Page 240 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

spawned a set of new “Turkic” states in Central Asia, fostered dreams of Tur-
key’s impending leap into the global arena. Coupled with a cycle of exuberant
growth in the domestic economy, Turkey’s neoliberal turn became a showcase
for success in international circles. 4
Thus the year 1990—when a satellite venture, beaming from Germany, broke
through state broadcasting monopoly—was a moment of heady optimism. The
banking and advertising industries were already integrated into global markets
through partnerships and joint ventures. Consumer markets were ®ooded with
goods and brand names from distant parts of the world. The boom in domestic
consumption, coupled with an unprecedented expansion in advertising mar-
kets, made investments in commercial television highly attractive. A series of
commercial networks were launched in rapid succession, followed by a spate
of buying and selling to gain common control of newspapers, television, and
magazines. The broadcasting industry expanded at a frenzied pace, becoming a
hotbed of mergers and acquisitions, with growing concentration of corporate
control within and across various commercial media markets. By 1994—the
precise date when the provisions of a new law re-regulating commercial media
markets went into effect—media markets had already undergone a dramatic
transformation, and mainstream Turkish audiences had become familiar with
the seductions of infotainment and tabloid television. 5
The downturn to Turkey’s neoliberal episode was equally swift and dra-
matic. From around the mid-1990s on, the country began to suffer “economic
uncertainty”—to use the favorite catchphrase of Turkish journalism—which
became an endless topic for public debate. A succession of coalition govern-
ments began to follow one another in a game of musical chairs, lending credence
to the diagnosis that “political instability in Ankara” was the main culprit for
6
“economic uncertainty.” And, most important, insurgent politics of Islam and
of Kurdish nationalism seemed to escalate concomitantly, bringing the Turkish
nation on the brink of being drawn and quartered.
The ¤fteen-year con®ict between armed Kurdish dissidents and the Turkish
military, which claimed more than thirty thousand lives, was never of¤cially
recognized. The of¤cial rhetoric of “anarchy” and “the ¤ght against terrorism,”
which was deployed from the mid-1980s until the end of the 1990s, cast a cloak
of silence over the political trauma of mass deportations, empty villages, and
large cities ®ooded by refugees from the war zone. The military—its budget,
operations, and expenditures—remained (and remains) outside the boundaries
of public debate. Direct censorship of news about the war—in which more than
2.5 million young men were immediately involved in the ¤ghting—meant that
reporting was con¤ned to the ups and downs of seemingly scattered “terrorist
incidents.”
By contrast, the growing signi¤cance of Islam in electoral politics (especially
after a succession of landslide victories in large metropolitan centers beginning
with Istanbul in 1994) became an incessant topic of public discussion and tele-
vision “chat,” next to none other than “economic uncertainty.” In the ensuing
debates, the centralized Directorate of Religious Affairs became a focal point of

Becoming “Secular Muslims” 229