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

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2022-9-03

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Falay Toda, Kübra Nur

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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

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

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Northern Cyprus Campus, Thesis

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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.