Building a Pious Self in Secular Settings: Pious Women in Modern Turkey (original) (raw)
Related papers
Rethinking Piety and the Veil Under Political Islam: Unveiling Among Turkish Women After 2016
American Journal of Qualitative Research, 2022
This paper covers how the merging of political Islam and the Turkish state led to the monopolization of public Islam and describes how the erasing of diverse meanings underlying Islamic ethical practices has led pious Muslim women to unveil as part of their search for their own subjectivity without falling into the binary of Islamist and secularist political projects. Towards illustrating the search for non-politicized piety, I refer to the narratives of six informants. Their stories reveal that the attempt of cultivating non-politicized piety still takes place within, and in relation to the political upheavals created by the political rule as it shifts into authoritarianism. Contrary to the framing of unveiling as a repudiation of Islamic norms, the cases of unveiling in this study aim to show how acts of unveiling communicate an intricate form of political and religious agency expressed from within an insecure, vulnerable position. More than all, they express the difficulty of establishing and maintaining an Islamic self-cultivation regimen under the shadow of a political symbolism that has been hoisted upon a major tool of this pious self-construction.
Religion State and Society, 2016
Since 2003 the Turkish Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) has increased the number of female preachers (vaizeler). These state appointed professional female preachers are engaged in illuminating women and providing them with an appropriate religious education. Within the frame of Turkish state’s regulation of religious affairs, this phenomenon is important since it calls into question both the state’s monopoly over religious officers and women’s access to the religious public realm. The article casts light on these issues by addressing the following questions: what does the Diyanet’s increase in female preachers reveal about the intertwined relationship between women, religion and the state in contemporary Turkey? Or, in other words, what does it reveal about the transformation of Turkey’s assertive secularism? Following year-long ethnographic observations of the vaizeler’s daily activities in three Istanbul districts (Bahçelievler, Üsküdar and Beşiktaş), this paper analyses the evolution of female religious engagement in Turkey. The concluding remarks highlight the trend of professionalisation and standardisation in the traditional activity of female preaching. The vaizeler’s sessions are also extremely telling of a broader and complex redefinition of Turkish secularism.
Pitfalls of Secularism in Turkey
Feminist Dissent
Deniz Kandiyoti is Emeritus Professor of Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her work on gender, development, nationalism, and Islam has been deeply influential within feminist studies, development studies and Middle Eastern studies. Her path-breaking essay ‘Bargaining with Patriarchy’ appeared in the journal Gender and Society in 1988. She is the author of Concubines, Sisters and Citizens: Identities and Social Transformation (1997) and the editor of Fragments of Culture: The Everyday Life of Modern Turkey (2002), Gendering the Middle East (1996), Women, Islam and the State (1991).
Performing Irşad. Female Preachers (vaizeler) in view of the Turkish State's Moral Support
Turkish Studies, 2015
The article addresses the religious assistance provided by female preachers (vaizeler) enrolled by a Turkish state institution, the Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet). Employed all over the country and abroad, these preachers are performing many activities that transcend the sacred places of mosques. The study first investigates how concretely the Turkish state has promoted an increase in religious assistance for women and families. Resulting from one year of ethnographic observations of the vaizeler's daily activities in Istanbul, this work enriches the debate concerning religion and the state in Turkey with an unconventional perspective: female moral support.
Religion, Politics and Gender Equality in Turkey: implications of a democratic paradox?
Third World Quarterly - THIRD WORLD Q, 2010
This article examines the gendered implications of the intertwining of Islam and politics that took shape after the process of democratisation in Turkey had brought a political party with an Islamist background to power. This development revived the spectre of restrictive sex roles for women. The country is thus confronted with a democratic paradox: the expansion of religious freedoms accompanying potential and/or real threats to gender equality. The ban on the Islamic headscarf in universities has been the most visible terrain of public controversy on Islam. However, the paper argues that a more threatening development is the propagation of patriarchal religious values, sanctioning secondary roles for women through the public bureaucracy as well as through the educational system and civil society organisations.
