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21 Consumer Culture, Islam
and the Politics of Lifestyle:
Fashion for Veiling in
Contemporary Turkey
Baris¸ Kiliçba y and
Mutlu Binark
Introduction: the Turkish modernization project and the
construction of a collective identity
Since the late 1980s, Turkey’s economic structure has been reformed in parallel
with the integration process into the global market economy. The adoption of
the principles of a market economy has influenced individuals and their ways
of self-definition within everyday life. Simultaneously, as a consequence of a
homogenized national culture and national identity – two projects of Kemalist
ideology, which the nation-state has been based on since the establishment of the
Turkish Republic in 1923 – the problem of the representation of ‘the others’ has
come about. Two tensions have arisen from discussions on the representation of
the marginalized ‘others’. The necessity to define the centre and the periphery
has stimulated the first tension, while the second tension is a result of seeking
control mechanisms to strengthen the nation-state ideology, which conceives
secularism as one of its founding principles. Turkish secularism is not an equiv-
alent of the Anglo-Saxon conceptualization of secularism, which includes ‘the
separation of the church and the state’. In Turkey, secularism is rather inter-
preted as the regulation and the administration of religious practices and insti-
tutions by the nation-state and its agent, the General Directorate of Religious
Affairs. Since the foundation of the Turkish Republic, this interpretation of secu-
larism has been called in the Turkish Constitution laicism, following the French
model, but also differing from it (Göle, 1997: 64–5). We refer to the Turkish
Republic’s interpretation of secularism as ‘didactic secularism’, and define it as
moralistic and pedagogical, and also as a controlling and teaching mechanism,
which conceives secularism as a western lifestyle.
We also argue that Turkish modernization, conceptualized as a project of
social engineering, resulted both in the homogenization and the absorption of
different identities within the monocultural identity. Only the use of the Turkish
language was allowed in public institutions, and there was to be only one single
Source: EJC (2002), vol. 17, no. 4: 495–511.