Page 253 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

every six hours. In the six centuries of the Ottoman Empire, the number
of mosques built was around ¤fteen thousand, in the sixty-¤ve years of
the Republic, the number of mosques has exceeded one hundred thou-
sand. Why are they being built? There is something wrong here. Muslims
must free themselves from those who ¤rst put arti¤cial distances between
themselves and God, and then ask for a commission to remove them.

The illustrative excerpts above are chosen from particular moments in Yasar
Nuri Öztürk’s performance, when his facial expression and gestures imply that
he has cast aside what he had come prepared to talk about (as an expert guest),
and his voice and intonation suggest that he is now speaking “spontaneously.”
Within the anticipatory framework of the Ayse Özgün Show, “we” (studio audi-
ences, viewers at home, as well as Ayse Özgün herself) expect and wait (respect-
fully) for the moment when Yasar Nuri Öztürk will assume a “¤ghter” frame,
lashing out against the enemies of “real Islam” rather than elaborating on what
“real Islam” is.
Ayse Özgün, as a shrewd and experienced producer, knows that such “electric
moments” (her term) are crucial for her program ratings. During the interviews
she narrated a “mistake” during the second year of the program: “We decided
that instead of telling people to read the Quran, we would read it together on
the program, chapter and verse. Our ratings fell immediately, so we gave up
after two weeks.” She lamented that “people were not interested in learning the
Quran,” immediately qualifying that she would never admit this in public.
Overall, during the ¤ve-year period when this particular program was on
the air every Friday, Yasar Nuri Öztürk’s language and attacks have become pro-
gressively sharper, along with his growing visibility on commercial channels, in
a range of other programs. When asked, program directors have one answer:
“ratings.”

A Heroic Fighter against “Fake” Islam?

Moving outward from the microcosm of the Ayse Özgün Show to draw
conclusions about Yasar Nuri Öztürk’s “ratings” on commercial television in
general is obviously a hazardous task. The foregoing analysis suggests that a cru-
cial component of “watching” him on television is his readiness to assume “a
¤ghter” frame—cutting across different groups of viewers to engage them in a
melodramatic con®ict between “real” Islam and “corrupt” Islam. What lends
him credibility as a “lone ¤ghter” against forces of corruption is the recognition,
on the part of diverse audiences, that he is a man of “scienti¤c learning”—that
is, that his scholarly knowledge of “real Islam” is formidable. So regardless of
how ambivalent or even confused perhaps “we” (as his viewers or as Turkish
people) might be about “real Islam,” there can be no doubt about Yasar Nuri
Öztürk’s own quali¤cations as a man of prodigious scholarship (since he con-
tinuously refers back to his own writings) and his perfect recall of the entire
Quran (since he quotes exact words and phrases in Arabic along with their in-

242 Ayse Öncü