Reading Friday Sermons as Pragmatic Politics: Sermons in Turkey in 2016-2022

Download

10498180.pdf

Date

2022-9-03

Author

Falay Toda, Kübra Nur

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

189
views

0
downloads

The literature tends to interpret the last few decades of transformation in public sphere as the Islamization of Turkey. Similarly, it presents the discourse and practices of the Presidency of Religious Affairs (PRA) as instrumentalization for this purpose considering the subject and content of the Friday sermons. However, whether the public sphere in Turkey moving away from secularism to a more religious and particularly Islamist direction needs to be carefully analyzed. This thesis examines the broader debates of secularism, secularization, and rise of religion in the public sphere by focusing on the PRA and particularly the public messages of the PRA via Friday sermons. It engages with the theoretical perspective of post-secularism that problematizes the binary perception of secularism and the visibility of religion in the public sphere by displaying the complex and intertwined relations between religion and secularism. It examines the PRA and Friday sermons and tries to examine how and to what extent the PRA is autonomous from political authority or organically connected to the political authority or an instrument of political authority for pursuing a pragmatic agenda setting. The thesis is grounded on case studies and examination of Friday sermons in 2016 and 2022. The thesis argues that the PRA is a product of post-secularism rather than being an institution for secularism or Islamisation in its addressing and responding to the current political, social, and economic issues during the JDP rule.

Subject Keywords

Post-secularism, JDP Government, PRA, Friday Sermons

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/99786

Collections

Northern Cyprus Campus, Thesis

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Peace in Non-Western Theory Polat, Necati (Oxford University Press, London , 2021-01-01) This chapter looks critically into the exhortations in recent peace thinking to accommodate visions of peace outside European modernity, called the West. The discussion problematizes the premise of a radical distinction in cultural terms between the West and the non-West, questioning for each front the notion of a linear cultural transmission from ancient times onward. The binary, the chapter argues, is premised effectively on an oblivion of hybridities, especially in the Mediterranean basin, already b...
Transformation of Turkish Islamism and the Rise of the Justice and Development Party Şen, Mustafa (2010-01-01) Deviating from the mainstream analyses of the AKP that see the rise of AKP to power as a result of the struggle between ocentero and operiphery,o this study is an attempt to analyze and understand the modalities of inclusion and accommodation of Turkish Islamism into the sociopolitical structure of Turkey. Therefore, it specially focuses on three interwoven processes: the articulation of Turkish Islamism with the Turkish Islamic synthesis; permanent enlargement of the religious field; and articulation betwe...
Displaced memories, or the architecture of forgetting and remembrance Sargın, Güven Arif (SAGE Publications, 2004-10-01) Under the political pressure of Turkey's Modernity Project Ankara's urban-planning processes and its monuments have always been utilized as significant tools of architectural displacement in the expedience of utopias, both socially and spatially. Urban-scale operations since the 1950s, a significant conservative breakthrough as a result of global liberalism and populism, however, have overwhelmed the secular state's organized forgetting, and have increasingly demobilized the capital city's modernist collect...
The sustainability crisis of Alevis Tol, Uğraş Ulaş; Özçoban Üstüner, Fahriye; Department of Political Science and Public Administration (2009) One of the important agendas of Turkey in the 2000s has been the “Alevi Revival”. The subject of this thesis, which claims that Alevis are in a search of identity rather than in a period of revival, is the sustainability crisis of the Alevis. Aleviness which has not been mentioned in the political sphere before has now turned into frequently spoken phenomenon. In this “Open Aleviness” period Alevis felt themselves more free and relieved and with this sense they started to claim more rights and freedoms. The...
Theoretical aporia of Islamic liberalism: the case of lockean liberalism Canbegi, Halil İbrahim; Okyayuz, Mehmet; Department of Political Science and Public Administration (2019) Even though the historical background of discussions on “Islamic liberalism” dates back to colonisation of Muslim-majority countries between 19th and 20th centuries, these debates have become much more visible both in academia and media in the post-Arab spring period. In this period, proponents of “Islamic liberalism” have predominantly taken Lockean liberalism as a model and they have even equated former with the latter. This thesis thereby critically evaluates the theoretical and conceptual framework of “...

Citation Formats

K. N. Falay Toda, “Reading Friday Sermons as Pragmatic Politics: Sermons in Turkey in 2016-2022,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2022.