Doctoral student Yunus Dogan Telliel (City University of New York - Graduate Center), supervised by Dr. Michael Blim, will investigate how and why religious language reform movements vary in their effects. In particular, the study will focus on elucidating the contextual, on-the-ground politics of secularism in a Muslim-majority country by comparing how efforts to reform religious language unfold and how they affect Muslim self-identity and notions of secular citizenship.
The research has a comparative design, which will contrast two religious language reform initiatives in Turkey. The first one is a set of reform proposals in the late 20th century put forth by religious scholars and intellectuals who, amid the growing popularity of Islamic revivalism, wished to authorize the use of Turkish in worshipping as a means of countering fundamentalism. The second is the current multiculturalist state policy that endorses the religious use of Kurdish. The former sought to nationalize Islamic faith, alongside rising worries about Muslim citizens' loyalty to the nation-state, while the latter aims to integrate the large Kurdish Muslim minority into the national community, emphasizing Islam as a social cement. To examine this relationship between vernacularized religious language and citizenship in these two different periods, the researcher will employ a combination of social scientific methods. These include participant observation, interviews with key informants, archival research, and multimedia text analysis, which together will elucidate the variable ways that Islamic reform initiatives have been promoted, understood, and talked about by ordinary Muslim citizens as well as reformers themselves.
The research is important because it will contribute to better understanding of how, why, with what consequences modern secular governments may choose to support religious reform. The findings also will inform social science theory of what constitutes modernity. Funding this research also supports the education of a graduate student.
This research explored why, and how the idea of vernacularized religious language has been a compelling vehicle of various Muslim reformisms in modern Turkey, from the 1920s to the present day. It focused on the goals, stakes and reception of reformisms challenging or redefining the roles that the (classical) Arabic, as an ecumenical language, plays in Muslim citizens’ religious education, rituals and piety in general. Theories of secular modernity often emphasize the effects of the post-Reformation trajectories of vernacularization in explaining how modern selves and polities come into being in Western Christianity. These trajectories have also been invoked as standards to assess other religious traditions’ compatibility with secular modernity and its institutions. This research investigated, rather, the ‘predicaments’ of vernacularized religious language, as Turkey's reformisms have sought to negotiate between Islamic tradition and the secular nation-state. It therefore inquired into the extent to which, and in what ways, the frameworks derived from modern Western Christian experiences may be useful to understand other modern religious traditions, Islam in particular. The question of vernacularized religious language was examined comparatively across four distinct ‘cases,’ chosen to reflect both convergence and divergence in how the vernacular may be positioned vis-à-vis Arabic as the ecumenical language of Islam: 1) the state elites’ nationalist reformism that could not succeed in its search for an ‘authoritative’ Turkish translation of the Qur’an, yet introduced the call to prayer in Turkish, 1932-1950; 2) the 1990s’ ‘laicist Muslim’ reformism seeking state recognition and promotion of ritual prayers in Turkish, as a means to combat Islamic revivalism; 3) contemporary reformism of an emerging group of young Muslims who have endorsed ritual prayers in any vernacular, as they approach them as a vehicle of personal piety, less interested in its laicist import; 4) and more recent reformism of Kurdish activists who have challenged the Turkish state’s control over the language of mosque sermons and their contents, as they have sought for Kurdish sermons to replace Turkish ones. This research suggested that, as Muslim reformists have been compelled to draw on both Islamic tradition and secular modernity’s values, concepts, and categories in order to advocate certain changes, reform projects do not necessarily follow single paths from well-defined beginnings to foreseen ends. Trajectories of a religious reform project may be full of ambiguities or digressions, as some components of that project may be embraced, others may not. Moreover, what was initially perceived as a ‘targeted problem’ by reformists may cease to be recognized as such. This research also showed that conflicts between reformists and their opponents are not always conflicts between being for or against change, but can also entail rival claims concerning the form that changes take, and the manner in which they are carried out.
