Page 257 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

vision. Rather than reinventing the unanswerable question of who is a secular
Muslim, I assumed that, like all cultural identities, its boundaries are inherently
blurred. By situating myself in the terrain of the present—wherein insurgent
cultural politics of Islam, and of Kurdish nationalism, were intermingled with
political discourses of neoliberalism and its anti-state rhetoric—I hoped to
avoid the conceptual pitfalls of a genealogical account. Instead, I started out
with the metamorphosis of Yasar Nuri Öztürk into a “super-subject” on televi-
sion, and tried to plot the overlapping constituencies for whom he “made sense”
and the intersecting social spaces wherein his voice was ampli¤ed.
Yet even as I tried to map out the multiple meanings of what he was saying
and the competing interpretations being constructed around them, additional
aspects of the phenomenon I was investigating came into focus. The object of
my analysis seemed to recompose itself as my search for situated knowledge
continued. I had begun by thinking of him as a “super-subject” on television—
addressing viewers in the ¤rst person to stabilize the perpetually shifting agen-
das of the moment, performing the “magic” of balancing out the moral from
the immoral, right from wrong. Was this because audiences embraced him as a
sermonizer in tune with the spirit of the times—a happy blending of Islamic
theology, aerobics, the Internet, English, and a “modern” (uncovered) wife? His
own self-positioning, however, was that of an eminent scholar. The primary
content of his lengthy soliloquies on television, reminiscent of classroom lec-
turing, seemed to be pitched to literate, urban, middle-class audiences. So what
was the secret of his magical “ratings”? How did he cut across multiple audience
segments to bring them in front of the television set? This line of questioning
led me to focus on moments of passionate intensity in Yasar Nuri Öztürk’s per-
formance, when he assumed a “¤ghter frame” to lash out against the enemies
of “real Islam.” What brought diverse audience segments in front of the televi-
sion set, and knit them together, I concluded, was the desire to watch him ¤ght
the perpetrators of “fake Islam”—the identities of whom invoked a shared fund
of knowledge based on narratives of Turkish nationalism. The question of who
“we” are and “what we stand for” as secular Muslims acquired facticity in the
ongoing moral struggle between “real” and “fake Islam,” even as the term, as an
abstract concept and political practice, became more meaningless, implacable,
and illusive. What seemed an impossible illusion to sustain—“we are all secular
Muslims”—was fabricated in the heroic ¤ght against “those” who bene¤ted
from “fake Islam.”
If the line of questioning I pursued led me to a more layered understanding
of his “magical” relationship with audiences, it also revealed the terra incognito
of my research. What about the way that his arguments underwent public cir-
culation? During the course of my research I had become increasingly aware of
the difference between the primary content of Yasar Nuri Öztürk’s “political”
sermons (addressed to viewers) and the way that his statements were selectively
picked up and ampli¤ed as they entered public circulation. His “magical” tele-
vision ratings and the “talk value” of his statements in public circulation were
obviously linked. This link, however, was not a matter of temporal ordering in

246 Ayse Öncü