Bodies, places and time: Islamic visibilities in the public sphere and the contestations of secular modernity in Turkey

This dissertation explores the ways in which the current constitutional system in Turkey is being contested and negotiated around the constitutive norm of secularism and the place and role of Islam, as these negotiations are carried out in various sites of everyday life. Islamic identities began to emerge in the secular public sphere around mid-1980s and gained a more forceful presence after 1994 when the Islamist political party, Refah , came to power in Istanbul upon winning the municipal elections. Tracing Islamist interventions in public spaces, I explore the formations of political identities around the categories of gender, class, nationalism and religious orientation, and how the performance of such identities contest and call into question established norms around which the public sphere is organized. My analysis focuses on bodies (the construction of the national subject), places (the construction of social space) and time (the construction of national history) as three main sites from which interventions and contestations are carried out. I examine interventions regarding (1) the clothing of bodies through state regulations, the proliferation of women\u27s images in the media and the propagation of the image of the veiled woman in various public performances; (2) the construction of social space, as illustrated in the representations of the city of Istanbul and the restructuring of various city spaces in the performance of both secular and Islamic identities; and (3) the making and contestations of national history, as illustrated in the unofficial commemoration of May 29, 1453 by Islamic circles as “the Conquest of Istanbul Day.” I conclude that, under Refah Party, Islamic discourse turns into a nationalist political project, which contests the authority of secularism, but retains the national, homogenizing and authoritative systems of state control intact and uncontested. This is partially the reason why Islamism is perceived as a threat to the secular system, which compelled the military to intervene in 1997 and led to the eventual closure of Refah Party. This intervention allowed the military to establish itself as the ultimate overseer of the secular system, and closed all venues to the formal negotiation of the constitutional norm of secularism