Page 241 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

controversy. As the representative of of¤cial Islam in Turkey, the Directorate of
Religious Affairs is one of the largest and best ¤nanced state institutions in Tur-
key, with control over mosques, religious education, and a vast network of re-
7
ligious endowments and charities. Ignoring the details of a complicated history,
it might be said that its emergent scope and powers are bound with the project
of Turkish modernity and nationalism, aimed at creating “secular Muslims.”
Two sets of state practices were involved in this process of social engineering.
On the one hand, the Turkish state attempted to purge (with various degrees of
vigilance or success or both at different times) all autonomous loci of Islamic
thought and activity embedded in communal networks. On the other, it has
sought to de¤ne and produce, under state auspices, the universal principles of
Islamic doctrine and ritual for all Turkish citizens. The onus of interpreting the
doctrinal and ritual injunctions of Islam was delegated to the State Directorate
of Religious Affairs, along with the responsibility of training, certifying, and
monitoring imams who preach in mosques, and, most important, the task of
educating all Turkish citizens in the religious and moral precepts of Islam as
part of the national educational curriculum. So the Directorate has evolved into
one of the most powerful institutions in Turkey, with an organizational reach
(as well as budget) next to none other than the Ministries of Education, Interior,
and Defense. Needless to say, its doctrinal and ritual injunctions as well as its
educational policies have been subject to the viscidities of party politics since
the 1950s. But its institutional centrality and primacy in de¤ning and supplying
what constitutes public knowledge of Islam in the “secular” republic of Turkey
was never seriously challenged until the 1990s.
In the political conjuncture of the 1990s the Directorate became a major
target of attack for nearly all strategic groups in the political arena. Most im-
mediately it was targeted by radical discourses emanating from Islamic circles,
denounced as an anomalous product of Kemalist authoritarianism and state re-
pression of Islam, in the guise of “secularism.” The Directorate was identi¤ed
as the site of state coercion, as opposed to “civil” formations of political Islam.
Simultaneously the Directorate also came under vociferous attack by the gath-
ering momentum of “secularist” forces, this time for allowing “Islamists” to in-
¤ltrate state bureaucracy and to bene¤t from its dispensations. Public outcry
centered on the growing numbers and the expanding student population in
schools for training religious functionaries (imam-hatip schools), where fe-
male students attended segregated classes in “covered” uniforms. The Director-
ate was accused of promoting a parallel educational system based upon sheria
principles, through state funding and tutelage. Concurrently critical voices ema-
nating from Turkey’s hitherto invisible Alevi minorities (an estimated 20 per-
cent of Turkey’s population) began to be heard in the political arena. Threatened
by the growing momentum of political Islam, Alevi minorities began to publicly
criticize state policies for promoting Sunni-Islam as the of¤cial state religion,
under the guise of “secularism.” The Directorate was accused of using public
tax money to subsidize an expanding network of Sunni-Orthodox mosques and

230 Ayse Öncü