The pluralism and diversification of religious authority has always been an inherent characteristic of Islam throughout history but has become more complex over the last four decades following the rise of political Islam, Salafism and the push of globalization and transnational rights discourse. In this paper, I want to engage with concepts and practices of Islamic authority within a context of challenges posed by globalization, the politics of development aid and the concomitant transnational discourse of human rights, women’s and children’s rights. I do not wish to discuss conflicts or convergences between Islamic doctrine and human rights, but rather want to look at concrete responses by religious leaders to rights-backed demands for social and cultural transformation. More specifically, I want to discuss religious speech in relation to the campaign for the abandonment of Female Genital Cutting practices in Egypt. Campaigns against FGC are usually studied in the field of development studies but are rarely the subject of broad anthropological investigation. Such campaigns - mostly in the form of awareness-raising seminars - can be seen, however, as efforts to accelerate socio-cultural transformation. Moreover, activists and NGO workers impact on religious opinion making by seeking the support of leaders to condemn the practice and endorse efforts to stop it. This paper aims to discuss the nature of the involvement of religious leaders in coalition building against FGC and its implications for religious authority and opinion making. It draws on literature study, anthropological fieldwork in Cairo and Luxor (between December 2013 and June 2014) and religious speech that is available online (You Tube). It gives an in-depth analysis of concrete religious discourse by Azhari shaykhs who were invited within the frame of awareness-raising seminars and of speeches by two major Salafi preachers. Through the variety of expressed opinions on the matter of FGC, I argue that this context is contributive to a tendency toward authoritarian opinion making (Abou El Fadl 1997, 2001) and brings forth the question of power and authority to define what belongs to the sphere of the religious and what belongs to the cultural (Barras & Dabby 2014).

The Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı, hereafter Diyanet) is a state institution established one year after the foundation of the secular Turkish Republic in order to fill the vacuum in religious authority created by the abolition of the Islamic caliphate as part of the reforms undertaken to forge a secular nation-state. Diyanet’s role is defined in the Turkish Constitution as governing “the works concerning the beliefs, worship, and ethics of Islam,” enlightening “the public about their religion”, and administering “the sacred places of worship”. Despite this legislative restriction on its jurisdiction, Diyanet has started establishing Family Counseling and Religious Guidance Offices (Family Offices hereafter) throughout Turkey since 2003, approximately one year after the coming to power of the Muslim-conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP). Preachers working for Diyanet’s Family Offices provide pious Muslim families with religious guidance as well as advice and counseling on domestic issues. Diyanet’s Family Offices have led to secular anxieties about the role of Diyanet as an institution in particular and the proper scope of religion in a secular state in general. Such anxieties have become exacerbated by the AKP’s pledge to form a “New Turkey ,” posed as the antithesis of the Kemalist era, which is known for its authoritarian form of secularism that is antagonistic to the public expression and visibility of religion. Based on a year-long fieldwork that included interviews with the preachers working for these offices and participant observation in the training sessions of these preachers, this presentation explores how the family has recently become the primary site through which the role of Islam in governance and the proper jurisdiction of theology in a secular public have been debated, contested, and reconfigured in Turkey, which is considered the paradigmatic example of secular governance in the Middle East. I argue that the Turkish government’s attempt to govern the family through religion should not be considered simply as Islamization or an aberration from secularism. While the involvement of Diyanet in the sphere of the family may appear as Islam’s overreaching beyond its proper boundaries and jurisdiction, such intertwinements between religion and politics may serve to further consolidate and extend the secular state’s power into the intimate domains of pious citizens’ lives through the deployment of religious authority.

Although the discourse of and policies towards strengthening the family are not new in Turkey, there has been a significant transformation in the content and impact of the politics of the family under the rule of the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party, hereafter AKP) in the last decade. This transformation is particularly visible in terms of the way pro-family regulations shape the social policy agenda and the increasing number of institutional mechanisms created for this purpose within the state apparatus. The Ministry of Family and Social Policies seems to be the main agent behind AKP’s family-centered policies, and consequently, most of the research has focused on this institution. However, the Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı (Directorate of Religious Affairs) has been playing an equally vital role in their shaping and implementation. Diyanet’s efforts, in particular, to increase women’s participation and visibility in the religious domain overlap with and support the family-centered policies in significant ways. This paper aims to look at this overlap between the politics of the family and the feminization of the religious sphere by analyzing the transformation and utilization of the Diyanet during the AKP era. It will particularly focus on two channels created within the Diyanet system: The Family Guidance Bureaus, which were established in 2003 with the aim of protecting and strengthening the family through religious counseling, and female preachers employed by the Diyanet to reach more women through religious practices and guidance. Based on a variety of sources, including Diyanet reports, publications of the family bureaus and ethnographical data, the paper will explore how these new channels intersect with and serve the family-based government policies while at the same time increasing women’s participation in religious practices, both inside and outside the mosque. In other words, the paper will analyze the work of Diyanet’s female preachers and Family Guidance Bureaus as milieus where AKP’s ambitious policies of strengthening the family and broadening the state regulation of the religious domain meets and complements each other. In doing so, the paper also aims to contribute to understanding the transformation of the Diyanet and the new roles it undertakes under the AKP rule.