Project Details
Projekt
Dis/ambiguating Religious Affiliations: Sectarians, Agnostics, and Secularists in the late Ottoman Empire and Turkey
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Kader Konuk
Subject Area
General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
Term
since 2018
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 322729370
This project questions the binary logic of religion and the secular by studying the late Ottoman Empire and Turkey from a literary and cultural historical perspective. Rejecting the secularization thesis as a way of understanding the transformation of the Ottoman multi-confessional state (i.e. millet system) into a national state, this project recognizes the ambiguity that is embedded in the idea of secularism itself. Turkish secularism, it argues, is not an annihilative project that relegated religion to the private sphere, but an ideology that served as a basis for the formation of a nation that secured the dominance of Sunni Islam over and against non-Muslim and non-Sunni communities. This project investigates religious ambiguities produced by the Ottoman Empire’s regulation of ethno-religious millets in the Tanzimat period and the creation of a laic state to the 're-Islamization’ process in the twenty-first century. By studying a broad range of literary narratives and archival sources–including nineteenth century literature in Armeno-Turkish, late Ottoman conversion accounts, the contemporary Turkish novel as well as digital life narratives authored by young women, this project questions the validity of the secularization thesis as an approach to understand the history of Turkey. This historically contextualized investigation of religious ambiguity in the late Ottoman Empire and Turkey engages with its sources from a comparative literature perspective. It investigates how religious ambiguities are either produced, negotiated, and/or eliminated in literary and cultural narratives. Three interrelated strands of research will be conducted to inquire into processes of ambiguiation and disambiguation from the nineteenth century to the present. This project proposes a notion of secularity that is not the product of a particular secular ideology, but the product of triangulation between three monotheistic communities.Instead, the project examines relations between multiple religious and non-religious communities, thus proposing a notion of secularity as a set of practices that evolve when different religious and non-religious communities engage with each other. Taking such an approach is likely to steer the debate away from its current impasse—a rhetoric that sees secularism in Muslim societies as a belated foreign import, an imposition from outside, or the result of failed modernization. Thus, rather than perpetuating mainstream views about secular spheres in Muslim-dominated societies, this project investigates how secularity has continually been redefined by shifting demographics from the Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republic and how secularity catalyzed a process in which the place of different religious and non-religious communities are determined.
DFG Programme
Research Units
