpurely religious but a class issue. I argue that it is necessary to approach religiosity as local and political, given thatgovernment-supported political religiosity is significantly different from local religiosity in terms of its references
and sensitivities. In this sense, this political religiosity means an opposition to the classical republican ideology. In
my presentation, I will share my observations and experiences on these issues.

Workshop: Religion and its History in Turkey
MarkusDressler
Institute for
the Study ofReligion
Leipzig
University

Charisma, Embodiment, and Continuous Revelation – Rethinking the Conceptualization of Islam as“Discursive Tradition”
My contribution will engage with Talal Asad’s seminal The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam (1986), Shahab
Ahmed’s What is Islam? (2016) and recent contributions by Zeynep Oktay to reflect on the conceptualization ofIslam. Against conceptualizations of Islam that draw on the Quranic revelation and the prophet Muhammad as nodsof Islamic normativity (Asad), or privilege textual and logocentric approaches (Ahmed), I am interested in a broader
framework for Islamic normativities that transcends the level of the finite textual. Drawing on the Alevi case, andbuilding on arguments recently developed by Oktay, I argue that the idea of continuous revelation, the importance ofcharisma, in the sense of embodiment of the divine in humans, places and things, as well as affective connections
through soundscapes and aesthetic formations are important factors in the condensation of Islamic normativities.
Taking them seriously requires pluralization of our approach to Islam as discursive tradition. Such pluralization is inline with a genealogical perspective, which should be sceptical of conceptualizations of Islam that embark fromhegemonic enunciations of Islam, i.e. enunciations that take for granted the scripture-centeredness of Islamic piety
and devotion.

Timur
HammondUrban Worlds of Islam: Networks, Traditions, and Places

Smita Tewari
JassalBaraka in the Turkish Imaginary

Despite ongoing attempts to develop alternative frameworks, the tension between the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’thDepartment of continues to define scholarship on Islam in 20 century Turkey. This paper contributes to these recent discussions bycalling attention to some of the geographical assumptions that are built into these debates. It suggests that much of
Geography
this scholarship depends upon the metaphor of space-as-container where religion is located ‘in space.’ While suchandEnvironment approaches are valuable, this paper argues that scholars should also draw upon an analytic of places-of-connection tobetter understand the geographies of Islam. It illustrates those arguments through a discussion of two figures who
Syracuse
moved through early 20th century Eyüp: Hacı Cemal Öğüt and Ahmet Süheyl Ünver.
University

Faculty ofSociology andAnthropology

Baraka or Bereket, a religiously inflected term is commonly used in Turkey. With a focus on this layered andreligiously inflected concept, I explore how practices associated with mainstream Islam, pre-Islam, as well as
Alevism converge to produce distinctly Turkish understandings about everyday piety in contemporary Turkey. Sincea variety of socio historic reasons and diverse social imaginaries about Islam and its visibility in public life have led
to widely divergent contemporary practices, what transpires for example during shrine visits, also illuminates theWorkshop: Religion and its History in Turkey
AshokaUniversity

multi-layered meanings of the term. The dialectical relationship at the core of baraka may be found in processes ofnegotiation between pilgrim and saint, visitor and shrine, but understandings about baraka also permeate Turkishsocial life. Beginning with how the term is understood by those making ziyara to the shrines of saints, I explore
understandings about baraka in both religious and “secular” contexts. Besides reflection on meaning making, I argue
that on the one hand people seek mystical and spiritual blessings and on the other, tangible material benefits ranging
from bodily health to wealth and prosperity. Thus, while visits to saint shrines may constitute one, albeit declining
arena of Turkish religiosity, of equal interest are other contexts within which Islam’s conceptual vocabulary may be
encountered.

ÖnderKüçükural

Nonreligious Imaginaries in the Turkish Context: What is more Banal? Secularism or Religion

