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Detoxing Our Souls from the West: Turkish Theology and the Invention of a Psyche for Homo Islamicus
Abstract
Humanities in the Turkish University is splitting up into two: Theology departments, besides the classical Islamic sciences, now include each and every humanities department. In every university there are two, for example, sociology departments, one 'secular' and one 'religious'. By supplementing traditional disciplines with the title 'religion', a new image of Man whose existence, it is argued, was suppressed, unfolds: Homo Islamicus (Davutoğlu 1994). In this paper, I will assemble a genealogy of the recently proliferating field of 'religious psychology' in Turkey with an eye to the larger shifts in power-knowledge nexus that underline it. It is only in 90s that we see the emergence an autonomous field of knowledge about the Islamic self that rapidly became almost omnipresent during the Justice and Development Party decade as manifested in the record breaker popular self help books inspired by religious teachings. This new discourse about the Muslim self, I argue, is a buffer zone between a neoliberalized market and insulated selves (Njoto-Feillard 2012, Rudnyckyj 2011). Rather than another spiel in the neoliberal blame game, we need to historicize and localize the problem-spaces (David Scott, 2004) out of which 'answers' such as religious psychology are produced. In this regard I will discuss two such histories out of which this new domain of inquiry emerges: First, since 60s, the task of decolonizing the Muslim Self from 'westoxification' (Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, 1962) and a return to the true 'self' produced the debate around Islamization of knowledge (Sardar 1985, Abaza 2002). The problematic of producing a knowledge that refused to comply with the normative structures of Western thought started to build its Subject from inside out. And secondly, German Ordoliberals who fled the Nazi Germany introduced 'social policy' to the Turkish economy departments, and their students later on brought up the Islamic Man against the ego-driven Western subject. Influenced by Roethlisberger's work on human relations, late Istanbul University Professor and the 'Great Mentor' of conservative intelligentsia Sabahattin Zaim (1978) argued that finite resources and infinite desires-needs must be rethought. Needs and desires can be reconfigured to elicit a harmonious society. It is out of these two problematics, I argue, a new discourse about the 'Muslim' self emerged. Following this double genealogy, the paper will touch briefly on how this new field circulates from university to social services and hospitals, and how through its iterations is being reified.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Turkey
Sub Area
Middle East/Near East Studies