Page 239 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

For the political site of struggles unleashed by these opposing trends continues
to be the national, not the post-national or transnational.
What follows is an attempt to pursue this line of thinking in the context of
Turkey’s “televisual moment”—roughly ten years in chronological time. Speci¤-
cally I am interested in how one of the most trenchant motifs of Turkish na-
tionalism, we are all secular Muslims, has been simultaneously destabilized and
recon¤gured in the political conjuncture of the late 1990s. My main concern is
not the insurgent politics of Islam per se or how it has challenged the mytholo-
gies of Turkish nationalism but rather the contradictory tendencies which have
come into play. What I hope to trace is how the normative ¤ction of a secular
Muslim has been reanimated and reaf¤rmed through commercial media, at a
moment in time when its inherent ambiguities were highlighted and politicized
by the growing visibility of Islam in the political arena.
My entry point of investigation into the dense political landscape of the late
1990s in Turkey will be to focus on the metamorphosis of a divinity professor
into a super-subject on commercial television—“the phenomenon of Yasar Nuri
Öztürk.” The centerpiece of my analysis will be how the chimera of a “secular
Muslim” was constituted on a particular talk-show program which was on the
air for more than ¤ve years, featuring Yasar Nuri Öztürk as a regular guest every
Friday morning. But, ¤rst, a parenthetical caveat on the generality and speci-
¤city of the “televisual moment” in Turkey.

The Unfolding of the “Televisual Moment” in Turkey
What de¤ned the televisual moment in Turkey, as in many parts of the
postcolonial world, was the historical coupling between the explosive growth
of neoliberal discourses and the phenomenal expansion of commercial media
1
markets. The dramatic failure of state-led development efforts to deliver its
promise of national progress was already apparent by the 1980s, in a range of
countries as diverse as India, Indonesia, and Turkey. 2 The blowing winds of neo-
liberalism from the transnational arena, with its rhetoric of “freedom from state
controls,” “opening to the outside,” and “integration to the global economy,”
promised the dawn of a new era. But what lent hope and optimism to such a
utopian possibility was the ease with which satellite technologies penetrated
across space, suggesting that integration to a world of plentitude and choice
waiting “outside” would be effortless, once “state barriers” were removed. It is
all too easy to forget, with the hindsight of the present, that “the dismantling
of state controls” was executed, at least initially, in the spirit of a heroic new
beginning. The immediate burst of energy in media and consumer markets
seemed to lend this hope tangibility, however brief, before it was displaced by
the disillusionments of neoliberalism. 3
In its broader outlines, the eventful history of Turkey’s televisual moment is
one variant of this narrative. It began sometime in the mid-1980s, with deregu-
lation in ¤nancial and capital markets that spearheaded the “opening of the
economy to the outside.” The breakup of the Soviet Union in 1989, which

228 Ayse Öncü