Alliance ofCivilizations
InstituteIbn Haldun
University

Lois Lee (2015), in her seminal work “Recognising the Non-religious,” questions “if people do not even notice thenon-religious images and slogans around them, does this not suggest that they are fundamentally indifferent to themand that these don’t really matter?” (p.2) Inspired by Billig’s notion of banality, Lee upholds an alternative view andargues that everyday forms of secularism (she uses nonreligion and subjective secularity interchangeably, I will also
follow her) may go unnoticed like dusty flags and they excite little attention, but they can have a profound influence
on contemporary culture. This paper explores similar yet different dynamics in the religion-related field (Quack,2014) in the Turkish context. The question I want to explore in this paper is “What is banal in the Turkish context?
Is it secularism or religion?” The cases and data I use are part of the on-goingfield research on nonreligion in 7 cities
in Turkey and funded by TUBITAK. Following Quack’s (2014) relational approach, I will argue that religion andsecularism are made mundane and invisible for some sections of society, while simultaneously eliciting great
excitement from other sections. Both these concepts are still polarizing fault lines in the Turkish context. From someof the participants in the field work we heard that both religion and secularism as something which is ‘traditional’,
pervasive, normal, and potentially banal. These ideas come out through their assumptions, conflations,and identifications that appear in their discourses and performances. For some other participants on the other hand,
the topics of religion and secularism are still fresh. Religion and secularism are still polarizing topics in the context
of Turkey. Thus, participant’s position in this polarization seems to determine what they consider banal. An analogy
from a slightly different context might help to clarify what I mean. Many official buildings in Turkey havenationalist quotes written on walls. A very common such quote is “Ne mutlu Türküm diyene/ Happy is he who says
I'm a Turk.” To a person that identifies as a Turk and resides in Kadikoy, Istanbul this sentence is trivial to the pointof being invisible. To a person identifying as a Kurd and residing in Diyarbakır this quote is a reminder ofsystemically oppressive state practices. In this paper I show that we are dealing with similar undercurrents in thedaily practices and symbols of religion and nonreligion/secularism. Data from the fieldwork point to the fact that

Workshop: Religion and its History in Turkey
there are discursive positions and imagineries (Beaman & Stacey, 2021) shaped by either religion or secularism.
They are normative, contentious, and vibrant enough to still mold individual and societal ‘identity’ and practice.
References:
Lee, L. (2015). “The Unwaved Flag: Everyday and Banal Forms of Non-Religion” Recognizing the Non-religious:
Reimagining the Secular. Oxford University Press.
Beaman, L. G., & Stacey, T. (Eds.). (2021). Nonreligious Imaginaries of World Repairing. Springer International
Publishing.
Quack, J. 2014. Outline of a Relational Approach to ‘Nonreligion’. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 26(4–5): 439–469.
Nil Mutluer
Institute for
the Study ofReligion
Leipzig
University

Tactics of Everyday Religion and Secularity in Turkey
Laicism in Turkey, has been the reference point for the continuation of the top-down Kemalist nationalist statepolicies since the proclamation of the Republic. The top-down, hegemonic model of Turkish modernization spawned
the "laic Kemalist - Islamic" antagonism and caused the fundamental values to be built around the two poles. This
antagonism has shaped the gender, family, age, religion, ethnicity and class-based power relations in which
Kemalists were regarded as the value/norm setter and the main power holder, until the AKP (Adalet ve KalkınmaPartisi, Justice and Development Party) came to power in 2002 elections. Despite this antagonism at state andpolitical level, religion and secularity are lived in plurality and everyday life reveals the fact that the modern politicalframe of what is described as secular -laic- or religious -Muslim- does not fit in everyday life encounters andsettings. Everyday reveals the plurality of the discourses, practices and meanings attributed to religious and secular.
The aim of this presentation/study is to reveal this plurality in the everyday context of today’s Turkey. Based on
ethnographic field works carried out on Kemalist Feminists, Muslims and Informal Women Organizations this
discussion examines the everyday tactics utilized in relation to state, religious and non-religious organizations aswell as everyday interactions. It also seeks to understand the local contextualization of religious and secular invarious power relations.

Workshop: Religion and its History in Turkey
Zeynep Oktay

The History of Popular Religion in Turkey: Conceptual and Methodological Issues

Department of
TurkishLanguage andLiterature

Our representations of the Muslim past rely largely on the textual and material products of the urban, literate, andmale elite. Efforts to extend beyond this framework pose methodological and conceptual problems. In this paper,
past conceptualization such as “folk Islam” and recent concepts such as “agrarian religion” will be evaluated insearch for a terminology that refrains from positing binaries while also taking account of religious difference andplurality. The role of literary texts and manuscripts as sources on the history of popular religiosity will be discussed
and the unique methodologies required by these sources will be investigated. How can we imagine the oral
consumption of these texts and the communities that are formed in this process? How do we imagine intertextuality
in the oral tradition? Considering these issues will also lead us to question the presumed binary between the religious
and the non-religious in pre-modern Anatolian society.

