And Then We Work for God: Rural Sunni Islam in Western Turkey - Brossura

Hart, Kimberly

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0804786607 ISBN 13: 9780804786607

Casa editrice: Stanford Univ Pr, 2013

Riassunto

Turkey's contemporary struggles with Islam are often interpreted as a conflict between religion and secularism played out most obviously in the split between rural and urban populations. The reality, of course, is more complicated than the assumptions. Exploring religious expression in two villages, this book considers rural spiritual practices and describes a living, evolving Sunni Islam, influenced and transformed by local and national sources of religious orthodoxy.

Drawing on a decade of research, Kimberly Hart shows how religion is not an abstract set of principles, but a complex set of practices. Sunni Islam structures individual lives through rituals—birth, circumcision, marriage, military service, death—and the expression of these traditions varies between villages. Hart delves into the question of why some choose to keep alive the past, while others want to face a future unburdened by local cultural practices. Her answer speaks to global transformations in Islam, to the push and pull between those who maintain a link to the past, even when these practices challenge orthodoxy, and those who want a purified global religion.

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Informazioni sugli autori

Anthropologist and filmmaker Kimberly Hart is Assistant Professor of Social-Cultural Anthropology at the State University of New York College at Buffalo. Her award-winning film, A Wedding in the Yuntdag, is based on footage collected during fieldwork (2000-2001).

Anthropologist and filmmaker Kimberly Hart is Assistant Professor of Social-Cultural Anthropology at the State University of New York College at Buffalo. Her award-winning film, A Wedding in the Yuntdag, is based on footage collected during fieldwork (2000-2001).

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AND THEN WE WORK FOR GOD

Rural Sunni Islam in Western Turkey

By KIMBERLY HART

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-8660-7

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................
ix
Introduction: Competing Claims to Religious Authority......................
1
1 Secular Time and the Individual..........................................
25
2 Islamic Time and the Village.............................................
43
3 Good Deeds and the Moral Economy.........................................
74
4 Constructing Islam: Mosques, Men, and the State..........................
90
5 Women's Traditions and Innovations.......................................
114
6 Ritual Purification and the Pernicious Danger of Culture.................
151
7 Secular and Spiritual Routes to Knowledge................................
172
8 An Entrepreneurial "Neo-Tarikat" and Islamic Education...................
195
9 Dealing with the Secular World: A Trip to the Beach......................
223
Notes......................................................................
247
Bibliography...............................................................
265
Index......................................................................
281

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

SECULAR TIMEAND THE INDIVIDUAL

THE REPUBLIC

An overview of the history of the Republic during the twentieth century highlightsthe relationship between the state and Sunni Islam. Through an examinationof this relationship, I will show how Sunni Islam was contained andcontrolled by the state in what is referred to as laicism (government control ofreligion). As I trace three of the most important moments in this history, theAtatürk revolution, the 1950 election, and the post-1980 coup, I discuss howunstable and intertwined with political ideologies this relationship between thenature and meaning of secularity and Sunni Islam has been. By consideringthis history, I can then compare it to how villagers understand time, the nation,and Islam.

The first era under consideration is the transition between the OttomanEmpire and the Turkish Republic. The Ottoman Empire fought on the side ofGermany during World War I. After its defeat, its vast territories were occupiedby victorious European powers, the Allies, many of whom had an interestin the religious minorities, especially in Christians, who had an emergentsense of national identity as Greek, Georgian, and Armenian. The War of Independence,led by Mustafa Kemal (who later took the last name Atatürk), wasfought against this occupation by Europeans. There was widespread dread overthe anticipated dismemberment of the remaining Anatolian heart of the formerEmpire. The ensuing triumph of the national army was remarkable, consideringtheir state of exhaustion following decades of war and epidemics.

