Collective land in Morocco, which makes up roughly one-third of the country’s territory, has been managed by a complex arrangement of statutory, customary, and religious legal systems since 1919. The Moroccan government and international development organizations have repeatedly identified legal asymmetry in land governance structures as a major barrier to rural development. Starting in 2017, a new pilot project administered by the Moroccan government with funding from the Millennium Challenge Corporation is transforming 46,000 hectares of collective land in the Gharb irrigated perimeter into individual freehold tenure over a five-year period. Based on fieldwork carried out from 2017-18, this paper seeks to use the case of collective land privatization in Morocco to broadly explore how the conceptualization of modernity structures acceptable spaces and strategies for rural development. Drawing on interviews with a variety of stakeholders, including Moroccan and U.S. government officials, collective land representatives, and rights-holders to the lands in question, I assert that the Moroccan government’s adoption of a particular conception of modernity within the development sphere has shaped the design and explicit goals of contemporary tenure conversion. This conception is based on economic liberalization, emphasizing the role of the market, and formalization of property rights, but the selective engagement of the state with these policy models highlights the pursuit of project outcomes that lie outside of the acceptable spaces for development. By viewing the practice of tenure reform as a space in which rural power relations and the distribution of resource access are negotiated, we can observe how the discourse of modernity and economic development obscures the concomitant pursuit of political objectives. Ongoing interviews with stakeholders indicates broad agreement on the actualization of some explicit project goals, including marketization of land transactions, increased credit access, and tenure security. At the same time, there is a significant divide between how official and unofficial actors perceive the future transformation of agrarian structures, particularly regarding livelihood shifts, concentration of land ownership, and the relative gains of large farmers and agricultural corporations. This project marks a retreat of the state from directly managing collective land, while opening up opportunities for economic gain by politically connected elites and foreign corporations through marketization and capitalization of the agrarian sphere.

The paper builds on the sociology of intellectuals, knowledge, and ideas, while incorporating the insight of the multi-disciplinary area studies on the Middle Eastern-Muslim intellectual space, and particularly modern Turkey. The paper draws attention to how religion as a domain of "authoritative knowledge" has been largely overlooked in the Western sociology of intellectual space and argues why political-historical context and cultural geography need to be taken into account for explaining the development of intellectual space in particular contexts. In an effort to communicate these literatures further, the paper builds on the Bourdieusian notion of "intellectual field," and argues that both the relational and substantive components of "intellectual capital" in the contemporary Muslim intellectual space in Turkey will define the influence of the agents in it. In terms of its empirical approach, the paper focuses on two intellectual organizations founded by Muslims and Muslim scholars in Turkey, namely "Bilim ve Sanat Vakfi" (BISAV, 1986- The Foundation for Sciences and Arts) and "Ilmi Etudler Dernegi" (ILEM, 2002 - The Association for Scientific Studies), due to their high levels of institutionalization. The study constructs original qualitative datasets that use numerous online archival sources, including magazines/journals, organizational logistical reports and event commentaries, academic profiles and curriculum vitae of individual intellectuals, and other miscellaneous resources. The paper draws on social network analysis to explore the academic relations of more than 50 individuals who have significantly lectured in BISAV and ILEM, in order to develop an understanding of intellectual weight and relative autonomy within Turkey's contemporary Muslim intellectual space. The findings suggest that the betweenness centrality of individual intellectuals which takes into account their general intellectual productivity, scholarly engagement with non-Turkish (Western and Eastern) academic societies and publication outlets, can be a good indicator of their public intellectual influence in Muslim intellectual space in post-2000s Turkey. However, intellectual productivity and high levels of engagement do not readily translate into relative intellectual autonomy from the field of power, as various Muslim intellectuals become highly engaged with the political field, if not become a part of the political heteronomy. The relational perspective needs to be complemented by further understanding of the substantive attributes of intellectual engagement and output. The qualitative analysis in this regard suggests that the intellectual knowledge, which is produced and disseminated by these elite intellectual organizations and intellectuals, syncretizes Western academia with Islamic intellectual heritage, while strategizing to maintain balance between full-blown Westernism and defensive-reactionary Islamism.

