Page 242 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

schools, not to mention a vast centralized bureaucracy from which Alevi mi-
norities have been excluded by de¤nition. Thus, in the neoliberal conjuncture
of the 1990s, at a moment of dramatic reductions in state expenditures for wel-
fare and education, not only the ideological role but also the budget and expen-
ditures of the Directorate became a matter of heated controversy—furnishing
rich material for columnists, talk show hosts, as well as academics in the media-
saturated environment of the moment.

The Metamorphosis of Yasar Nuri Öztürk into a
“Super-subject” on Turkish Television

In discussing the relationship between television and knowledge in gen-
eral, John Ellis (1999) emphasizes the dialectic between two extremes of disor-
der and control. Television, he suggests, does not provide an overall explanation;
it comes to no conclusions. Instead, it produces an unstoppable ®ood of events,
spectacles of con®icts, intimations of crises of all sorts, people in desperate
circumstances—unfolding before our very eyes in “real time” with cameras de-
liberately focusing on action. It also offers an enormous amount of “chat”—
musings about what may have happened, what may be about to happen, or what
may be the result if events were to take a certain turn. We, as audiences, are
desperate for some sort of conclusion, but the more bits of information we
acquire, the more the complexity and contradictions. Television’s perpetually
shifting agendas leave us adrift in a sea of doubt and contingency.
This was certainly the case toward the end of the 1990s in Turkey, when the
body politic of the nation appeared to be dissolving symbolically and liter-
ally, as a series of calamitous events—“shock news” in the language of tabloid
journalism—began to tumble upon one another on television screens. The on-
going civil war between Kurdish independence ¤ghters and the armed forces of
the state remained invisible on television screens, apart from of¤cially autho-
rized references to terrorist activities. But as the death toll continued to increase,
visual images of mothers crying over the funeral caskets of their sons, who died
defending their nation, began to intrude with increasing frequency. Then there
was a series of shock events involving “reactionary Islam”—young girls falling
into the clutches of heterodox sects (Fadime Sahin event of 1996); provincial
towns falling prey to Iranian extremists (Sincan event of 1997); the in¤ltration
of the “bloody” Hizballah network into the heartlands of the nation (Hizballah
event of 2000)—which brought the nation to the brink of disaster. Last but not
least was a series of political scandals (uncovered by investigative journalists)
which revealed the hitherto unsuspected existence of a “deep state,” involving
linkages between high-level state of¤cials, drug cartels, and Kurdish tribal net-
works. For mainstream audiences, watching these “disastrous events” unfolding
before their very eyes, interspersed with tabloid news on the “ordinary lives of
the super rich” (the subject matter of innumerable tele-magazine programs)

Becoming “Secular Muslims” 231