Many Turks, like the villagers, consider this victory a miracle. They referto the fallen as martyrs, sehitler. As is evident in descriptions of journeys thatvillagers make to Çanakkale, where Mustafa Kemal was a general in the battleat Gallipoli against the Allies in World War I, this location is treated as a placeof pilgrimage. For instance, when asking a woman to list the important tombsone can visit in Turkey, she mentioned the cemeteries at Çanakkale alongsidethe Mevlana's tomb in Konya. To further justify the sacred nature of the site,another woman explained to me that they do not visit the cemeteries of gavurs(infidels), only those of Turks. This battle, then, is understood as one betweenMuslim Turks and Western Christians.

Many other Muslim citizens also conceptualize this late Ottoman era in religiousterms, as I realized while visiting a packed temporary museum in a tentby the New Mosque in Istanbul in 2012. People crowding over glass cases treatedthe artifacts of the battle excavated in Çanakkale as religious relics, viewing fragmentsof uniform, shoes, weaponry, and soldiers' personal effects with hushedreverence. Interestingly, by treating this battle and its relics as sacred, they legitimizeAtatürk's leadership as an Ottoman military leader. This imbues his laterleadership in the War of Independence with spiritual import, as if the nationwere predestined. They thereby create a foundation of continuity between thesacred nature of the Ottoman and republican states and legitimize Atatürk's roleas a gazi, a holy warrior, who was victorious against infidels. Thus, pious peopleunderstand the state from its inception, as founded by a gazi (as the Empire wasas well), in sacralizing terms. This is regardless of the fact that the Republic wasfounded as a secular state, one which was based on laws constructed by people(imported from the Swiss legal code), not God. This means that for some there iseither a refusal to recognize the full import of secularization, which includes theprivatization of religion, or that this never happened and instead of experiencinga rupture with the Republic, they choose to see continuity with the Ottoman past.

The Republic was founded in 1923 and Mustafa Kemal became its primeminister. He commanded immense power and was able to introduce a series ofsecularizing, modernizing, and westernizing programs, aimed to utterly transformsociety or actually re-create it, since the remnants of the former Ottomanlife were in disarray. In addition to these reforms changing law, language,the way people dressed, and education, the people of Anatolia were managedthrough a population exchange with Greece; millions of ethnic Turks who hadbeen living in Greece migrated to Turkey, and concomitantly millions of OttomanGreeks migrated from Anatolia. Meanwhile, Ottoman Muslims migratedfrom the Balkan territories. The government settled many in villages in westernAnatolia, where they continue to retain a sense of their former Balkan identities.Many millions emigrated—Armenians, Jews, and Georgians—as it becameclear that the population would be reconstructed by the state as being composedof ethnically homogenous Turks. People would either have to conformto this idea, concealing their former identities, or leave. Thus, the compositionof the population changed substantially from being, in contemporary language,multiethnic and multisectarian, to being composed primarily of Turkish SunniMuslims, many of whom were immigrants.

Substantial numbers of Alevis and Kurds, indigenous to Anatolia, remained.The Alevis are a Shi'i-related Islamic group that venerates Ali and thatdoes not use mosques for worship, fast, or pray five times a day. They includemusic and dance in their key ritual of the Cem, and they do not seclude womenor forbid drinking alcohol. Kurds are ethnically different from Turks, beingIndo-European. They are Muslim, either Alevi or Sunni, but have been systematicallydiscriminated against as ethnically and linguistically different.

Through the founding ethno-national idea, that of being a Turk, this eraushered in a vigorous sense of national identity, creating the foundation of anew world, and fighting off divisive forces from within and without. The indivisibilityof the state and the homogenous nature of its people are core conceptsin Turkish nationalism. Groups which threaten the indivisibility of the state,such as religious and ethnic others, are regarded as threatening to nationalunity. Since the 1990s, this era has been reexamined, reinterpreted, and reprocessedby scholars and through books on minorities; in Kurdish, Sephardic,and other folk music; in films and television shows exploring the Ottoman Empire;and in museum exhibits. A new understanding of the Ottoman Empireand a notion of a reconstituted multiethnic society are being actualized, but ithas been long and hard in coming.

