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A Muslim Agora: Challenging Modern Urbanity in Two Fronts in Cihan Aktaş’s Work
Abstract
With the rapid urbanization of Turkey starting in the 1950s, modern urban life has long been problematized in the Islamic intellectual field in terms of its compatibility with Islam. Conceptualizing Islamic urbanity in juxtaposition with the modern Western city and taking a conservative stance against urban modernity, many Islamic intellectuals have made a call for the revival of Islamic urban tradition. Despite their critical engagement with the West, the scope of these accounts was mostly limited to the built environment and architectural features, thereby not breaking away from the hegemony of earlier studies on the “Islamic city” by Western scholars. Cihan Aktaş, a prolific intellectual and architect, making her debut in the late 1980s and known for her remarks on Islam and gender, distinguishes herself from these mainstream Islamic accounts by her skeptical approach to tradition and her broader perspective on urbanity, highlighting the everyday urban experiences in her books titled The Homelesness of Modernity and the Vitality of Family (1992) and The Urban Eclipse (2016). This paper suggests that Aktaş challenges modern urbanity in two fronts. First, Aktaş states that the secular nature of modernity makes space bereft of any divine meaning, failing to respond to the moral troubles of modern humans and ailing them with a sense of homelessness. Her second criticism is based on two premises, first, she argues that modern Western urbanity views the “white man” as the norm and universalizes the Western male urban experience. Relatedly, she asserts that Muslim intellectuals perpetuate the universalization of male urban experience while also expecting Muslim women to be the agents of Islamic resistance against modernity by confining them to private sphere in the name of tradition. Finding this burden overwhelming, Aktaş calls for a change in the organization of public sphere, which she refers to as agora, a conceptualization that makes the division between public and private spheres less manifest, facilitating the move in between them. Through this change, Aktaş aims to incorporate the urban experience of Muslim women into the conceptualization of Islamic urbanity. Thus, this paper discusses Aktaş’s agora as an alternative theorization of Islamic urbanity trying to break away from the hegemony of both modern Western urbanity and the conservative intellectual accounts on Islamic urbanity.
Discipline
Political Science
Geographic Area
Turkey
Sub Area
None