jeremy f. walton georgetown university confessional ... · jeremy f. walton georgetown university...

JEREMY F. WALTONGeorgetown University

Confessional pluralism and the civilsociety effect:Liberal mediations of Islam and secularism in contemporaryTurkey

A B S T R A C TPractices and ideals of confessional pluralism andliberal interpretations of Islam have achieved newprominence in Turkish civil society in recent years.In this article, I marshal fieldwork conducted amonga variety of Turkish Islamic civil society institutionsto argue that confessional pluralism and liberalIslam have reoriented practices of politics andsecularism in Turkey. As I demonstrate, liberaldiscourse about religious difference emerges withincivil society as a foil to hegemonic, homogeneousvisions of Islam on the part of the state. Myprincipal theoretical contribution is the civil societyeffect: how the institutions and discourses of civilsociety are idealized and rendered distinct fromstate power. Ethnographically, I focus on tworeligious groups that have achieved organizationwithin civil society: Turkish Alevis and supporters ofthe Sunni Hizmet Movement. [Islam, secularism, civilsociety, liberalism, pluralism, Turkey]

On a dreary February afternoon in 2007, I huddled near a coal-and wood-burning stove in a ramshackle building on the easternfringe of Anatolian Istanbul. At the time, this cramped, unofficialgecekondu structure served as the sole office for the SultanbeyliPir Sultan Abdal Association and Cem House (Sultanbeyli Pir

Sultan Abdal Dernegi ve Cem Evi),1 an NGO serving the Alevi residents ofthe sprawling, poor district of Sultanbeyli.2 A clutch of paunchy men ringedthe stove, each cradling a steaming cup of tea. Returning from the kitchento warm our tea, Sadegul Hanım,3 the young president of the association,took her place opposite me and launched into a discussion of the trialsfaced by Alevi Turks in general and her organization in particular:

As you know, the state and the Directorate of Religious Affairs(Diyanet Isleri Baskanlıgı) do not recognize Alevism. They do not fundcem houses, they insist that we worship in mosques like Sunnis. Wedecided to build a cem house here, in one of Istanbul’s most conser-vative Sunni neighborhoods, to challenge this discrimination. We toohave a right to be recognized as a religious minority (dini azınlık).

Several days later, I sipped a near-identical cup of tea in a context thatwas otherwise distant in every respect—geographically, economically, aes-thetically, and doctrinally—from the Sultanbeyli Pir Sultan Abdal Associ-ation. I had come to visit Cemal Bey, the vice president of the Journal-ists and Writers Foundation (Gazeteciler ve Yazarlar Vakfı). The Journalistsand Writers Foundation is the flagship organization of the Hizmet (Ser-vice) Movement in Istanbul, a loosely knit, transnational network of cor-porations, media outlets, private schools, and NGOs that draw inspirationfrom and advocate the teachings of the contemporary Sunni Turkish the-ologian Fethullah Gulen (Kuru 2003, 2005; Turam 2007; Yavuz and Espos-ito 2003). Cemal Bey and I sat opposite each other on the low, Ottoman-style “divan” couches that lined the foundation’s conference room; aboveme, an enlarged photograph of Fethullah Gulen embracing Pope John PaulII formed the centerpiece of a meticulously curated montage of images.

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 40, No. 1, pp. 182–200, ISSN 0094-0496, onlineISSN 1548-1425. C© 2013 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.DOI: 10.1111/amet.12013

Confessional pluralism � American Ethnologist

Among the personages in the photographs, I identifiedRecep Tayyip Erdogan, the current Turkish prime ministerand head of the governing Justice and Development Party(Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP); Deniz Baykal, the (nowformer) leader of the center-left Republican People’s Party(Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP); deceased Turkish rock-n-roll luminary Barıs Manco; and representatives of all ofTurkey’s recognized religious minorities—Catholic, Syriac,Greek Orthodox, and Armenian Christians as well as Jews—each posing gamely with Gulen himself or one of the foun-dation officers. Cemal Bey punctuated this pastiche of po-litical and religious pluralism with a comment: “Here at thefoundation, we aim to establish dialogue with all comers,especially members of different religions—Christians, Jews,Alevis, even Buddhists and Hindus. We believe that eachreligious community deserves to be recognized in and ofitself.”

Why are these two anecdotes of interest? From the per-spective of Turkish political society, Sadegul Hanım and Ce-mal Bey should occupy opposite sides of an incommensu-rable divide. As a spokeswoman of an Alevi organization,Sadegul Hanım would be expected to align herself with theCHP, which has traditionally been the most prominent po-litical representative of and advocate for Alevis.4 Cemal Bey,by contrast, is the very image of the new, conservative SunniMuslim bourgeoisie in Turkey, the bedrock constituency ofthe governing AKP, the chief political opponent of the CHP.5

Yet, despite this ostensible political antagonism, both ofthem voice and valorize liberal ideals in relation to mattersof religion. Although there are differences between SadegulHanım’s and Cemal Bey’s perspectives—the former favorsthe language of minority rights, whereas the latter prefersthe vocabulary of community—they both clearly operatewithin the register of collective recognition on the basis ofreligious identity. For each of them, the mechanics of col-lective recognition proceed from the sociological fact of reli-gious diversity: Multiple religious groups present within so-ciety warrant treatment as the objects of both equality andliberty.

In this article, I plumb the mediations of civil society, Is-lam, and liberal ideals and ideologies of religion in contem-porary Turkey that these two anecdotes briefly illustrate.Most generally, I demonstrate how and why a liberal modelof civil society has emerged in recent decades as a potentidiom of the politics of and about Islam in Turkey. In pur-suit of this aim, I offer an ethnographic exposition of thediscourses and practices of confessional pluralism—a reli-gious project for the flourishing of religious diversity—thatcharacterize Turkish Islamic civil society. Drawing inspira-tion from recent anthropological interrogations of liberalsecularism (Asad 2003; Mahmood 2005), I approach Islamand liberalism not as contrastive political ideologies but,rather, as modes of discursive practice that authorize, ani-mate, challenge, and coordinate each other in contextually

specific ways. Above all, these contextual mediations of lib-eralism and Islam within civil society defy the essentialistexpectation that Islam and political modernity are funda-mentally disparate domains that necessarily pose problemsfor each other when they interact (e.g., Gellner 1994; Lewis1993).