International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2011
Nearly one-third of Turkey's official preaching workforce are women. Their numbers have risen considerably over the past two decades, fueled by an unforeseen feminization of higher religious education as well as the Directorate of Religious Affairs’ attempts to redress its historical gender imbalances. Created in the early Turkish Republic, the Directorate is also historically embedded in (re)defining the appropriate domains and formations of religion, and the female preachers it now employs navigate people's potent fears rooted in memories of this fraught past. In the various neighborhoods of Istanbul, these preachers attempt to overcome conservative Muslims’ cautious ambivalence toward the interpretative and disciplinary powers of a secular state as well as assertive secularists’ discomfort and suspicion over increasingly visible manifestations of religiosity. Thus, the activities of state-sponsored female preachers are inescapably intertwined with the contestation of reli...
Political Religion and Politicized Women in Turkey: Hegemonic Republicanism Revisited
Since its establishment in 1923, the Republic of Turkey has assumed a sacred character, owing primarily to the influence of republicanism, the country's dominant political religion. Processes of modernization, inherent in republicanism, became the main instigators for the improvement of women's rights in Turkey from the 1920s and 1930s onwards. However, thanks to the subsequent Europeanization process in Turkey, coinciding with the new millennium, modernization has acquired new meanings. The new interpretations of modernization, do not necessarily support the dominant political religion in Turkey. Gender policy is a crucial area to gauge how modernization and republicanism clash and/or converge with each other. This article comprehensively examines how, very recently, the demands of gender rights activists have accentuated differences between republicanism and modernization. We argue that the schism among womens' groups in the public sphere regarding rights has been important for triggering debate and questioning the ongoing salience of republicanism. The article contributes to literature on political religions by suggesting that the sacralization of the republic, driven by Turkish nation-building processes in our case, may be hampered by the process of modernization once this process becomes autonomous from sacralization and generates its own momentum.
Reading Islam: Life and Politics of Brotherhood in Modern Turkey
2020
In Reading Islam Fabio Vicini offers a journey within the intimate relations, reading practices, and forms of intellectual engagement that regulate Muslim life in two enclosed religious communities in Istanbul. Combining anthropological observation with textual and genealogical analysis, he illustrates how the modes of thought and social engagement promoted by these two communities are the outcome of complex intellectual entanglements with modern discourses about science, education, the self, and Muslims’ place and responsibility in society. In this way, Reading Islam sheds light on the formation of new generations of faithful and socially active Muslims over the last thirty years and on their impact on the turn of Turkey from an assertive secularist Republic to an Islamic-oriented form of governance. ‘For the better part of a century, Turkey has been a major center of intellectual, educational, and ethical reform in modern Islam. In this vividly written and theoretically sophisticated book, Fabio Vicini takes readers through a reading of the two most foundational currents in that reform movement, and shows their deep relevance for education, ethics, and civility in the broader Muslim world. This is a must-read book for all students of Islamic affairs.’ Robert W. Hefner, Pardee School of Global Affairs, Boston University ‘Fabio Vicini’s Reading Islam is both methodologically careful and theoretically insightful, reflecting the best qualities of ethnographic writing on the social life of Islam in Turkey. Vicini describes in rich detail the forms of piety and intellectual development encouraged in religious communities active in Turkey. It is certainly refreshing to read an analysis of religious practice that takes seriously the practitioners’ orientation toward transcendence in developing religious knowledge and ethical reasoning.’ Kim Shiveley, Kutztown University ‘This perceptive study of brotherhood, ethics and self-disciplining in religious communities focused on reading Said Nursi’s Risale-i Nur draws attention to aspects of religious tradition hitherto neglected in studies of Turkish Islam. Vicini’s thoughtful analysis engages critically with a large body of contemporary social theory and provides essential new insight into the interiorizing practices of these communities and Islamic piety in general, offering a sympathetic understanding of Muslim life in modern Turkey.’ Martin van Bruinessen, Comparative Study of Contemporary Muslim Societies, Utrecht University