100 Years of Religion in Turkey: Voices from the Center and the Margins

This chapter provides an overview of some major themes in Turkish religion that have characterised the first hundred years of the Republic. It argues that scholars of Turkish religion have often been more absorbed in studying the implementation of laïcité in the country than in the intricacies and complexities of religious life itself. It also notes that scholarly paradigms have sometimes supported normative assumptions about religion in Turkey, namely that religion is marginal and/or homogeneously Sunni Muslim. In this way, the opening chapter makes a case for the intervention of this Handbook into the field. The chapter is organized around the following five core questions, discussion of which animates the volume as a whole: (1) What are the major continuities and ruptures in religion from the Ottoman to the Turkish Republican era? (2) How have different religious minority communities experienced the framework of official, hegemonic Sunni Islam? (3) How have modernization processes inflected religious daily lives in Turkey? (4) What have been the major trends in Turkish Islamic thought over the past 100 years? (5) How has religion in Turkey been a site for the contestation of power? This chapter presents each of the 34 subsequent contributions in summary, showing how they feed into a multi-faceted analysis of these five driving questions.