Nongovernmental politics, civil society effect,liberalism

How are we to understand the corresponding ideals andpractices of civil society actors who are otherwise politicallyat odds? Political discourse within Turkey offers a reduc-tive response to this question: However similar Alevi andSunni institutions and discourses may seem to be, an in-exorable political and theological gulf separates them. Thisdismissal emerges from a more pervasive political skepti-cism that maintains hegemony in Turkey: the notion thatevery public institution, actor, and event is ultimately de-termined by and oriented to state power, regardless of ap-pearances or claims to the contrary (Walton 2010a). Ac-cording to this perspective, civil society is no more thanan epiphenomenal extension of political society, in whichthe “true” cleavages of society achieve representation andadjudication.

NGO actors tend to advocate a diametrically oppositemodel of the relationship between civil society and polit-ical society. Rather than reducing civil society to an instru-ment or prosthesis of political society, apologists for civil so-ciety draw a strict cordon between “politics” and their ownactivities. For them, civil society is an apolitical domain ofauthentic desires and identities, entirely separate from themessy turf of political society. From this second perspective,any disagreement between Alevis and Sunnis is rendered in-significant because it is merely political—civil society, theostensible domain of social truth, authenticity, and interre-ligious harmony, constitutes proof of the pettiness of thispolitical friction.

Neither of these responses—the reduction of civil so-ciety to political society, on the one hand, and their rigiddistantiation, on the other—attends to the distinctive po-litical practice of civil society itself. I pursue a reading ofcivil society and Islam in Turkey that navigates between theScylla and Charybdis of these two perspectives. My read-ing of civil society and its constituent other, political society,draws broadly on Antonio Gramsci’s (1971) classic theoriza-tion of the two concepts. With keen Marxian attention tothe relationship between ideology and structures of power,Gramsci reframed civil society as a domain of hegemonicconsent, in contrast to earlier visions of civil society, fromAdam Ferguson through G. W. F. Hegel, as the domain of pri-vate interest.6 Gramsci (1971:12) theorized political society,on the contrary, as the domain of state coercion. While re-cent theorists of civil society inspired by Michel Foucault’s

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(1991) concept of “governmentality” (see also Lemke 2001;Potte-Bonneville 2007) have highlighted the continuitiesof governance between civil society and political society, Ipause on Gramsci’s distinction because it accents the differ-ent political modalities, consensual and coercive, that de-fine each domain. As I discuss at length below, the actorsand institutions that I analyze are liberal, rather than Marx-ian, in their own conceptions of civil society—they valorizecivil society as a prepolitical domain of social authenticityand truth. My task in this article is to read against the grainof this romance of civil society to trace the political disci-plines and effects of this very romance; Gramsci’s model of-fers a charter for just such a reading.

With Gramsci in hand, we can approach civil society asa distinctive modality of politics. I part ways with Gramsci,however, in viewing civil society as solely hegemonic;rather, civil society is a ground on which both hegemonicand counterhegemonic political discourses intersect, chal-lenge, and animate each other. In Turkey, in particular, glob-ally hegemonic liberal principles and ideologies achievecounterhegemonic valence in relation to questions of Islamand civil society. How might we approach this distinctivepolitics of civil society, within which global and nationalhegemonies and counterhegemonies situate each other?Michel Feher’s concept of “nongovernmental politics” of-fers a suggestion. Feher summarizes nongovernmentalpolitics as

neither apolitical nor governmental. To be involved inpolitics without aspiring to govern . . . what nongovern-mental activists of every stripe recognize is that boththe legitimacy and efficacy of their initiatives demandthat they refrain from occupying the realm of govern-ing agencies—whether with the purpose of taking themover, filling them with worthy stewards, or doing awaywith them. [2007:12]

Feher goes on to argue that nongovernmental politics isa constitutive feature of neoliberal contexts around theworld, particularly in the global South. As elsewhere, the as-cendancy of nongovernmental politics in Turkey is a markand index of an emergent neoliberal order, a point I ad-dress more thoroughly below. For the moment, however,I highlight the distinctive relationship between liberal re-ligiosity and nongovernmental politics that characterizesTurkish Islamic civil society. In contexts such as Turkey, de-fined by a strong state tradition (Heper 1991), nongovern-mental politics is not a fait accompli but an achievement.This achievement—the rendering of the politics of religionas nongovernmental—is precisely what unites otherwisedisparate theological and social projects within Turkish civilsociety.

In summary, we might think of civil society as a non-governmental idiom of politics. John L. and Jean Comaroff

(1999) argue that this idiom of politics hinges on a “natu-ralistic” ideology of civil society, the notion that civil soci-ety inherently allows and encourages the flourishing of pre-political identities and desires. As the Comaroffs point out,this romance of civil society implies and produces a con-comitant dystopia of the state—inasmuch as civil society isidealized and valorized as a domain naturally independentfrom power and coercion, the state is demonized as a locusof coercion and heteronomy.7 The critical question for theethnographer, then, is how best to capture the productionand politics of this romance of civil society.

Timothy Mitchell’s (1999) influential concept of the“state effect” suggests a provocative parallel in this regard.Mitchell arrives at the concept of the “state effect” by way ofinterrogating deceptively self-evident distinctions betweenstate and society and state and economy: “What is it aboutmodern society, as a particular form of social and economicorder, that has made possible the apparent autonomy of thestate as a freestanding entity? Why is this kind of appara-tus . . . the distinctive political arrangement of the modernage?” (1999:85). In analogous fashion, we might interrogatethe contemporary hegemony of civil society, its seeming in-evitability and self-evident autonomy from the state. Takinga page from Mitchell, we might ethnographically query the“civil society effect.” What institutional practices, micropo-litical contexts, and ideological formations produce civil so-ciety as a self-evident domain of freedom and authenticity(cf. Taylor 1994), especially in the regnant era of neoliberalglobalization? More specifically, what are the possible rela-tionships between religion and the civil society effect? Thediscourses and practices of confessional pluralism offer anavenue by which to pursue these questions. Confessionalpluralism depends on and stitches together an integratedromance of civil society, religion, and political liberalism.Above all, confessional pluralism hinges on a liberal modelof religion as a nonpolitical, voluntary mode of social lifethat demands recognition and protection under the aegisof the ostensibly universal values of liberty and equality.

Recent years have witnessed a groundswell in ethno-graphic and historical analyses of liberal discourses and sys-tems of governance (e.g., Larson 2004; Mehta 1999; Povinelli2002; Rose 2006) that interrogate latter-day apologies forliberalism (e.g., Habermas 1991; Rawls 2005). Critiques ofliberal secularism (Asad 1993, 2003; Mahmood 2005), inparticular, have underscored the incapacity of the liberalconcept of religion as individual, privatized belief to com-prehend the myriad ethical disciplines and communitiesthat have come to constitute religion outside the heart-lands of Western modernity. This purchase on the powersof liberal secularism has been especially fruitful for anthro-pologists of religion working in postcolonial contexts, suchas South Asia and Egypt, which still bear the imprint ofBritish liberal law and its distinctive configuration of re-ligion (Agrama 2010; Chatterjee 1998, 2004; Hansen 2000;

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Mahmood 2005). Nevertheless, this body of work does notfully tackle the questions that concern me here: How mightliberal ideals and religious projects coincide within and onthe basis of civil society? What defines the nongovernmen-tal politics of liberal, civil religion?

