A ramshackle lodge on one of Istanbul’s seven hills plays host to the amorous adventures of a Sufi master. Cloistered in mansions along the Bosphorus, female devotees from the upper echelon of Ottoman society flock to his lodge in order to escape the monotony of their family lives. The charismatic shaykh seduces them, they fall desperately in love with him and give their fortunes to support his lodge. When the guide has satisfied himself and exhausted the available financial resources, he moves on and the cycle begins anew. The scenario from the late Ottoman novel Nur Baba brings to mind stories of wayward priests, gurus, and shamans who misuse their posts to gain sexual gratification and material gain. Such images played an influential role in shaping how many intellectuals in the Middle East thought about the institutions and rituals of Sufism in the early twentieth century. In contrast to the now popular images of Sufis as peace-loving, ecumenical Muslims, important intellectuals in the early twentieth-century saw Sufi institutions and practices as detrimental to society and deeply at odds with modern notions of progress, justice and equality. In order to better understand such critiques of Sufism, this paper takes a deeper look at a piece of anti-Sufi literature and assesses responses to it in the late Ottoman public sphere. The Turkish novel Nur Baba (1922) by Yakup Kadri Karaosmano?lu (1889-1974) presents an unflattering yet complex appraisal of a Bektashi lodge on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus. Some contend that Karaosmano?lu’s book influenced the decision of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the Turkish Parliament to abolish Sufism in the early years of the Turkish Republic. Beyond the simple consideration of being pro or anti Sufi, the novel reveals insights about the shifting terrain of late Ottoman intellectual and religious landscapes and helps us understand the anatomy of what some intellectuals considered the dark side of Sufism. I argue that the book builds its critique based not on anti-religious or even anti-Sufi grounds but rather on questions of gender, class and a notion of rational religion. Using a variety of materials from the late Ottoman press and the first-ever Turkish motion picture which is based on the book, I demonstrate that Nur Baba offers a unique window onto early twentieth century intellectual history and contributed to a debate on the nature of appropriate religion that had far reaching effects in modern Turkey.

This paper discusses change in the commemoration/celebration of the birth of the Prophet Muhammad (Mawlid al-Nabi) in Turkey. Muslims have been commemorating and celebrating the Mawlid according to the lunar calendar—Sunnis on the 12th of Rabi’ al-awwal and Shiites on the 17th—in different ways. In Turkey, Mawlid has often been commemorated with formal recitation of poetry praising him mostly in mosques and at homes. The most well-known example of this poetry is Vesiletu’n Necat by Suleyman Celebi (1351-1422). It is traditional to recite it with the appropriate melodic contour (makam) and rhythmic pattern (usul) in classical Turkish music. However, in 1989 an innovation has appeared: the Blessed Birth Week. Since then, Muslims in Turkey have also been also commemorating the Prophet Muhammad with civic activities outside of their homes and mosques for a week. As Eric Hobsbawm (1983) noted new traditions are sometimes invented on the basis of the old traditions. They are grafted on the body of the old to rejuvenate certain aspects of culture in novel ways in order to facilitate the sociocultural transformations. In this respect, the Blessed Birth Week is a new cultural expression that was invented on the basis of an old tradition: Mawlid. Through archival research on documents and publications by the Turkish Presidency of Religious Affairs and national daily newspapers, I will inquire when and how this new tradition started and who were involved in the initiation and the development of it. I will identify the core rituals of this new tradition and discuss the process of formation of these rituals. I will demonstrate that the Blessed Birth Week parted from Mawlid in two major ways: calendar and civic quality. During the last two decades it has been celebrated according to solar calendar during the third week of April not only in mosques, but also in public, social spaces intertwined with daily, secular life. In this regard, I will discuss the cultural construction of the Blessed Birth Week from a historical perspective as an outward performance of a series of rites and rituals that leads to reconstruction of Islam as a contemporary civic religion in Turkey.

This paper is about the diverse ways in which piety is conceptualized and cultivated by highly-educated Muslim women in Turkey. These women hold active professional roles within the secular-public sphere while trying to keep their aim of becoming pious in their own way, in relation to their subjective understandings of piety. The paper examines the various paths of virtue formation taken by Turkish Muslim women by analyzing the data collected through the methods of participant observation and in-depth interviews. By questioning how they negotiate between the dynamics of the body and the mind, along with the different conceptions of agency, freedom, and submission informed by the secular-liberal and Islamic economies of ethical behavior, the paper claims that the boundaries between them is usually unclear in their everyday manifestation of piety and the course of its realization. Utilizing the Foucauldian “care of the self” as the main analytical tool, the paper traces the milestones of cultivating piety within the Islamic tradition, particularly through Mohamed Al-Ghazzali’s The Alchemy of Happiness, and On Disciplining the Self. In this way, the paper puts these classical Islamic thinkers in a dialogue with contemporary anthropologists of Islam, such as Saba Mahmood and Talal Asad, in relation to their conceptions of virtue-making and agency, and portrays how the women in this particular case negotiate with their theories unknowingly while they are on their way towards building a pious modern self. In order to create this dialogue, the paper examines the practices of headscarf and ritual prayer, as well as the particular contexts and happenings that are paving the way for a particular type of piety: including easier access to Islamic pedagogical sources, the ease of travel, and the availability of new religious communities that appeal to some of the interlocutors for various reasons. In this way, the paper concludes that all these technologies of self-cultivation, including the headscarf, create multiple subjectivities in relation to piety depending on the familial, educational, economic, and cultural backgrounds of Muslim women in Turkey, defying any monolithic categorization of veiled women, conservative women, religious women, etc. against a secular-liberal normative group.

