In Search of Perfection: Neo-spiritualism, Islamic Mysticism, and Secularism in Turkey

Abstract

This article scrutinizes a little-known venture in Turkish republican intellectual history, namely Turkish neo-spiritualism. Combining the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Western trend of modern spiritualism with its local dynamics and sociocultural structures, Turkish neo-spiritualism integrated the spiritual philosophies and practices of Western spiritualism with various doctrines of Islamic mysticism (Sufism). It thus sheds light on the complex ways in which a form of knowledge that was originated and disseminated from the West was not derivative in its “imported” version. The article demonstrates how modern spiritualism attained new meanings and connotations in Turkey by merging with indigenous cultural codes and memory, and how it responded to (or was shaped within) local sociopolitical as well as intellectual contexts, particularly including the top-down secularism of the early Turkish Republic.