To address these pressing questions, we first requirea clearer understanding of the distinction between liber-alism and secularism. Liberalism, with its broadly Britishgenealogy (Mehta 1999) represents only one modality ofsecularism; the French–Jacobin tradition of laicism, whichforwards a robust culture of statism as a means of polic-ing religion in the public sphere, is a distinct model ofsecularism, with divergent implications for religious prac-tice and organization. Ahmet Kuru (2009), for one, hasstressed the importance of the distinction between liberal-ism and laicism—“passive” and “assertive” secularism in histerminology—to the study of secularism in Turkey. Whenanthropologists and social scientists of Turkey discuss sec-ularism, they unanimously refer to Kemalism, the Jacobin–laicist model of secularism that continues to animate theTurkish state’s monopolistic approach to matters of reli-gion. Because laicism remains the dominant ideology andpractice of secularism within the institutions of the state,a liberal model of religion, with its ideology of individualfreedom of belief, increasingly constitutes a viable, vocalcriticism of Turkish state secularism. In short, liberalism isa lived political project on the part of Turkish civil soci-ety institutions and actors that departs significantly fromstate-based liberalism as it is understood in the North At-lantic and much of the postcolonial world. This emergentliberalism, grounded in Turkish civil society, is defined byand expresses a tension between two distinct political di-mensions: the global, neoliberal domain, within which lib-eral principles are increasingly hegemonic, and the nationalTurkish context, within which liberal discourses and imagi-naries are counterhegemonic in relation to the illiberal statetradition. Therefore, to set the stage for the remainder of myargument, I first offer a brief review of the history of the il-liberal, homogenizing ideal of laicist Turkish secularism, orKemalism (Ataturkculuk, Kemalizm) as it is known colloqui-ally within Turkey.

The Kemalist project of laicism and nationalhomogeneity in a neoliberal age

The enigma of the homogeneous ideal of Turkish iden-tity, with its ineluctable relationship to questions of re-ligion and secularism, is coeval with the foundation ofRepublican Turkey. From the remnants of the Ottoman Em-pire, rent asunder by World War I and the subsequent Al-lied occupation of Istanbul, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk andhis cohorts fashioned a state premised on an ethnolinguis-tic nationalism that was, rather paradoxically, both reli-gious and antireligious at once (Berkes 1965:461ff .; Lewis

1961:262ff .; Mango 2002). In the transition from a multieth-nic and multireligious empire to the homogeneous Turkishnation-state, Islam—in particular, Sunni Islam of the HanafiSchool of jurisprudence8—was taken to define Turkishnessitself (Lewis 1961:255). Almost immediately, however,Ataturk’s robust central government in Ankara began to en-act a series of stringent curtailments of practices and ex-pressions of Islam. Above all, the authority to define the le-gitimacy of all Islamic precepts and practices was vested ex-clusively in the state itself, in particular, in the Directorate ofReligious Affairs, heir to the office of the Sheik-ul-Islam, thesupreme authority on matters pertaining to Islam duringthe Ottoman period (Gozaydın 2009; Shankland 1999:29;Yılmaz 2005:100). The political history of Islam and secu-larism in Republican Turkey can be understood as the inter-play between these two divergent imperatives: privatizationand minimization, on the one hand, and monopolizationand homogenization, on the other.

Undoubtedly, the schematic, abstract hegemony ofKemalism has always been hypothetical rather than ac-tual in Turkey, at least to a degree. As Serif Mardin (1989),Michael Meeker (2002), and Brian Silverstein (2011) havedetailed in different ways, the Turkish state’s aspirationsto monopolize and enforce the privatization of Islam didnot entirely deny continuities of and accommodations topractices, discourses, and institutions with distinct his-toricities and more complex sociologies. Nonetheless, thefates and trajectories of both Kemalism and Turkish Is-lam have changed radically over the past quarter century.Since the early 1980s, Turkey has experienced an efflo-rescence of civil society in tandem with a neoliberal turnin both domestic economic policies and electoral politics(Heper 1991; Onis 2004; Tugal 2009). While the initial in-terventions of the neoliberal reforms of the eighties wereeconomic—a large number of state industries were rapidlyprivatized and protectionist, import-substitution policieswere overturned—reverberations in Turkey’s socioculturaland political spheres followed closely on their heels. Oneparticularly striking outcome of Turkey’s neoliberal turn hasbeen the proliferation of NGOs devoted to a congeries ofcauses, both spiritual and mundane. Whereas the state hadcarefully regulated and often curtailed religiously orientedcivil society organizations earlier in the history of the Re-public (Cızakcı 2000:86ff .), the novel economic and po-litical terrain of the eighties and nineties proved to be asalubrious context for the rapid expansion of charitablefoundations (vakıflar) and associations (dernekler). All ofthe organizations that I discuss in this article, both Alevi andSunni, were established during this era.

Academic interrogation of the neoliberal Turkishpresent has become a burgeoning cottage industry forscholars of Turkey in recent years.9 Among recent ethno-graphers of Turkish Islam and political life in the neolib-eral present, Cihan Tugal (2009) offers a suggestive model

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for tracing the shifting relationships among Islam, politicalsociety, and civil society in Turkey. Tugal’s ethnography an-alyzes the process by which the governing party, the AKP,achieved hegemony in an impoverished Istanbul neigh-borhood; in achieving this hegemony, Tugal (2009:147ff .)argues, the AKP successfully integrated Islamic civil soci-ety and Islamic political society. Without detracting fromthe novelty and importance of Tugal’s argument, my ownethnography pursues a different route: I emphasize howcivil society organizations articulate and practice a modeof religiosity, confessional pluralism, whose politics is de-fined precisely on the basis of its distinction from politi-cal society and the state. As the initial anecdote concerningSadegul Hanım and Cemal Bey suggests, confessional plu-ralism within civil society is remarkable precisely because itunravels and transcends many of the oppositions that de-fine Turkish political society itself.

