Page 244 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

which have since been recycled endlessly, particularly during Ramadan. He
gives close to one hundred scheduled talks annually in settings ranging from
¤ve-star hotels in Istanbul to provincial towns and cities in various parts of the
country. He is available on the Web to answer questions (paid) from the public
seeking advice on a variety of issues. His most recent book, based on the most
frequently asked questions on the Internet, entitled I Am Answering, is cur-
rently on sale in supermarkets and R&D chains, along with other popular best-
sellers of the moment. And his personal life, ranging from his “hip” dress style
(polo-shirts, suits with ties or foulards) and his daily workouts, to his “modern”
home-style and “uncovered” wife, has become an endless source of fascination
in the magazine press.

The Superstar of White Islam?
Perhaps the simplest way of thinking about the phenomenon of Yasar
Nuri Öztürk is how he embodies (literally and metaphorically) the blended cul-
ture of global consumerism. His public image is very much in tune with the
spirit of the times—Muslim but with a difference: Muslim Lite. Ever since mass
tourism took off in the mid-1980s Turkey has been marketing itself with a
montage of images intended to convey its spirit—whirling dervishes, sizzling
kebabs, sandy beaches, belly dancers, graceful minarets, and diners drinking red
wine. This cultural pastiche, constituted through the optics of the global tour-
ist industry, has been embraced as “multiculturalism” by the af®uent and well-
to-do classes of the neoliberal era, now associated with a mythical “Ottoman”
past. Thus among the more striking features of Turkey’s entry into the global
culture of consumerism has been the circulation of “Ottoman cultural heritage”
in a variety of commodi¤ed forms. So it is possible to interpret the phenomenon
of Yasar Nuri Öztürk as part of the same process—the rediscovery of Turkey’s
Muslim identity through the optics of global consumerism. When viewed from
the bird’s-eye vantage point of global consumerism, Yasar Nuri Öztürk encap-
sulates the summation of incompatibles—hybridities—which is the essence of
what might be thought of as a “global culture.”
Still, Yasar Nuri Öztürk is, ¤rst and foremost, a political ¤gure—an active
combatant in the battleground of cultural politics in Turkey. His fame and
popularity on television cannot be divorced from the deepening cleavages of the
neoliberal era, which became increasingly apparent from the mid-1990s on. The
year 1994 was an important watershed, because a series of landslide victories in
local elections (including in Istanbul) revealed the growing success of political
Islam in developing a popular moral discourse of opposition—based on justice,
honesty, and abstemiousness—while simultaneously incorporating the language
of “human rights” and “civil society” from neoliberal discourses of the moment.
Thus, in the political conjuncture of the late 1990s, the “classical” divisions of
Turkish politics between the “progressive” left (secularist) and the “conserva-
tive” right (religious) were recon¤gured. Political Islam succeeded in de¤ning
itself as the voice of “civil” society, the major force of (progressive) opposition

Becoming “Secular Muslims” 233