This paper explores the discourse surrounding the compatibility of modern science with Islamic piety in the teachings of Fethullah Gülen, and particularly its enactment in the activities of certain Gülenist educational communities in Turkey. It begins by outlining Gülen’s distinctive philosophy of science, which draws on the popular contemporary doctrine of i’jaz (the ‘scientific miracle of the Qur’an’). Following in the tradition of his intellectual predecessor Said Nursi, Gülen exhorts his followers to engage pro-actively with Western scientific progress and finds no a priori incompatibility therein with Islamic values and beliefs. Rather, he locates the origins of, and rationale behind, scientific advancement and discovery in the word and spirit of the Qur’anic text itself. Science is therefore a prominent component of the curricula in the educational establishments which characterise the Gülen Hizmet Movement around the world, and through which Gülen seeks to create a so-called ‘golden generation’ of pious Muslim believers, who are educated according to Western pedagogical standards and able to participate fully and ably in a competitive global society. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork amongst five Gülen-influenced educational institutions (high schools and universities) in Ankara and Istanbul, this paper investigates approaches to learning and teaching in science, as well as understandings of scientific and religious (particularly, Qur’anic) authority, in the Turkish Gülen community. The major contention of the paper is that the Gülenist discourse on science and Islam can only be accurately understood in light of the socio-political and cultural context from which it emerged and in which it is sustained. Accordingly, it analyses the experiences and testimonies of followers of Gülen’s teachings by linking the emergence of an apparently universal idiom of Islamic science with such local factors as Turkish and neo-Ottoman nationalism, the 20th-century encounter with Kemalist secularism, and Turkey’s burgeoning economic and geo-political aspirations. The paper concludes by questioning the implications of this rootedness in the specificities of modern Turkish history and socio-cultural norms on the Gülen Movement’s aspirations to universality and trans-nationalism.

The rise to power of the socially conservative Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi; AKP) in 2002 led many scholars, policymakers, and journalists to celebrate the emergence of a democratically-elected political party who challenged the “anti-religious” Kemalist establishment. 2002 seemed to mark a shift in religion-state relations in Turkey, away from a Kemalist agenda of laiklik that sought to block the free expression of religious belief, toward an AKP that sought to secure it. In many regards, these accounts were correct. Turkey witnessed the partial lifting of the ban against headscarves on university campuses, and the introduction of elective Qur’an courses in secondary schools across the country. However, the AKP’s relationship with certain minority religious groups, such as Alevis, highlights the limits of the party’s policies. A historically persecuted religious sect combining Shi’a Islam with Sufism, Alevis have become increasingly organized over the past thirty years as a rights-based movement, demanding that the Turkish state: a) recognize Alevism as distinct from Sunni Islam; b) legalize and subsidize Alevi places of worship; and c) include Alevism in religion textbooks. In 2007, the AKP inaugurated the “Alevi Opening,” an unprecedented effort to systematically address these demands. Six years later, however, the AKP government has yet to grant Alevis their demands in full, and opposition parties, such as the Kemalist Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi; CHP) and the Kurdish Democracy and Peace Party (Bar?? ve Demokrasi Partisi; BDP), have criticized the lack of progress. Domestic and international media outlets have joined their ranks, exemplified in the August 2012 Economist article, “The Ephemeral Alevi Opening.” In this article, I examine parliamentary debates on the Alevi matter from 2002 to 2012 and show that far from being representatives of change, as many scholars contend, the AKP has demonstrated marked similarities to Kemalists in their approach to religion-state relations. In particular, I demonstrate how the AKP privileges a particular interpretation of Islam, as Kemalists have done for decades; how this interpretation of Islam is intended to be a vehicle for national unification; how the AKP reserves the right to promote national unity through religion; and how the promotion of a particular Islam excludes nonconforming beliefs and institutions. Ultimately, the Alevi case casts doubt on the extent to which Turkey is moving in a direction of religious freedom for all, an essential feature of any democratic system.