Review of Christopher Dole, Healing Secular Life: Loss and Devotion in Modern Turkey

Abstract

‘The one who is not secular, is not a human being’ argues Yekta Gungor Ozden, the former Head of the Constitutional Court, Turkey’s highest judiciary body and also President of the Ataturkist Thought Institute. This stance epitomizes the value set of the official ideology in which secularism takes a central role in the construction of Turkish national identity. Christopher Dole, in this longitudinal research, takes a very unique approach to the discussions of secularism in Turkey. Unlike many others in the same field, his work does not confine the discourse to religion and democratization or to the East versus West dichotomy. He examines Turkish construction of secularism through the lens of various exilic traditions with therapeutic power in the context of suffering, healing and loss. He sheds light on the unremitting contention and interdependencies between the performances of these traditions with the state authority. The author starts with depicting the binary opposition presented by the modernization that Turkey is aiming towards and the traditional that was bequeathed from the Ottoman past (p. 22, p. 56). He then contextualizes secularism in the Turkish experience. He states that secularism is perceived as a ‘normative way of life’ and this refers to the ‘irreducible aesthetic dimension of Turkey’s project of secular modernity‘(p. 8). Therefore,’secularism persists as a core value of the nation’s political imaginary, continuing to organize discourse in an array of institutional and noninstitutional settings’ (p. 11). All facets of quotidian life both in public and private realm were organized with respect to one’s commitment to secular ideals (p. 8). At least that is what the regime demanded from its subjects. Within those lines, for instance around the time that the author collected his data from the two local communities (that constituted a binary opposition in the way they perceived secularism) at the outskirts of Ankara, the state institution that regulates child adoption policies introduced among its provisions a new article which suggests that Cont Islam (2015) 9:351–355 DOI 10.1007/s11562-013-0289-0