Page 243 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

and the “extraordinary sufferings of ordinary people” (featured “live” on “reality
shows”), there seemed little doubt that the Turkish nation was on the verge of
disaster. 8
In this climate of doubt, contingency, and speculation, what mainstream in-
fotainment broadcasting in Turkey (as elsewhere perhaps) offered audiences
9
was a limited set of “super-subjects” who speak the truth as they say it. Such
super-subjects address viewers in the category of the person, balancing out the
moral and immoral, the acceptable and the unacceptable, the right and the
wrong, even as events tumble upon us and there are no second guesses. Among
them are a selected number of news anchors, some notables from the busi-
ness community, some politicians (very few), and Yasar Nuri Öztürk. These are
not television stars or celebrities—“show biz” in the conventional American
sense of the term. Nor are they merely representatives of particular channels,
the media world in general, or “the public interest”; rather, they seem to repre-
sent a complex nexus of them all. They speak as the “I” (analogous to the “I”
in a sentence), and their messages perform the “magic” of binding different
elements and cultural institutions together to form a coherent “reality.” The
super-subject (at least on Turkish television) is not a “narrator” in the classical
sense of the term, organizing “live” events and orchestrating them toward a par-
ticular resolution. He (not she) does not provide narrative resolution but, by his
very presence, seems to stabilize the chaos, discord, and disorder of the world
beyond our immediate experience.
Yasar Nuri Öztürk, then, is one among the limited number of such super-
subjects on Turkish television and, akin to them all, stands in a category all its
own. He has an impressive cachet of credentials as a scholar as well as positional
authority—a theology professor at Istanbul University who specializes in Is-
lamic philosophy—which empower him as an “expert.” His prodigious writings
include more than forty books, both scholarly works and popular “best-sellers.”
He is ®uent in Arabic, Persian, and English; has committed the entire Quran to
memory; holds a (secular) Law degree; and is equally at home with quotations
from Nietzsche, Afghani, or Mevlana. 10
In addition to his scholarly/intellectual credentials, Yasar Nuri Öztürk has a
lengthy history of engagement with the popular media. He started writing “Fri-
day columns” for daily newspapers in the 1970s, starting with Son Havadis,
later Tercuman, then moving up to Hurriyet (the largest circulating mass daily)
in the 1980s. From 1987 on, he began to appear regularly on the World of Be-
lief program, broadcast on state television on Friday evenings. But it was the
advent of multichannel commercial broadcasting that catapulted Yasar Nuri
Öztürk into the national limelight, transforming his name into a household
word, sweeping his books to the top of best-seller charts, and turning him into
a highly visible public persona.
Since the mid-1990s Yasar Nuri Öztürk has become the most sought after
“guest” in innumerable studio debates, talk shows, and arena programs. He has
prepared and presented such regular programs as Isiga Cagri (Call to Light) or
Kuran ve Insan (Quran and the Human Being) for various commercial channels,

232 Ayse Öncü