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Islamic Broadcasting and the Reconfiguration of the Secular Public Sphere in Turkey through Television
Abstract
The phenomenon of Islamic television broadcasting in Turkey complicates and problematizes the conventional narrative of secularism, which assumes a clear-cut distinction between secular and religious, public and private, and traditional and modern. These broadcasters challenge the logic of secularism by presenting Islam (often implicitly) as a set of discourses and practices that regulate all aspects of an individual's comportments as well as the norms of a collective living rather than as merely a transcendental spirituality experienced in the private sphere. They also illustrate the possibility of the co-existence of the secular and the religious by fostering new habits of media production and consumption tied to a new Islamic bourgeois ethics. The development of television broadcasting in Turkey - from the past monopoly of the state to the multi-channel liberal media environment of today - exemplifies the problems with the exclusive nature of the secular, public sphere, and the necessity for the reconfiguration of this sphere and the idea of secularism germinated in it, to make them more inclusive and pluralistic. Islamic TV channels illustrate the necessity of secularism to acknowledge the unavoidable yet denied plurality and heterogeneity of the liberal public.
Discipline
Media Arts
Geographic Area
Turkey
Sub Area
None