For our purposes, of special interest is the caliphate, once the worldwideseat of Islamic authority. Atatürk disbanded this office in 1924 and the Diyanetwas established, taking over some of this previous office's roles. But becausereligious schools, communities, and shariat courts, which controlled domesticissues of marriage, divorce, and inheritance, were also disbanded, the roleof the Diyanet was significantly modified from that of the previous Ottomanadministration. Islamic practice, without courts or communities, and allowingonly state-controlled training, was truncated and contained by the seculargovernment. The aim was to restructure what it meant to be Muslim, makingreligion an individual private practice but one regulated by the state. Thus, aMuslim was meant to become an individual believer who practiced under theleadership of state officials who were bound by civil law. This was a radicaldeparture from the worldview of the Empire, in which the individual Muslimwas bound by laws from God interpreted and administered by Islamic legalscholars, the ulema, whose power was legitimized by their spiritual knowledge.

In the Republic, the authority to rule was secularized and the spiritual tasksof the Diyanet functioned within the secular framework of state control. SunniIslam was thereby managed by a government office. State employees hired tolead prayer, imams, would not have the power to make legal decisions, to legallymarry people, or to determine issues regarding inheritance, for instance. Thisinstitutional framework for Turkish Sunni Islam, one which produces secularlaw in secular time, and which encompasses what predates the state, Islam itself,is called laicism, drawing upon but not reproducing the French model. As ElizabethHurd argues, "Laicism insists upon a singular and universal set of relationsbetween sacred and profane dimensions of existence that holds regardless ofcultural or historical circumstances. This is achieved in part through exclusionarypractices that represent Islam as antimodern, irrational, and tyrannical."

Confusingly, laicism is often translated as "secularism," without qualification.In fact, Turkey's legacy of state control of Sunni Islam is different fromthe American form of secularism, in which the government theoretically cannotestablish religion, as outlined in the First Amendment, and from Frenchlaicism, in which the government claims to protect citizens from the intrusionof religion in public life in order to protect the unity of the nation. In Turkey,the government protects itself from the intrusion of Islam in its institutions, bycontaining and pacifying religion within one of its ministries. In so doing, thegovernment shields itself from unruly Muslims and attempts to pacify themby making illegal forms of Islam which exist outside state controls. Thus, inTurkey, the secular state creates Sunni orthodoxy and puts a stamp of legalityon it. As Jeremy Walton demonstrates, the contradictory and uneasy relationshipthe secular state has to the production of religious orthodoxy is not onlya contradiction but a source of dispute and debate among Muslims. These debatesare a subject of this book.

As Esra Özyürek argues, political debates about the meaning and purposeof a Kemalist worldview and an Islamic one are mediated through the deploymentof historical eras: Ottoman, republican, Neo-Ottoman, and their conceptualfoundations: Islamic, secular rationalist, and spiritual. Cultural memory,therefore, is a battleground in which political positions about the meaning ofthe past are used in the present and projected into an uncertain future.

If Sunni Muslims have trouble swallowing the total control of Islam by thestate, what do non-Sunni Muslims and non-Muslims do? In Turkey, non-SunniMuslims are by and large the Alevi, a Shi'i-related, Anatolian-specific community,often dismissed by Sunni Muslims as not "really" Muslims at all. Others,minority religious communities, Jews and Christians, have a tenuous positionwithin the state system and for this reason they are reluctant to draw too muchattention to themselves.

In short, the laicist state creates an official Sunni orthodoxy by funding andrunning mosques, disseminating sermons, and training imams. These institutionalcontrols make Islam "into a religion," marginalizing and privatizing it,codifying and controlling it. Because Sunni Islam is made by the state, it followsthat Islam is de facto secularized—contained within state institutions. Throughthe institutionalization of religious practice, the orthodox subject is createdthrough the discipline of the body (prayer and other actions), putting that bodyinto a temporal and spatial frame where Mecca is the center but where the Turkishstate has a shadowy presence. The Diyanet extends its jurisdiction over themeaning, role, and purpose of Turkish Sunni Islam by working among Turkishimmigrants abroad. The Diyanet Içleri Türk Islam Birligi (DITIB; the Türkisch-IslamischeUnion der Anstalt für Religion e.V., or the Turkish Islamic Union forthe Institution of Religion), for instance, in Germany, is a branch of the TurkishPresidency of Religious Affairs, which appoints imams from Turkey to work inmosques for four years serving Turkish migrant communities. In this way, beinga Sunni Muslim is an expression of a national identity, connected to expressionsof citizenship and related to the negotiation of immigrant identities abroad.

