Abstract
How do young devout Muslim men navigate the complex spatiality of piety and consumption in contemporary urban Turkey? While the recent economic and political enfranchisement of a devout Sunni Muslim middle class in Turkey has been widely documented, gender, age, and geographical differences within this sector remain relatively unexamined. Even less attention is paid to recently emergent devout masculinities. We examine the question of how young devout men navigate these complexities by analyzing the four focus groups we conducted in December 2014 in Istanbul and Konya with men between ages 18 and 35 and who self-identify as devout Muslim. These groups each assembled ten men who did not previously know one another, for a total of 40 participants. Our research reveals that everyday practices of piety and consumption take young devout men across highly variant moral geographies in both the cosmopolitan city of Istanbul and the conservative Central Anatolian city of Konya. Across mosques, cafes, and city streets, these moral geographies include differing and sometimes contradictory expectations of and desires for manliness, youthfulness, and religiosity. Our research shows how these moral geographies transect the scale of the body, the city, and the uneven effects of broader political-economic dynamics that shape Istanbul and Konya, both materially and culturally. We argue that young men form their devout masculinities through their navigation of normative heterosexuality, religious and social conservatism, and pluralism in urban space. Devout masculinity, we find, is practiced quite differently in the diverse and highly varied city of Istanbul than it is Konya, where there are fewer spaces of encounter and leisure for youth. Thus the moral geographies of young devout men’s spatial practices are mediated through the body at the same time as they are enmeshed within the urban fabric of these politically and economically differentiated cities. Our research thus contributes to the development of geographically situated and gendered understandings of piety and consumption in Turkey today.
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