Muslim Civil Society and the Politics of Religious Freedom in Turkey

Abstract

Muslim Civil Society and the Politics of Religious Freedom in Turkey is an inquiry into the political practices of contemporary Turkish Muslim NGOs. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Istanbul and Ankara, it examines how Muslim NGOs interrogate statist sovereignty over Islam in Turkey. Muslim NGOs target two facets of state power in relation to Islam: Kemalist laicism and its marginalization of Islam in public life and the state-based production of a homogeneous form of Sunni Islam. In making this double criticism of statist sovereignty over Islam, Turkish Muslim NGOs champion religious freedom as a paramount political ideal. This nongovernmental politics of religious freedom has entailed the naturalization of second mode of power in relation to religion—that of liberal governmentality. It has also sanctioned a romance of civil society as uniquely suited to authentic, nonpolitical modes of belonging—the civil society effect. This nexus of religious freedom, nongovernmental politics, and the civil society effect determines a counterpublic relationship between Turkish Muslim NGOs and statist forms of Islam. The institutions that the book discusses span the dominant sectarian divide in Turkey—that between Sunnis and Alevis. The book develops a broad set of comparisons and contrasts between Sunni and Alevi organizations. On one hand, it argues that Sunni and Alevi NGOs articulate a shared discourse of religious freedom. On the other hand, it attends to the persistent, hierarchical differences between Sunnis and Alevis in Turkey, which situate Sunni and Alevi NGOs unevenly within a broader field of power.