Micro Spaces, Performative Repertoires and Gender Wars among Islamic Youth in Istanbul

Abstract

The cultural reforms introduced by the Turkish Republican elite after 1923 aspired to a Western-oriented civilisational transformation. Excluding Islamic symbols from the modern public sphere (such as the headscarf) was perceived as one indispensable prerequisite of the Westernisation process. The public sphere tightly monitored by the secular elites appeared as an outcome of state modernism, relegating religion to the private sphere. The emergence of an Islamist social movement in Turkey in the 1990s was characterised by its challenging of the laicity of urban spaces. Male and female activists presented themselves in a way that announced their Islamic identity, thus culturally and ideologically contesting the modernist/secularist public sphere. My argument is that the public performance of an Islamic identity in Istanbul in this period did not manifest itself as a movement of atomistic individuals, but neither was it an experience of a unified community. By contrast, Islamists pursued a form of subjectivation through Islamic morals as they tried to blend a new rationality with a religious self. In the process, young male and female Islamic actors often clashed over what the performing of this Islamic self might include.