Secularism and State Religion in Modern Turkey: Law, policy-making and the Diyanet, by Emir Kaya. Religious Politics in Turkey: from the birth of the Republic to the AKP, Ceren Lord. (original) (raw)
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Secularism and State Religion in Modern Turkey : Law, Policy-Making and the Diyanet
The Diyanet, the official face of Islam in Turkey, is the ‘Presidency of Religious Affairs’, a governmental department established in 1924 after the break-up of the Ottoman Empire and with the abolition of Caliphate. In this book, Emir Kaya offers an in-depth multidisciplinary analysis of this vital institution. Focusing on the role of the Diyanet in society, Kaya explores the balance the institution has to strike between the Muslim traditions of the Turkish population and the secular creed of the Turkish state. By examining the various laws that either bolstered or hindered the Diyanet’s budgets and activities, Kaya highlights the institutional mindsets of the Diyanet membership. He also evaluates its successes and failures as a state department that must consistently operate within the context of the religiosity of Turkish society. By situating all of this within the two competing – but often complimentary – concepts of religion and secularism, Kaya offers a book that is important for those researching the interplay of Islam and the state in Turkey and beyond.
Religion and Politics in Contemporary Turkey
Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of the Middle East, 2021
Religion and secularism have been central threads in Turkish politics throughout the history of the republic. This chapter focuses on three important aspects of the relationship between religion and politics in contemporary Turkey. First, it explores the political functions of the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), a government agency that has served as the primary means for the implementation of the religious policies of the Turkish state. Second, it investigates the relations between Islamic communities, political parties, and the state and argues that the distinction between official and unofficial Islam that has informed much of the work on the Turkish religious field must be strongly qualified. Finally, the author focuses on the trajectory of political Islam in Turkey, critically re viewing the literature on the rise, political incorporation, and authoritarian turn of Islamic parties. The conclusion emphasizes the need for studies investigating the impact of politics on religiosity in Turkish society.
Management of Religion in Turkey
This article discusses legal regulations and political issues regarding religion in Turkey, and focuses on the role, historical foundations and legal structure of the Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı – hereinafter ‘Diyanet’), an administrative unit founded in 1924 “to organize the religious affairs” in a secular state apparatus. In order to contextualise the issue, concepts of ‘laicité’, ‘secular’, ‘secularizations’, ‘secularisms’, and ‘post-secular’ are explored. Thus the triangle between state, society and religion, with a special focus on a decade of successive AK Party (Development and Justice Party) governments, is scrutinised in the light of the right to freedom of religion and/or belief in Turkey.
Diyanet: The Turkish Directorate for Religious Affairs
The team 'influence from abroad' is an extremely difficult issue. After finalising two national reports, we decided to structure the final project report along four main dimensions (explained below). Following a general historical account of Islam in Turkey (chapter 2), the first dimension concerns the
Journal of Islamic Thought and Civilization
This paper offers a critical analysis of the body of offices responsible for the regulation of the public religious affairs in Turkey with a historical perspective from the Ottoman Empire to the current Republican period. The paper has a specific goal to explore how the public bodies regulating the religious life have played their role for the purpose of ensuring political and social control in the country by reviewing the religious institution during the Ottoman era and comparing within the Republican period under three different ruling ages: the Republican People’s Party, the multi-party and the AK Party. A significant volume of research has been conducted on the various aspects of public religious offices; and have been reviewed for this purpose by using historical research design. The findings show that during the Ottoman Empire, the regulation of the spiritual life was marked by a strong influence of the Sheikh ul-Islam . However, this institution experienced a huge decline aft...
Instrumentalizing Islam in a 'Secular' State: Turkey's Diyanet and Interfaith Dialogue
2020
This paper analyses how interfaith dialogue was interpreted by the Turkish state's Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) over several administrations. Mirroring changes in attitude within the state, the Diyanet began promoting interfaith dialogue in mid-1990s. The Islamist-inspired AKP administration continued this stance after its election in 2002. However, as the AKP leadership adopted a more authoritarian and anti-western tone after 2011, they changed their policy on interfaith dialogue. Through a political analysis and a content analysis of Diyanet texts and Friday sermons, this paper will discuss policy on interfaith dialogue to show how Islam has been used for social engineering by the nominally secular Turkish state. This paper contributes to literature on secularism by examining how an aggressively secular state has instrumentalized religion to meet its political needs.