The nongovernmental politics marshaled by Turkish Is-lamic civil society institutions, and the civil society effectin particular, achieve efficacy in direct relation to Turkey’sstate culture of laicism. This does not imply, however, thatTurkish Islamic civil society is merely national in its ori-entation, causes, or effects—globalization, understood asan ensemble of transnational mobilities, opportunities, andconstraints, is equally central to the organizations of mystudy. On an institutional level, most Turkish Islamic NGOsmaintain strong ties with like-minded organizations out-side Turkey itself; this is especially true of Sunni Hizmet or-ganizations, each of which maintains close relations withprivate schools, NGOs, and businesses devoted to the theol-ogy and philanthropy of Fethullah Gulen in Europe, NorthAmerica, Central Asia, and elsewhere (Hendrick 2011; Tu-ram 2007). In a distinct but related manner, Alevi insti-tutions in Turkey have responded to the articulation of adiasporic Alevi identity on the part of European (especiallyGerman) Alevi organizations (Sokefeld 2003, 2008).

More abstractly, the intersection of liberal discourseand religious initiative, so characteristic of Turkish IslamicNGOs, gestures to the expanding hegemony of liberalismas a political idiom on a global scale. My interlocutors donot conceive of the appeal to liberal values of equality, au-tonomy, and recognition as a political act—for them, thesevalues are assumed to be universal, global, and thereforeprepolitical. Here, we encounter one of the fascinating, con-stitutive paradoxes of liberal politics: Despite its relativenovelty within the Turkish political sphere and insepara-bility from neoliberal economic and political transforma-tions, liberalism’s unique particularity is its incapacity toacknowledge its own political particularity. While the intri-cate relationship between political liberalism and politico-economic neoliberalism10—a matter of both mutual im-brication and tension—is beyond my purview here, theseemingly incontestable authority of liberal political idealsthroughout the neoliberal world is a central backdrop to the

story of Turkish Islamic civil society that I narrate. Above all,this story centers on the civil society effect in relation to Is-lam in Turkey. As I argue, the civil society effect is a criti-cal hinge linking national debates over the relationship be-tween the Turkish state and Islam to global discourses andpractices of religion and neoliberal civil society.

Negotiating between the difference of thecommunity and difference within thecommunity: Confessional pluralism of and forTurkey’s Alevi civil society organizations

After leaving the Pir Sultan Abdal Association, I huddledagainst the cold at the Sutanbeyli bus stop, on the firstleg of the protracted journey back to the center of Istan-bul, pondering the lessons of the day. As usual, I had beenstruck by the tensions that underpin the articulation of Ale-vism within Turkish civil society. Several weeks earlier, Ihad engaged in a similar conversation with the presidentof the Hacı Bektas Foundation (Hacı Bektas Vakfı), a flag-ship Alevi institution in Ankara—like Sadegul Hanım, hehad cited questions of collective recognition and state dis-crimination as definitive Alevi concerns. In both instances,I had the keen sense I was witnessing an exemplary in-stance of liberal identity politics. Throughout my research,nearly all of my Alevi interlocutors, both official represen-tatives of civil society organizations and casual acquain-tances, regularly rattled off the key words and phrases ofidentity-based civil and political rights movements: equalprotection before the law, end to discrimination, toleranceand respect, recognition. Clearly, it seemed to me, theseclaims necessitate a coherent, circumscribed identity as thegrounds for recognition and equal protection. And yet, inthese very same contexts, I witnessed impassioned, oftencontentious arguments over the very definition of Alevismitself. At the Hacı Bektas Foundation, an assembly of dedeshotly debated the question of whether there are Kurdish, aswell as Turkish, Alevis.11 During my afternoon at the Sul-tanbeyli Cem House, a smaller group of Alevi men arguedover the “sources” (kokler) of Alevism, with particular dis-agreement over the importance of the inheritance of centralAsian “shamanistic” (samanizm) traditions.

These arguments over the definition of Alevism are in-separable from the civil society effect itself. For the imageof civil society as a domain of authentic desires, identities,and communities to achieve traction, discourses and ide-ologies of authenticity must have a coherent object. De-bate over the proper definition of Alevism is a crucial pro-cess for establishing this object for Alevis. Turkey’s AleviNGOs, then, all grapple with a constitutive dilemma ofliberal nongovernmental politics: How does organizationalmobilization itself demand, privilege, and produce certaindiscourses of collectivity and community? For each of myAlevi interlocutors, the prospect and project of confessional

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pluralism offers a plausible resolution to this dilemma. Theeffort to establish Alevism as one among a plurality of equal,legitimate religious identities is the dynamo of Alevi activitywithin civil society. In what follows, I examine the relation-ship among confessional pluralism, collective identity, andnongovernmental political mobilization that motivates thesanctioned discourses and activities of three Alevi institu-tions. Two of these organizations, the aforementioned HacıBektas Foundation and the Cem Foundation (Cem Vakfı),are among the most prominent Alevi institutions in Turkey;the third, the Ehl-i Beyt Foundation (Ehl-i Beyt Vakfı), fas-cinates precisely because of its marginality to Alevism as awhole.

Orthodoxization and aspirations to equality: The CemFoundation

The sprawling offices of the Cem Foundation were a fre-quent destination for me during my fieldwork. The build-ing that houses the foundation—a modern, boxlike, six-story structure built from thick steel beams covered by acarapace of cobalt reflective glass—dominates the neigh-borhood of Kocasinan, one of the many anonymous, lower-middle-class and blue-collar residential districts that haverapidly mushroomed on the outskirts of Istanbul over thepast half century (see also Erdemir 2005:944). Upon my ar-rival at the Cem Foundation, I was conveyed immediately tothe foundation chairman and vice president for the ritual-ized greeting offered to “esteemed guests” (degerli misafir-ler), especially foreign researchers such as myself. Follow-ing this brief presentation, I descended to the library andconference room, where Ayhan Bey, one of the foundation’sstaff researchers (arastırmacılar), awaited me in his office.

From the perspective of the Cem Foundation, AyhanBey explained, Alevism is, above all, a coherent religioustradition that incorporates elements of both Central Asianmystical–shamanistic practices and Twelver Shi‘a Islam.One of the primary activities supported by the Cem Foun-dation is research into the historical roots of Alevi traditionsto provide a comprehensive definition of Alevism. AyhanBey summarized this definition of Alevism as devotion tothe Ehl-i Beyt (the family unit of the Prophet Muhammad,his daughter Fatma, his son-in-law and cousin Ali, and Aliand Fatma’s sons Hasan and Huseyin), Hacı Bektas, Pir Sul-tan Abdal, and other Alevi “saints” (pirler, veliler) as prac-ticed in the cem ceremony, within the unique ritual spaceof the cem house. He was adamant concerning the relation-ship between Alevi identity and the cem: “Those who do notperform the cem cannot call themselves Alevis.” Addition-ally, Ayhan Bey championed the “traditional” (geleneksel)gender integration in the cem ceremony as evidence for the“primordial” (ilkel) modernity and liberalness of the Alevicommunity. Taken as a whole, Ayhan Bey’s discourse aboutAlevism suggests a moment of “orthodoxization,” the pro-

duction of a singular vision and version of belief and prac-tice, the very sort of transformation that Hart (2009) hastraced among Sunni Turks in a rural Aegean village. In thecase of the Cem Foundation, however, this process of ortho-doxization hinges on the civil society effect: The articulationof an Alevi orthodoxy pivots on an optimistic vision of civilsociety as an instrument for the excavation and representa-tion of Alevism as a pristine pious tradition and community.

