The Secular and Religious

Abstract

Abstract A binaristic approach to the phenomenon of the secular and religious has long been considered axiomatic in conceptualizing Turkish republican history. This chapter problematizes this binaristic scaffold through a genealogical-historical engagement with Turkish neo-spiritualism, which emerged as a novel intellectual discourse for reevaluating spiritual or transcendental matters with a new (scientifically credible) language in early republican Turkey. The chapter traces neo-spiritualist conceptualizations of spirit/soul (ruh) and memory (hafıza), utilizing them as unexpected entry points into a complex net of generative relations and entanglements that Turkish secularism has enacted by and through its simultaneous engagements with modern science and preexisting religious traditions. Shedding light on the suppressed yet enduring impact of Muslim cultural memory within the republican (secular) sociocultural sphere, the chapter ruminates on the potential of these neo-spiritualist concepts to explicate what the secular and religious entail in modern Turkey (and beyond) in more imaginative, inquisitive, and deconstructive ways.