Page 259 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

AK government immediately rejected the label “Islamist.” Both AK’s new prime
minister (Abdullah Gül) and its charismatic chairman (Recep Tayyip Erdogan)
af¤rmed their belief in the separation of religion and state, and declared their
vision of a new future—a modern, democratic, economically prosperous, secu-
lar, Muslim Turkey. This summation of incompatibilities suggests that the di-
visive issues that produced the “phenomenon of Yasar Nuri Öztürk” will con-
tinue to haunt Turkish politics in the coming decade, in ways that remain to be
investigated.

Notes

1. I use the notion of “a televisual moment” so as to avoid the universalistic conno-
tations of the concept of a “millennial moment” developed by Comaroff and Comaroff
(2000). So I have come up with a phrase that reiterates their emphasis on the signi¤cance
of neoliberal discourses, and also highlights the concomitant boom in domestic media
and consumer markets.
2. I refer to India and Indonesia speci¤cally, because accounts of the changing media
scene during the 1990s seem so remarkably similar to the Turkish case (Pendakur and
Kapur 1997; Sen and Hill 2000; Rajagopal 2001).
3. Tsing (2000, 115) describes the 1990s decade in Indonesia as follows: “From the
top of what was called a ‘miracle,’ Indonesia fell to the bottom of a ‘crisis.’ . . . So recently
an exemplar of the promise of globalization, overnight became the case study of global-
ization’s failures.”
4. There is a vast literature on Turkey’s neoliberal turn. For an overview and exten-
sive bibliography, see Cizre-Sakallioglu and Yeldan 2000. On the rise of an “Islamic
economy” during this period, see Bugra 1999, 1998; Önis 1997.
5. For a discussion on the interaction of markets and politics in the transformation
of the media scene during the 1990s decade in Turkey, see Öncü 2000; forthcoming.
6. The expressions within quotation marks are all direct translations from Turkish.
That they sound so familiar reveals how rapidly catchphrases from the global language
of neoliberalism were appropriated by Turkish journalists and entered into public dis-
course as well as everyday language.
7. The paucity of research on the history of the Directory of Religious Affairs is
remarkable. For a notable exception, see Tarhanli 1993.
8. What Langer (1998) describes as “the other news” or “tabloid news” has been
main fare of prime time news programming since the mid-1990s in Turkey.
9. The concept of a “super-subject” was developed by Morse (1986). with speci¤c
reference to television news personalities. Although television producers use the word
“magic” to describe Yasar Nuri Öztürk’s appeal to audiences, I prefer to avoid Weber’s
notion of charisma, used by Marshall (1999) to discuss the celebrity phenomenon in
general. Morse’s concept of a “super-subject” emphasizes the signi¤cance of direct ad-
dress on television, in the subjective, conversational mode, which brings into play the
powerful codes of equality and reciprocity in everyday talk. She suggests that when a
super-subject speaks to me, the truth conditions or rules of veri¤cation of “secondary”
or mediated experience are suspended, and what he says assumes the paramount reality

248 Ayse Öncü