Over the course of our many conversations, I pressedAyhan Bey to reflect on the emphasis on coherence thatframes the Cem Foundation’s research into and definitionof Alevism. Gradually, Ayhan presented an intriguing com-mentary rooted in a political rationalization. He began bypointing out the continual refusal of the Turkish state, asembodied by the Directorate of Religious Affairs, to recog-nize Alevism as a “true minority” (gercek bir azınlık). Thislack of recognition has two lamentable consequences: Ale-vis, unlike their Sunni counterparts, do not receive statefunding for their places of worship (cem houses), and Alevichildren are forced to learn an exclusively Sunni interpreta-tion of Islam in mandatory religion classes (zorunlu din der-sleri) taught in Turkish public schools. After reciting thesefamiliar Alevi complaints, Ayhan Bey adduced an expla-nation for the state’s discrimination rooted in the socialhistory of Alevism itself. While he acknowledged moroselythat the Directorate of Religious Affairs remains a staunchlySunni institution, he also bemoaned the lack of organiza-tion and the dispersion of Alevis, both socially and doctri-nally. The Directorate of Religious Affairs is able to ignoreAlevis’ collective demands for recognition because, in con-trast to the ostensible uniformity of Sunni Islam in Turkey,so many different practices and beliefs characterize Ale-vism. From Ayhan Bey’s perspective, Alevis suffer from adeficit of orthodoxy. To make matters worse, the associa-tion of Alevis with leftist political movements and the claimsmade by certain prominent Alevis that Alevism is “outsideof Islam entirely” (Islamiyet’in dısında) only reinforce Sunniand state-based biases against Alevism.12 The Cem Founda-tion struggles to counteract this bias by lobbying the state,primarily through informal means, to recognize Alevism asa coherent religion (din) or sect (mezhep) defined by itsown distinctive traditions. This lobbying is rooted stronglyin a discourse of confessional pluralism: The Cem Foun-dation has no interest in denying the right of Sunnis topractice their own traditions but merely wants to establishAlevism on an equal footing with Sunni Islam. The two in-dispensable criteria of equality are the inclusion of Alevismin mandatory religion classes and the provision of publicfunding for cem houses and other Alevi institutions, in pro-portion to the monies that the Directorate of Religious Af-fairs provides for the construction and upkeep of mosques,the training of imams, and other Sunni religious matters.

Although he did not discuss the matter explicitly, Ay-han Bey’s remarks drew on a precise perspective on the

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nature and culture of secularism in contemporary Turkey.By arguing that Alevis should receive proportional repre-sentation in religion classes and proportional funding formatters of religious practice, Ayhan Bey tacitly acceptedthe statist dispensation of secularism that already exists inTurkey. In colloquial terms, from the perspective of the CemFoundation, the “system” itself is not flawed; it merely needsto live up to the liberal, pluralist goal of allowing equal par-ticipation and representation of minority religious commu-nities. For instance, the Cem Foundation does not lobby forthe complete removal of the Directorate of Religious Affairsand tends to emphasize equality and brotherhood amongSunni and Alevi Muslims. In summary, for the Cem Foun-dation and its sympathizers, the object of nongovernmentalpolitics is to reform governance in keeping with egalitarianprinciples. As I discuss below, however, the same is not trueof all Alevi organizations.

Horizons of liberal secularism: The Hacı Bektas Veli AnatolianCulture Foundation

On a dusty afternoon in August 2006, I met with a youngemployee of the Hacı Bektas Foundation in a smoky, Marx-ist cafe near the metropolitan bustle of Kızılay Square indowntown Ankara. Our chosen meeting place spoke vol-umes: We would be unlikely to encounter an affiliate ofthe Cem Foundation in such an establishment, as the CemFoundation has largely eschewed the leftist political orien-tation that was once pervasive among Alevis, particularly inthe 1970s. Over incessant cigarettes and cups of tea, whicheventually transformed into large mugs of Efes, the de factonational brand of pilsner in Turkey, Cahit described his du-ties and activities at the Hacı Bektas Foundation, along withthe aims of the organization as a whole. Gradually, the con-versation turned to the Directorate of Religious Affairs andits role in Alevi life. Cahit’s comments, and his comparisonbetween the Cem Foundation and the Hacı Bektas Founda-tion, in particular, were striking:

We don’t want anything to do with the Directorate ofReligious Affairs. We’d prefer that it not exist. And that’sthe basic difference between us and the Cem Foun-dation: They claim that the state should support bothSunnis and Alevis. In our opinion, the state should sup-port neither Sunnis nor Alevis. Each community shouldattend to its own needs, separate from the state. This isthe true meaning of secularism.

Unlike Ayhan Bey of the Cem Foundation, Cahit wasnot content merely to demand equal representation andcompensation from the state as it already exists in Turkey.To adapt a model forwarded in the Indian context byPartha Chatterjee (1998:358), whereas the Cem Founda-tion emphasizes the principle of equality, which requires

that the state “not give preference to one religion overanother,” the Hacı Bektas Foundation contends that theprinciple of liberty—“that the state permit the practiceof any religion”—necessitates absolute nonintervention bythe state in religious affairs. For the Hacı Bektas Founda-tion, a thoroughly liberal model of secularism as the abso-lute nonintervention of the state in religion, which manyof my interlocutors referred to as the “American model”(Amerikan model, Amerika ornegi) after the well-knownU.S. firewall between church and state, trumps the principleof equality. One of the primary activities of the foundationis to sue for the removal of institutions that are perceivedto act as an impediment to the principle of religious lib-erty and, hence, the “true meaning of secularism” (laikligingercek anlamı). In pursuit of this aim, the foundation hasopened several court cases suing for the removal of the Di-rectorate of Religious Affairs and an end to mandatory reli-gion classes. While the lawsuits against the directorate havebeen unsuccessful, the foundation’s lawyers have made par-tial inroads against mandatory religion classes. In a 2006 de-cision, a midlevel court held that Alevi children could not beforced to learn from textbooks that only include Sunni be-liefs and practices.