Villagers in the Yuntdag, argue that the Diyanet is the descendant of the Ottomanoffice of the caliphate, thereby suggesting a connection between the republicancontrol of Sunni Islam and the Ottoman one. Rather than seeing the laicistcontainment of Islam within a secular state, many praise Atatürk for replicatingOttoman structures in the Republic. They consider the authoritarian controlof religion important to the maintenance of order. In a contradictory fashion,though villagers see continuity between the Ottoman administrative structuresof Sunni Islam and republican ones, they are critically wary of the early republicanreforms, which included disbanding the caliphate, changing the script fromArabic to Latin, transforming the calendar, replacing Ottoman and Islamic legalcodes with ones imported from Europe, revolutionizing headgear for men, discouragingthe wearing of headscarves for women, putting the call to prayer inTurkish (during the early decades), forbidding the teaching of the Qur'an tochildren during the difficult early years of the Republic, eliminating unofficialimams, closing saints' tombs and brotherhoods, eliminating Islamic schools(medrese), and replacing these with secular education and so on.

They note backpedaling on some policies before the first democratic electionin 1950, twelve years after Atatürk's death, including the reopening of saints'tombs, the introduction of religion classes in public schools, training for imams,the return to the call to prayer in Arabic, and support for making the pilgrimage.Villagers' assessment of this early history is contradictory, based as it is ona primary understanding of continuity rather than disjuncture between the twogovernments. Many are quick to assert the legitimacy of the state, but also makecritical note of past actions, which controlled the role of Islam in daily life. Onthe other hand, though villagers critique some early reforms, they praise Atatürkfor controlling unruly Islam. That is, Islam, from their view, should be purifiedby state control but not to the extent that Islam itself is changed. This meansthat there is an essence of Islam, orthodoxy, which many expect the state shouldprotect, such as certifying that Qur'ans are "real" via a Diyanet stamp in eachbook. They therefore do not always interpret laicism as the state production oforthodoxy, as Walton argued, but as the governmental protection of orthodoxy.

The fact that it is illegal to criticize Atatürk makes it difficult for people to saythat Atatürk's secularizing policies were detrimental to Islam itself. Instead, manylook to Inõnü, Atatürk's successor, as the one who caused problems. Atatürk diedin 1938. The law protecting speech about Atatürk was passed in 1951, after the1950 first multiparty election, a time when Atatürk's legacy was being reevaluated,especially in the provinces. Rather than open a space for discussion andreflection, the state nervously closed the lid on this discourse. Villagers demonstratetheir fear of voicing illegal or "wrong" (yanlis) opinions. Many of the contradictorystatements people make about their view of secularizing reforms andthe role of the state in controlling Sunni Islam come from a fear that they will beinterpreted as having said something against the state or against Atatürk's legacy.

Why was Sunni Islam regarded as such a threat that it needed to be controlledby a state institution? Islam in the Empire, in both its official capacitywithin the institutions and in its decentralized, mystical form among brotherhoods(tarikats), had posed a threat in the newly laicized, nation-state of theRepublic. In the Ottoman era, Islamic brotherhoods and other Islamic orderswere not only powerful, but they had important roles in provincial cities andtowns less tied to the imperial center, Istanbul. They decentralized religious authority.Furthermore, brotherhoods were involved in revolts and uprisings beforeand after the establishment of the Republic, creating alternative networksof political power. The main fear was of alternative political organizations,which would undermine the state, as well as pluralistic sources of religious authoritywhich would decentralize Islam.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from AND THEN WE WORK FOR GOD by KIMBERLY HART. Copyright © 2013 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Stanford Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2013
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0804786607
• ISBN 13: 9780804786607
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 292
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile