Pastors of a dispersed flock: Diyanet officers and Turkey's art of governing its diaspora

Chiara Maritato

doi:10.1017/ipo.2020.31

Abstract

AbstractRelying on Foucault's concept of pastoral power, the article scrutinizes the role of religious officers who are employed by Turkey's Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) and serve Turkish Muslim communities in Europe. It investigates how state-led diaspora institutions operate at a micro-level and what they reveal about the state's governmentality outside its territory. In order to parse the pastoral actors' empirically visible agency, the work draws on ethnographic observations of the religious officers' activities in the Diyanet's mosques in Austria. It outlines (i) how Diyanet officers' pastoral practices go beyond the mosques and manifest in a wide range of socio-cultural religious services aimed at reaching diaspora communities, (ii) the relation between Diyanet officers' activities and the Turkish state's extraterritorial practices and discourse aimed to promoting obedience to the authorities and love for the motherland, and (iii) how the interaction between Diyanet officers and the flock shape people's perception of themselves as a community while remapping the boundaries of a Turkish and Muslim belonging in essentialist terms.

Highlights

In the wake of the 2015 ‘Islam Law’, which bans the foreign funding of religious groups and requires imams to speak German,1 the Austrian government closed seven mosques in June 2018 and declared that up to 40 imams face the possibility of losing their residence permit
The three sections of the analysis focus on the activities of imams and preachers sent to Diyanet mosques in Europe (Demir, 2010; Bruce, 2020) and outline (i) how Diyanet officers’ pastoral practices go beyond the mosques and manifest in a wide range of socio-cultural religious services aimed at reaching diaspora communities, (ii) how Diyanet officers’ activities relate to the Turkish state’s extraterritorial practices and discourse aimed at promoting obedience to the authorities and love for the motherland, and (iii) how the interaction between Diyanet officers and the flock shape people’s perception of themselves as a community while remapping the boundaries of a Turkish and Muslim belonging in essentialist terms
This article investigates how state-led diaspora institutions function at micro-levels and what they reveal about the instruments that states deploy to embrace and govern ‘their’ diaspora as a ‘domestic abroad’

Summary

Introduction

In the wake of the 2015 ‘Islam Law’, which bans the foreign funding of religious groups and requires imams to speak German,1 the Austrian government closed seven mosques in June 2018 and declared that up to 40 imams face the possibility of losing their residence permit. This article investigates what the activities conducted by religious officers sent abroad reveal about Turkey’s current art of governing its diaspora.

Results

Conclusion