As with the Cem Foundation, the nongovernmentalpolitics of representation that the Hacı Bektas Foundationespouses and marshals relates directly to its interpretationof Alevi tradition. Whereas the Cem Foundation demon-strates intense concern for orthodoxy by attempting tostreamline and formalize a unitary corpus of beliefs andpractices that constitute Alevism, the Hacı Bektas Founda-tion is far more content to sanction a multiplicity of dif-ferent interpretations of Alevism. This relative acceptanceof Alevi plurality corresponds to a more lenient attitude to-ward the Central Asian and shamanistic aspects of Alevismas well as less emphasis on establishing a canon of defini-tive Alevi texts. More precisely, the definition of Alevism asa “religion,” with a characteristic tradition or set of tradi-tions, is not of particular interest to the Hacı Bektas Foun-dation. The Hacı Bektas Foundation and its affiliates subor-dinate the question of whether Alevism is best understoodas a religion, a folkloric tradition, or even an ethnicity tocriticism of the state, and the Directorate of Religious Af-fairs, in particular. Concomitantly, the Hacı Bektas Foun-dation champions a substantially different ideal of confes-sional pluralism than the Cem Foundation. For the CemFoundation, the state is the necessary guarantor of plural-ist equality among different religious communities. For theHacı Bektas Foundation, by contrast, pluralism, religious orotherwise, can only exist in the absence of state interven-tion in communal identification and practice. While mem-bers of both foundations uniformly stress equality amongreligious communities, they differ sharply in their respec-tive visions of the means by which confessional pluralismshould be realized.

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The compelling marginality of the Ehl-i Beyt Foundation

“Most Alevis have no idea what Alevism is, you know. Theythink that it’s mysticism, or communism. That’s why ourfoundation is so important: We are trying to teach Ale-vis to understand and to be themselves.” I was sitting inthe gleaming offices of the Ehl-i Beyt Foundation, on thesecond floor of an office building overlooking the centralsquare of Zeytinburnu, a middle-class neighborhood lo-cated on the shore of the Marmara Sea near Istanbul’sAtaturk Airport. As I struggled to finish the ample meal ofkuru fasulye (stewed beans) that had been placed in frontof me, Fermani Bey, the chairman of the foundation, ex-plained the foundation’s plans for an international AleviUniversity. Fermani Bey’s son, a chic, New York–educatedman several years my junior, had joined us (for my benefitand comfort, I supposed) and underscored or revised his fa-ther’s presentation as he felt necessary. After I had finishedstruggling with my yogurt and fasulye, I broached my stan-dard series of questions: How does the Ehl-i Beyt Founda-tion understand Alevism? What beliefs and practices consti-tute it? Fermani Bey proceeded to explain that Alevism is, atits basis, no more or less than “the essential truth of Islam”(Islam’ın ozu), as practiced and believed by Muslims theworld over. In particular, he emphasized the centrality of theEhl-i Beyt as the inspirational light of Islam. He lamentedthe tragedy of Huseyin’s death at Kerbala and underscoredthe importance of Hacı Bektas as a renewer (muceddit) ofIslam. At the same time, he bemoaned the “infiltration” ofAlevi ritual by Central Asian mystical and shamanic prac-tices as well as the association of Turkish Alevis with leftistpolitical movements, which he described as “reactionary”(ırtıca).

The most intriguing aspects of Fermani Bey’s under-standing of Alevism were latent in what he did not say.For instance, although his emphasis on the Ehl-i Beyt andthe Battle of Kerbala is typical of Shi‘a Muslims throughoutthe world, he strictly avoided using the term Sia in asso-ciation with Alevism—to make such an association is po-litically fraught in Turkey, given the strong association ofShi‘a Islam with Iran, which is a bugbear of “fundamental-ism” (seriatcılık) for most secular Turks. Nor did FermaniBey mention the cem ceremony, which many Alevis con-sider definitive of Alevism itself. From the perspective of theEhl-i Beyt Foundation, the cem is a “ritual innovation” (adetdegisikligi), with roots in Central Asian (rather than Arab–Islamic) religious traditions and, therefore, contrary to the“essence” of Islam. In place of the cem, Fermani Bey andthe Ehl-i Beyt Foundation advocate prayer in mosques, aritual practice that most Alevis dismiss as a “Sunni” activ-ity with no relation to Alevism (see Tambar 2009b). A simi-larly inspired, careful choice of wording is found in the de-scription of the Ehl-i Beyt Foundation’s activities and goalson the foundation website. A section describing the annual

celebration of the philosophy of Hacı Bektas sponsored bythe foundation announces that “ceremonies which honorHacı Bektas Veli in a traditional manner are coordinated bythe Ehl-i Beyt Foundation every year” (emphasis added).13

Although these “traditional” ceremonies almost certainlyresemble a cem, the word cem itself is avoided. Equallyprovocative, the website goes on to say that the foundationorganizes activities dedicated to Rumi (Mevlana), the fa-mous Sufi theologian and poet of Persian–Afghan heritage,whose tomb complex is located in the Anatolian city ofKonya and who was decidedly not Alevi or Shi‘a (see DunyaEhl-i Beyt Vakfı 2008). Finally, Fermani Bey did not mentionthe Directorate of Religious Affairs at all during our tete-a-tete; for most of my other Alevi interlocutors, complaintsabout the directorate took on a fetishistic quality.

As I quickly learned during my research with a vari-ety of Alevi NGOs, the Ehl-i Beyt Foundation does not en-joy much respect or good will among Alevis outside of itsown supporters. My mention to other Alevi friends thatI had interviewed officials from Ehl-i Beyt was frequentlygreeted with scoffing and a skeptical comment along thelines of “They’re Alevis who want to be Sunnis” or, more po-litically, “They’re members of the AKP.” Since its creation,the Ehl-i Beyt Foundation has promoted itself as a repre-sentative Alevi institution among political and civil soci-ety circles associated with Sunni revivalism in Turkey; forprecisely this reason, many Alevis vehemently criticize theEhl-i Beyt Foundation as “assimilationist” (asimilasyoncu).Tellingly, the Ehl-i Beyt Foundation was first recommendedto me by a member of a Sunni NGO. Ehl-i Beyt’s links to thegoverning AKP are equally evident. The foundation websitefeatures prominent photographs of Fermani Bey with suchAKP luminaries as President Abdullah Gul and Prime Minis-ter Erdogan; moreover, on the very day that I first met him,Fermani Bey had just returned from a memorial service(anma toreni) commemorating the death of former primeminister Turgut Ozal, who is now revered as an architect ofneoliberalism and the political legitimization of Sunni Is-lam in Turkey (Onis 2004). From the limited perspective ofparty politics, the idea of the chairman of an Alevi founda-tion rubbing elbows with the Sunni-oriented political estab-lishment is rather shocking, yet Fermani Bey and the Ehl-iBeyt Foundation have readily accepted this affiliation, andhave, therefore, been dismissed as cynical opportunists bymany Alevis. Crucially, these very criticisms of the Ehl-i BeytFoundation draw on the ideological grammar of politicalsociety and civil society that I have outlined: Alevi critics ofEhl-i Beyt argue that, at least in this particular case, civil so-ciety is no more than an appendage of political society.

