Page 256 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

for instance—such as translating the Arabic call to prayers (ezan) into Turkish,
conducting mosque worship in Turkish, or reciting daily ritual prayers ( namaz)
in Turkish—have been subject to intense debate, negotiation, and compromise
since the formative decades of Turkish nationalism. But when retold in the
media-saturated environment of the 1990s, they became something new—the
litmus test of political standing in the immediacy of the present. And, as such,
they were transposed onto a different plane, recon¤gured in the public arena in
terms of “people’s choice versus state controls.” Whether Yasar Nuri Öztürk was
a “hero” or a “false hero” in this struggle remains open to question. But the
drama itself, by repudiating the functionaries of the centralized state, and call-
ing them to account for interfering with people’s choice, offered the potential
possibility of “freely choosing” to become united as “secular Muslims.” Perhaps
the “magic” of Yasar Nuri Oztürk in the political conjuncture of the 1990s re-
sided in making this impossible dream sound plausible.
In terms of substance, what produced the “phenomenon of Yasar Nuri Öz-
türk” was a double-dynamic. His television audiences embraced him as a way
of af¤rming who “we” are and “what we stand for” as secular Muslims. His
statements were mobilized by different constituencies to concretize ongoing
struggles over the issue of “whose interests” the Directorate of Religious Affairs
promoted and “what it stood for” in the secular Republic of Turkey. Neither of
these is reducible to the other, in the sense of what came before and what came
after, or which was primary and which was secondary. What linked them to-
gether, in mutual feedback, was the historically speci¤c ways in which “the affair
of state” and “the affairs of religion” continue to be entangled in Turkey. The
“phenomenon of Yasar Nuri Öztürk” was both a product of this entanglement
and part of its renegotiation in the political conjuncture of the 1990s in Turkey.

I began this essay by proposing the notion of a “televisual moment” as a way
of capturing both the generality and also the speci¤city of the 1990s in Turkey.
In the broadest sense, this was a historical moment when the blowing winds of
neoliberalism in the transnational arena coincided with declining optimism
and faith in the utopian promise of state-led development and progress in much
of the postcolonial world. The entry of television into history at this particular
moment, I suggested, brought into the foreground two opposing tendencies as-
sociated with the global expansion of media and communication networks. On
the one hand, it revealed the fragility of a phalanx of “modern” institutions as-
sociated with the nation-state, undermining of¤cial scripts of who “we” are and
“what we stand for.” On the other hand, it brought into play new modes of iden-
ti¤cation with the abstract nation, by annexing familiar motifs and themes from
narratives of nationalism, and reproducing them through visual formats and
popular genres of global media culture.
Focusing on the “phenomenon of Yasar Nuri Oztürk” was a way of “cutting”
into the dense political landscape of the late 1990s in Turkey, to explore how
one of the key motifs of Turkish nationalism—“we are all secular Muslims”—
was being reanimated through the visual formats and commodity logic of tele-

Becoming “Secular Muslims” 245