Boğaziçi
University

Mark Soileau

What is Felt When a Martyr Falls in Modern Turkey

Independent
ScholarMartyrdom is an attribution bestowed upon an individual who has died a usually violent and often bloody death forthe sake of a cause or struggle on behalf of a group (“us”) and at the hands of an enemy (“them”). In the case ofmartyrdom (şehitlik) in contemporary Turkey, the relevant group identity is most prominently conceived of as the
Turkish nation, with Sunni Islamic overtones. Because it brings together themes like struggle, violence, death,sacrifice, and community, the concept of martyrdom bears strong affectivity – that is, the potential to convey andengender emotions in members of the relevant community. These emotions may include sorrow, indebtedness, pride,
anger, and vengeance. Because the martyr figure bears such cultural gravity and thus political utility, his memory isperpetuated through various means, including the naming of streets and schools, narrative texts, dramatic images,
poems and songs, and other forms of emotional discourse and expression. It is through these media that theaffectivity of martyrdom is actualized. This paper will explore the aesthetic and affective dimensions of thecommemoration of martyrs in modern Turkey, analyzing the forms through which they are commemorated and theemotions thereby conveyed, with reference to several historical moments: the wars that constitute the republic’s
birth narrative (the defense of Çanakkale and the War of Liberation), the fight against separatist terrorism, and mostrecently the coup attempt of 15 July 2016. It will show how the emotions engendered through the martyr motif andits dramatic symbols work culturally, though these emotions might be felt differently by different individuals fromdifferent sets of surroundings at different times.

Workshop: Religion and its History in Turkey
Jeremy F.
WaltonReligious Freedom, Spatial Politics, and Heritagization in Today’s Turkey

In recent years, scholars such as Winnifred Sullivan (2005) and Elizabeth Shaman Hurd (2015) have plumbed theDepartment of political ideal of “religious freedom” and its discontents. Through legal enshrinement and application, “religious
freedom” creates myriad dilemmas and even “impossibilities” for a variety of religious actors, especially those of
Culturalminoritized communities, even as the imperative of “religious freedom” has also inspired new, internationalized
Studiesmodalities of governance. My own earlier work (Walton 2017) interrogated the formations of religious freedom,
University of
secularism and civil society in Turkey in relation to both Sunni and Alevi institutions and collectivities. In thisRijekapresentation, I aim to integrate these previous discussions of religious freedom, which have largely focused on legalinstitutional questions, with an interrogation of the politics of religious spaces and religious heritage. To do so, I
compare and contrast three specific sites in Istanbul: Hagia Sophia (Ayasofya-i Kebir Camii), Saint Stephen’s
Bulgarian Church (Sveti Stefan Crkva; Demir kilise) and the recently-opened Yavuz Selim Sultan Bridge. On thebasis of its recent reconsecration as a mosque, Hagia Sophia illustrates an aggressive religious-spatial politics thatframes religious freedom as a majoritarian project in antagonistic relation to “secularism”. By contrast, SaintStephen’s Church, the unique, publicly-visible Bulgarian-Orthodox site in Istanbul, enshrines an image of religious
freedom as a minority politics of recognition and a salvage project in relation to the Ottoman Empire’s erstwhile,
diminished non-Muslim communities. Finally, Alevi protests against the naming of the third Bosporus bridge after
Yavuz Selim Sultan, who authorized massacres of Alevi-Kızılbaş during the early 16th century, articulates religious
freedom as a politics of protest on the part of a community that has been denied legal recognition and, for the mostpart, lacks monumental sites of memory and heritagization.
Bret Wilson

The Last Masters: Sufi Shaykhs at the End of Empire and in the Early Republic

Department of This paper examines the biographies of Sufi leaders (shaykhs) in the empire-to-republic transition to demonstrate
History
how they coped – as a group – with the suppression of Sufism in 1925, which eliminated their jobs and, in manycases, forced them to relocate. The picture that emerges is diverse: some embraced the post-1925 context, working
Centralin state jobs and becoming enthusiastic Kemalists, while others withdrew from public life and some rejected
Europeansecularism in its entirety. The dominant trend is that Sufi masters worked with and sometimes for the new
University
republican state, often in jobs in the cultural or educational realms, sometimes in politics, and more seldom for the
new state religious bureaucracy, Diyanet. To varying degrees, Sufi leaders maintained an above-average social status
but many had to accept a diminution of their former prestige. Most accepted this fate while fewer numbers emigrated
to continue their vocation abroad in Syria, Egypt, or Albania. This paper represents one of the first attempts tounderstand secularization through the collective experience of Sufi masters. It is accompanied by the production of a

Workshop: Religion and its History in Turkey
database about shaykhs about their post-1925 occupations.