Of course, it is not my desire or place to evaluate thespecific political aspirations of the members of the Ehl-i Beyt Foundation. Rather, I am interested in delineatinghow Ehl-i Beyt coordinates a nongovernmental politics ofrepresentation on the basis of a specific interpretation of

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Alevism. The Ehl-i Beyt Foundation’s conception of Alevismactively downplays both the Central Asian roots of Alevipractices and, more generally, all differences within Islamas a whole. As the foundation website proclaims, “From theperspective of the Ehl-i Beyt Foundation, there is no dis-agreement, there is unity, compassion and affection, thereis no Alevi-Sunni distinction, there is the brotherhood of Is-lam and the brotherhood of humankind.”14 With this quotein mind, one might say that the confessional pluralism ofthe Ehl-i Beyt Foundation unravels the dilemma of collec-tive representation by altogether denying that Alevism con-stitutes a difference that must be recognized. This denial ofmuch of what is generally considered to be “Alevi tradition”(especially the cem ceremony), and the political possibili-ties that accrue to this denial, have provoked marked skep-ticism and disdain on the part of those Alevis (in my expe-rience, the vast majority) who continue to aspire to a spacefor their own legitimate religious difference.

Above all, the marginality of the Ehl-i Beyt Founda-tion highlights a fundamental tension in the Alevi com-mitment to confessional pluralism. As I have discussed,some Alevi organizations tolerate a multiplicity of defini-tions of “Alevism” itself. Moreover, heated debate concern-ing the sources and constituent practices of Alevism has byno means ceased—indeed, the vast diversity of civil soci-ety organizations devoted to Alevi concerns suggests thatthese very differences of interpretation and practice bothbolster and stem from institutional multiplicity. Nonethe-less, there is one interpretation of Alevism that falls beyondthe pale of toleration for most Alevis: the conception ofAlevism that denies its distinctiveness altogether. Althoughthe members of the Ehl-i Beyt Foundation do not overtlydeny this distinctiveness, their proximity to Sunni politi-cal parties and civil society organizations, along with theirdismissal of Alevism’s central ritual practices, has led mostother Alevis to condemn them as “assimilationist.” Simul-taneously, the very indifference of the Ehl-i Beyt Founda-tion to the collective concerns expressed by the SultanbeyliPir Sultan Abdal Association, the Cem Foundation, and theHacı Bektas Foundation has encouraged its emergence as aprivileged interlocutor within a broader field of Sunni orga-nizations. While a politics of difference defines the generalAlevi commitment to confessional pluralism, the Ehl-i Beythas established a space within Turkish Islamic civil societyon the basis of a politics of proximity.

Alevism and the civil society effect

The three foundations that I have discussed—the CemFoundation, the Hacı Bektas Foundation, and the Ehl-iBeyt Foundation—evince sharp divergences in their insti-tutional perspectives and conceptions of Alevism itself. De-spite these differences, however, they share a more basicdiscursive and political logic. As I have emphasized, the

process of organization and articulation within civil so-ciety continues to transform understandings of Alevi tra-dition, doctrine, practice, and identity in manifold, activeways. However, each of the institutions that I have consid-ered conceives of this transformation as the excavation orreemergence of a pristine, authentic identity. Civil society isunderstood by all of the different Alevi actors and institu-tions I discuss as a domain free from power, which encour-ages the seamless translation of Alevism into an identitythat is suited for representation and recognition. Althoughcivil society itself is thoroughly mediated by political logicsand state disciplines, NGO actors only conceive of politicsas an ex post facto activity that logically and temporally fol-lows the ideologically prepolitical coherence of an authen-tic Alevi identity. I have emphasized the different practicesof defining this identity among distinct groups and institu-tions, but each of them shares in this primordialist logic ofidentity in relation to civil society and political action. This,in brief, is the civil society effect in action.

A prepolitical conception of civil society also unitesthese different institutions as liberal. For each of them, pol-itics consists of a confrontational relationship between, onthe one hand, an authentic, prepolitical community, and,on the other, the state and its apparatuses. As Nikolas Rosehas argued (2000:98), this concept of the authentic com-munity is a distinctive feature of political formation withinlate liberalism; as I show below, it is equally characteristicof the Sunni organizations affiliated with the Hizmet Move-ment. On the basis of the supposedly inherent legitimacyof the prepolitical Alevi community, Alevi institutions en-deavor to contest, criticize, and persuade the state in myr-iad ways. This project of contestation, critique, and persua-sion is an exemplar of nongovernmental politics. Indeed, itis notable that my interlocutors from the Cem Foundation,the Hacı Bektas Foundation, and other Alevi organizationswere all reliably cynical about partisan politics in Turkeyas a means of achieving their goals, and they were partic-ularly dismissive of the CHP, the traditional political repre-sentative of Alevis. This dismissal of political society is notmerely strategic or tactical—for each of the organizationsI have discussed, civil society constitutes a uniquely legit-imate and salubrious domain for collective representation.Concomitantly, even criticisms of these institutions, such asthose leveled at the Ehl-i Beyt Foundation, proceed by deny-ing the authenticity of an institution’s commitment to civilsociety—the most effective dismissal of an NGO is the claimthat it is a mere “front” for political society.

