Page 254 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

terpretations in Turkish). But, most important, of course, is the urgency of the
ongoing battle in the present, which demands united opposition on the part of
different groups of viewers.
When Yasar Nuri Öztürk situates himself within a melodramatic con®ict be-
tween “real” versus “invented/fake” Islam, he does not target “political Islam”
directly but only “those people” who distort “real Islam” for their own gain. His
true enemies are the “racketeers” or “pro¤teers” (tezgahlar), which might be
translated into the everyday experience of his viewers in a variety of ways. In
Turkey of the 1990s “they” might include Islamic Financial Houses that attract
clients by offering “interest-free” banking. Or “those people” may be offshoots
of religious orders that channel “great wealth” through foundations (vakif ).
And, as in one of the direct quotations I have given above, “they” might also
include people who solicit contributions from “innocent” believers to build a
new mosque every other day. So each time Yasar Nuri Öztürk begins to attack
“pro¤teers” and “racketeers” (combined with the viewing experience itself), the
timeless opposition between “real” versus “fake” Islam, one good, the other bad,
both acquires fresh urgency and becomes an immediate problem calling for
united opposition.
But why are (some) “Turkish people” deceived by these pro¤teers? Why don’t
they “wake up”? The answer appears to reside in “muddled thinking” based
either on hearsay (kulakdan dolma bilgiler) or “superstition” (hürafe)—terms
Yasar Nuri Öztürk often uses interchangeably in his television performances.
He frequently dismisses questions about the morality of everyday practices
(such as the appropriateness of handshaking between men and women or the
permissibility of men and women swimming together at the beach) as trivial
because they amount to no more than “hearsay” rather than being based on true
knowledge of the Quran. He continuously berates his audiences for believ-
ing what they hear from others, instead of reading the Quran to decide for
themselves by “reasoning.” Similarly he dismisses such “popular” rituals as vis-
iting shrines of holy men or seeking help from healers as hürafe—superstitions
that corrupt “real Islam.” But the distinction between “muddled thinking” and
hürafe (an assimilated word from Arabic) also connotes a symbolic hierarchy,
between (modern) literate people who are simply confused and the (tradi-
tional) illiterate masses who remain steeped in superstition. Hence the word
hürafe captures the time immemorial opposition between the literate culture
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of Sunni Orthodox Islam and the popular Islam of the periphery, as well as
its numerous reincarnations throughout Republican history—enlightened elite
versus uneducated masses, urban versus rural, modernity versus tradition. So,
once again, Yasar Nuri Öztürk’s battle against hürafe in the immediate urgency
of the present becomes part of a ceaseless struggle between Orthodoxy and
heresy, between enlightenment and backwardness.
Yasar Nuri Öztürk’s struggle to rescue “real Islam” from hürafe and tezgahlar,
then, invokes the familiar tropes of Turkish nationalism while simultaneously
recasting them in the immediacy of the present. In the act of watching him on
television, the contradictions, ambivalences, and ambiguities of the couplet

Becoming “Secular Muslims” 243