Turkey is going through a turbulent political period in which the intertwining of neoliberalism and conservatism and the drift towards authoritarianism constitiute major obstacles to gender equality. Against this background, the study of the rise of Islamic fashion in contemporary Turkey and its effects on pious women’s gendered identities can provide a useful ground to explore the discrepancy between the image of “ideal woman” promoted in the pro-Islamist, antifeminist and authoritarian discourses of the Justice and Development Party (JDP) government and urban, well-educated, young pious women’s conception of gender and Islam. This study aims to examine this discrepancy by drawing on in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted with young, urban and pious fashion designers. It engages in a detailed narrative analysis that attempts to disentangle the complex web of meanings where Islamic fashion, gendered identities and piety intermesh with each other in young, pious fashion designers’ mindsets. As the interviews reveal, in the contemporary Turkish context, young, pious women’s appropriation of Islamic fashion in the fashion sector is highly marked by themes such as individualism, women’s empowerment and gender equality. Drawing on this, this paper points out that Islamic fashion connotes a new possibility for unsettling age-old divides in Turkey such as secular/pious, modern/traditional and can initiate dialogue between different positionalities beyond their static interpretations in hegemonic public narratives. This promising intertwining of Islam and fashion in young, pious fashion designers’ mindset also displays profeminist tones that constitutes a counter-hegemonic force opposing the rise of the antifeminist ethos in the political arena in contemporary Turkey. Along these lines, the following research questions constitute a guideline for this research: How do young, urban, pious fashion designers in Turkey negotiate the intertwining of fashion and Islamic practices? What kind of narratives do they produce when reflecting on their gendered identities? How do they position themselves vis-a-vis secular and pious publics? What effects does this positionality generate on their conceptions of gender, Islam, modernity and secularism? As a result of this analysis, I hope to be able to explore the positionalities of pious women fashion designers in the contemporary gender regime in Turkey.

Formation of the "Wise Persons Committee" in 2013 was heralded as one of the turning points in Turkey's democratization process. Composed of 63 people, who are framed as the 'top intelligentsia' of Turkey, the Wise People conducted meetings all over the country to establish a dialogue channels with the public in general; the 'ordinary folk'-with regards to peaceful resolution of the Kurdish Question. At this instance, the figure of the 'enlightened' (the word used for 'intellectual' in Turkish, 'aydın') was utilized as a 'positive','uniting' figure by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government and AKP's leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Barely three years later, the same political cadres of the AKP, condemned the 'intellectual' (aydın) for signing a petition demanding the very same thing; peaceful resolution of the Kurdish Question. This time around, the 1128 signatories of the petition, belonging to Turkey's academic circles were framed as 'supporters of terrorism' by the AKP and now-Head of Republic Erdoğan. Some of these academics lost their jobs, had their passports confiscated, had traveling abroad ban imposed, became targets of legal and administrative investigations. Ironically, some of the signatories were the very same people who took part in the Wise Persons Committee or have supported this committee’s work. This article evaluates how the political representation figure of 'aydın' has transformed in these two instances by analyzing the politicians' speeches, news stories and political analyses that appeared in the media, as well as the interviews, articles and statements of the intellectuals involved through the method of discourse analysis. We also discuss the role of 'aydın' in Turkey's contemporary political history, the dependence and independence of the intellectual vis-a-vis political power and question why and how politicians aim to instrumentalize the 'aydın' in normative (in ‘positive’ and ‘negative’) terms to vanguard their political agenda. Overall, the article assesses Bourdieu’s theorization on symbolic power of the intellectual and intellectual as an “autonomous and collective individual” with regards to these two cases in Turkey: how is the intellectual’s autonomy shaped when viewed from a comparative angle in seemingly contrasting cases and how does political power relate to the display of autonomy/lack of it of the collective intellectual.

This paper discusses the increasing prominence of religious, iconic symbolism in Turkish visual politics, by focusing state sponsored expositions, cultural-cum-pedagogic events and public celebrations, orchestrated by the Turkish AKP Government and affiliated municipalities. Such public, religio-cultural and populist orchestrations of Islamic symbolism, this paper argues, are aspects of a current struggle about the very identity of Turkish nationalism, as well a re-negotiation of religious imageries in urban, public space. As has been noted in recent research on contemporary Turkish politics, we are currently witnessing an increasing recourse to Islamic and neo-Ottoman symbolism in informal political events and discourse, on the initiative of the religiously oriented Turkish government and its network of religious activist movements in the civil society. In line with such research, this paper discusses the increasingly institutional and official character of such appropriation of visual symbolism, evoking religious imagery, Islamic moral values and (quasi)historical references to an idealized Islamic (and Ottoman) past. The appropriation of visual Islamic symbolism, cloaked as “pedagogic” or “cultural” events in urban public space, efficiently convey an anti-secularist ideology, while avoiding imposition of religious norms in official political or legal discourse. Such events provide a populist, politicized venue, appealing to an increasingly urbanized pious constituency, yet strategically by-passing Turkish secular, constitutional provisions. This paper also explores such appropriations of religious symbolism in public space in terms of a (re)drawing of the boundaries for what is considered as acceptable from Islamic institutional perspectives. In short: orchestrating politics through religious symbolism not only changes the nature of politics, but the religious imaginaries as such. Methodologically, the paper builds on ethnography, document- and visual analysis from Turkish public bodies and state museums, such as “The Sacred Trusts” collection of Islamic relics at the Topkapi Palace Museum, Istanbul. The paper also builds on recent data collected from the religious and semi-official national celebrations of “The Holy Birth Week”, commemorating the birth of Prophet Muhammed. Theoretically, the paper draws on visual anthropology as well as urban- and political sociology in exploring such displays of visual politics through appropriations of public urban space, as well critical Islamic studies perspectives on the invention of sacred traditions accommodated to renegotiated pedagogical and institutional formats.