Visualizing Secularism and Religion by Cinar Alev;Roy Srirupa;Yahya Maha;

Author:Cinar, Alev;Roy, Srirupa;Yahya, Maha;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

7 Talk Television

Reinventing Secular Muslims in the Era of Neoliberalism

AYE ÖNCÜ

This essay focuses on one of the most trenchant motifs of Turkish nationalism, “we are all secular Muslims,” to explore the ways in which that motif has been simultaneously destabilized and also reconfigured in the political conjuncture of the 1990s. The essay's main emphasis is on how the meanings of being secular, and of being a secular Muslim, have acquired content through the visual formats and commodity logic of television, at a moment in time when their “arbitrariness” was revealed and politicized by the growing visibility of Islam in the public realm. The centerpiece of the analysis is how the chimera of who “we” are and “what we stand for” as secular Muslims is constituted on a particular talk-show program, featuring a divinity professor, Yasar Nuri Ozturk, as celebrity guest. The discussion moves beyond the magical audience ratings of Yasar Nuri Ozturk, to emphasize the ways his arguments entered into public circulation in the dense political scene of the late 1990s to highlight the anomalies of a centralized Directorate of Religious Affairs in the Secular Republic of Turkey.

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