The term mahalle bask?s? ( literally, neighborhood pressure) was coined in May 2007 by the foremost social scientist of Turkey, ?erif Mardin. It was extensively discussed in the media, particularly after the accession of AKP to power for the second time in July 2007. By this term Mardin referred to the rather implicit social pressures which might be exerted by Muslims for neighbors to conform to their view of Muslim behavior. His argument was that as a party of the existing political system, there was no doubt that AKP would rule the state according to the principles of the republican regime, but the political ideology of “democratic conservatism” that the AKP promotes may not be enough to counter that so-called “community pressure”. According to a survey done by Medya Takip Merkezi (Media Survey Center) mahalle bask?s? was reported in 630 news in a total of 31 national newspapers between 18 September and 1 October 2007 just after the general elections. A total 255 columnists, all of them addressed this concept at least once in their columns which fueled an ever growing public debate about the way in which AKP’s conservative politics will shape the future of the Turkish society. This paper discusses the different aspects of what made mahalle bask?s? so popular in an arduously democratizing country like Turkey in which Sunni Muslims constitute the majority . It argues that the popularity of the concept is due first to the paradoxical meanings that the term mahalle connotes in the Turkish context, apart from being an administrative unit, a municipal precinct, second, to the emergence of new types of both secular and religious civil societies each of which claims the public sphere in its own way and create new mechanisms of mutual “othering, and third, to its vast capacity of answering the need of finding new discursive strategies to show how anti-democratic the political ideology of “democratic conservatism” might be without employing the repressive discourses of official secularism.

Originally, the secular Turkish state fashioned after Kemal Ataturk's vision, mastered "the art" of keeping official sites of the state free of religious symbols and headscarf. However, the election of a pious president, Abdullah Gul by the pro-Islamic party, Justice and Development (JD), and especially his wife's headscarf interrupted the presumably pristine "secular space" of the state. Immediately after Gul's nomination, the urban landscape of Istanbul also turned into sites of secularist protest and contestation against JD's Muslim politics. The secularist backlash on the streets parallels to new concerns of social scientists who point to the likelihood of a gap between the pious in power and the devout on the street. The pious communities, it has been argued, would have an independent life and social dynamics at the neighborhood level which may not be easily aligned with, shaped or controlled by the secular political institutions. This paper engages this debate on the power of the neighborhood communities, by bringing in another aspect of communal pressure. Concretely, I look at the secularist resistance to and the pressures on the pious in urban space. In order to explore the secularist pressures at the neighborhood level, I focus on a secular urban space, Tesvikiye. Exploring the meeting points of both political and urban sociology, the paper rethinks the concept of "the right to the city." First, ethnographic data parts ways with the predominant arguments, by illustrating conservatism in secular neighborhoods, and how secularist pressures confront the pious in urban daily life. I explore the links between these everyday secularist pressures and the secularist enforcements of the state. Second, even if we assume/accept that the pious in secular states may have a communal neighborhood life at the level that is at odds with or independent of the secular state, they still co-exist with and cant avoid facing the secularist non-state actors in urban daily life. The data shows that the secularist Istanbulites associate symbiotically with Kemal and "his" secular Republic. Hence, the pious in urban space continue interacting and negotiating "right to the city" directly with secularist communities or indirectly with secular state. The paper suggests that the debates around the powers and threats of pious neighborhood communities must take into account the nature and power of the secularist backlash, whether it is from the non-state actors in the cities or from the secular Republic itself.

This paper will discuss the results of a study, based on in-depth interviews with 401 people with different identities, in 12 Anatolian towns and two districts of Istanbul. The identiy groups in question are the minority Alevis, women, young people who dress differently, people who do not observe Islamic practices, Kurdish students, students with a left ideological orientation, the Roma, Christians, and government employees who see their identity as “secular”. The study showed how people with different identities are considered as “the other” and subjected to ostracisim, social pressure and even violence. Although the study does not argue that the results show widespread intolerance, it nevertheless reveals serious problems in Turkish society that the goverment and opposition parties as well as intellectuals and the media have to address and search for means to create a more democratic and culturally plural society.

Since 2002, the year the Justice and Development Party (JDP) formed a majority government in Turkey, the bulk of secularists in that country have felt that the country would soon be drifted toward a state based on Islam. The secularists in question are of the opinion that the JDP government has been engaged in dissimulation (takiyye) and, in the first opportune moment, it would attempt to Islamise the state. In a related manner, the secularists think that there has been a gradual increase in number of turbaned women and the latter would exercise a moral pressure on the the uncovered women and oblige the latter too to sport turbans. Thus it is presumed that the bulk of the people in Turkey long for a state based on Islam. The present article takes up the question of whether indeed a great majority of the people in Turkey are inclined toward a state based on Islam for they oppose the secular Republic, they have little or no tolerance toward the secularists, and thay insist that everybody in that country should practice and live Islam as they themselves do. The article draws upon findings from reliable nation-wide surveys conducted in Turkey since 1999.