Until less than a decade ago secularism was still considered t h e idea epitomizing the ethos of modern Turkey. Today, this doctrine has lost its champions. The elite that traditionally defended those values - mainly the military, the judiciary, and the academia - are scattered or silenced under AKP's authoritarian regime. The aim of this paper is to expound on the vanishing from the public discourse of the idea of secularism. A secular polity is a precondition for democracy. A critical analysis of how secularism historically has been handled by its protagonists will therefore help clarifying issues related to the present crisis of democracy. In the Turkish context secularism has stood for state control over religion, often with assertive and authoritarian overtones. The last big contestation over secularism was the military intervention of February 28, 1997, which resulted in the breakup of Islamist Necmettin Erbakan's government and closure of his Welfare Party. This was followed by mobilization of laic-oriented masses into high-pitched street demonstrations. What these manifestations revealed, however, was that official secularism (laicism) was but a rigid ideology lacking real concern for rationally organized, long-lasting institutions in tune with a democratic order. Has not Turkish secularism always suffered from this deficiency? To a large extent yes, but neither have initiatives to bring about reforms been totally lacking. For example, between the middle of the 1970s and a decade ahead, important, but too often overlooked, efforts were spent to render the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) - core institution in the secular order - a better regulated and transparent design as "public authority." These efforts largely failed, but in retrospect they tell a story about how reform-minded actors were able to initiate transformations, even despite the military junta (1980-83). The paper deals with issues and interest groups involved in this contentious process, and discusses the social, religious and political dynamics at work during this critical period. On balance, the heavy-handedness of Turkish secularism has played into the hands of non-democratic forces. Thus, when AKP got into power in 2002, Diyanet became an easy and gratifying prey. Under AKP Diyanet has been considerably boosted, but to the price of loosing its prestige; insted figuring as a collaborator to an oppressive, in practice one-party regime, which has dropped the secularism agenda all together. Except for various archival resources, this paper is based on autobiographical and interview material.

Much of the existing literature on women’s rights activism and framing processes in the Muslim world presents the nature of such organizing in terms of dichotomous discourses of egalitarianism (secular) or complementarianism (religious), with little emphasis on the dynamism of women’s campaigning efforts within their often shifting contexts. Addressing this gap in the literature, this paper will analyze the recent framing processes of various elite Islamic women in Iran and Turkey to demand for expansion of women’s rights, in particular women’s increased access to political roles, in terms of ‘gender justice’ rather than ‘gender equality’. Based on data gathered from personal interviews as well as a careful study of public statements and publications of elite women, or those with close ties to key political figures, this paper critically examines the political, social, and tactical implications of women’s framing processes that are not conventionally deemed as feminist, given their complementarian undertones. In a comparative research between Iran’s first Vice-President for Women’s Affairs, Shahindokht Molaverdi (2013-2017), under president Hassan Rouhani, as well as the director of the AKP-backed Women and Democracy Association (KADEM) organization in Turkey, Sare Aydin Yilmaz (2013 to present), this paper highlights the nuanced justifications behind adopting a ‘gender justice’ framing. This paper also evaluates the ways in which such public framing on the demand for women’s expanded political roles is received by the political elites as well as the larger public, including women’s rights activists across the ideological spectrum, in each respective country. It argues that Molaverdi’s emphasis on ‘gender justice’ tactfully enables her to find resonance with the Islamic elites while advocating for equal opportunities between genders, including adoption of certain affirmative action measures, given systemic discrimination against women. Such strategic framing has enabled Molaverdi to win the support of a number of secular women’s rights activists, including on the issue of women’s political representation and increased access to the parliament. On the other hand, Yilmaz’s reference to complementarity between genders in her writings and statements on ‘gender justice’ has led to some public backlash against her and her organization among secular Turkish feminists and intensified cleavages between women’s rights groups. Her women’s rights organization, KADEM, however has been able to capitalize on much support from the conservative AKP party in its organizing and campaigning efforts, including in attracting funding from the international community.