Despite the massive institutional efforts of Alevi NGOs,Alevism is not as airtight and settled as my interlocutorsfrom Alevi institutions propose. The premium that Alevicivil society organizations place on Alevism as a cohesive,authentic identity (cf. Taylor 1994) also produces momentsof irony and confusion. On one visit to the Cem Founda-tion, I was introduced to a “truly authentic Alevi bard from

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the village” (gercekten otantik koylu bir ozan), who was vis-iting Istanbul from the northeastern province of Erzincan. Ispoke with this “authentic bard” for several minutes, query-ing his own understanding of Alevism; gradually, I realizedthat, despite (or, rather, because of) his authenticity, he hadvery little sense of “Alevism” as an abstract identity at all. Forhim, “Alevis” were kin and neighbors within his village, de-fined by their ritual distinction in opposition to the “Sun-nis” in other villages (see Shankland 1993); the notion ofAlevism as an identity beyond kinship networks and rit-ual practice was of little interest to him. On another occa-sion, I witnessed a surreal prelude to a cem ceremony atthe Hacı Bektas Foundation in Ankara. The dede who offi-ciated spent some twenty minutes prior to the ceremonyexplaining that it used to be performed in certain ways inAnatolian villages, but because urban, modern Alevis haveforgotten many of the “traditional” (geleneksel) aspects ofthe ritual, he would merely summarize them verbally for theaudience (which he then proceeded to do hastily).15 As bothof these anecdotes suggest, the civil society effect—the ide-ological production of a prepolitical identity that authorizesrepresentation within civil society—necessarily involves thetransformation of ritual practice, doctrine, and communalidentity rather than their mere ex post facto representation.The ironies of the authentic bard who cannot speak to “Ale-vism” in general and the urban cem ceremony that refer-entially cites forgotten aspects of ritual practice both pointdirectly to this formative and transformative power.

For most Alevi civil society organizations, the problemof confessional pluralism is, in essence, a problem of thestate’s definition and promulgation of a certain type of re-ligion. If the state were to treat all religious communitiesequally or not interfere with their ability to worship as theychoose, then religious pluralism would necessarily flourish.For Turkey’s Sunni civil society organizations, by contrast,the dilemmas of confessional pluralism are not so clearlydefined as a problem of state discrimination among reli-gious communities and identities. As I describe in the nextsection, groups affiliated with the Hizmet Movement prac-tice confessional pluralism and advocate a liberal interpre-tation of Islam in response to the Kemalist definition of Is-lam and its proper, privatized place, in general.

Neo-Ottoman liberalism and pluralist publicity:The Hizmet Movement

After completing his paean to interreligious dialogue andpluralism, Cemal Bey, of the Journalists and Writers Foun-dation, strolled to a nearby multimedia console and pressedplay on the DVD player. A screen on the wall opposite dis-played a portrait of Fethullah Gulen superimposed withfootage of an eagle soaring in the azure firmament. I sat pa-tiently through a 15-minute promotional video for the foun-dation, which focused exclusively on the themes of “Love,

Peace, Tolerance, and Interreligious and IntercivilizationalDialogue” (Sevgi, Barıs, Hosgoru, Dinler Arası ve MedeniyetArası Diyalog). The famous photograph of Gulen and PopeJohn Paul II made another appearance in the video. Afterthe film had finished, Cemal Bey beamed proudly and askedme perfunctorily whether I had liked the presentation. I re-marked that the film had effectively articulated the idealsand aspirations of the foundation as I understood them—something of an understatement.

Of all of the organizations with which I conducted re-search during my time in Turkey, the Journalists and WritersFoundation is the most overtly dedicated to a cosmopoli-tan project of interreligious tolerance and confessional plu-ralism. The overarching purpose of the foundation is toprovide both domestic and international support for thetheological, pedagogical, and cultural projects of FethullahGulen (Kuru 2003; Turam 2007). Gulen himself is a contem-porary heir to the late Ottoman–early Republican theolo-gian Bediuzzaman Said Nursi and has achieved fame, admi-ration, and controversy by expanding the incipient ideal ofinterreligious conciliation found in Said’s opus, the Risale-i Nur, into a global project of interreligious dialogue andpious love for humanity as a whole.16 The Journalists andWriters Foundation carries the ensign of Gulen’s aspirationswith enthusiasm. In addition to publishing widely on topicsof religion, tolerance, and dialogue (including Gulen’s ownworks),17 the foundation organizes a staggering number ofnational and international conferences, typically based onthemes and ideals championed by Gulen himself.

At an initial glance, the ideals of the Journalists andWriters Foundation might appear to be a whole-cloth bor-rowing of discourses of multicultural pluralism and politicaltoleration as practiced in the liberal democracies of westernEurope and North America. However, the members of thefoundation consistently emphasize that their liberal com-mitments spring from a separate historical tradition, thatof Ottoman Islam (Walton 2009, 2010b). Although Gulenhimself has occasionally downplayed the importance of theOttoman heritage to the Hizmet Movement,18 affiliates ofHizmet, and members of the Journalists and Writers Foun-dation in particular, regularly valorize Ottoman aestheticand political forms. Over the course of several interviews,Cemal Bey outlined the Ottoman heritage of religious toler-ance that inspires the activities of the foundation. This nos-talgic version of Ottoman liberalism rests on two separatebases: the Ottoman millet system and the Ottoman foun-dation system (vakıf sistemi).19

The millet system, for its part, offers an Islamic prece-dent for a liberal model of tolerance and coexistence amongreligious and ethnic communities. According to the foun-dation’s rather rose-tinted view, the Ottoman millet systemensured both autonomy and equality for the minority re-ligious communities of the empire—Jews and a variety ofethnically and doctrinally distinct Christian communities.

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Each millet was granted self-governance under the over-arching sovereignty of the Sublime Porte; this guaranteeof self-governance itself provided a principle of equalityamong the millets.20 Notably, this millet-based ideology ofreligious identity is identical to the Alevi understanding ofcollective identity: Communal identities are organic, coher-ent, and prepolitical in and of themselves and only inter-act with political institutions in a contingent manner. Thisspirit of equality among and autonomy of the millets di-rectly inspires the nongovernmental activism of the foun-dation. I had the opportunity to witness a rekindling of themillet ideal at many of the conferences sponsored bythe foundation. One particular symposium, focusing onglobal hunger and poverty, brought together representa-tives from Turkey’s different religious populations, the Ar-menian, Greek, and Syriac Orthodox Churches as well asJewish and Sunni Muslim communities—the contempo-rary heirs to the Ottoman millets. In this context, inter-religious dialogue based on a recuperation of the milletideal acted as both a means to confessional pluralism anda sufficient demonstration of pluralism in its own right.Certainly, my interlocutors at the Journalists and WritersFoundation contend that dialogue is a necessary step inthe process of achieving and promoting interreligious tol-erance. However, as instantiations and signs of a sincerecommitment to pluralism, these spectacles of interreligiousdialogue also count as moments of tolerance in and ofthemselves.

It is especially notable that members of the HizmetMovement regularly assimilate the Ottoman category of“the millet” to the category of “community” (cemaat). Liketheir Alevi counterparts in civil society, liberal Sunnis ide-alize “community” as pure gemeinschaft, a locus of or-ganic, authentic, and voluntaristic ties that both precedesand subtends politics. Rose’s (2000) argument concerningthe centrality of “community” to late liberal governance isagain pertinent here. Muslim intellectuals affiliated with theHizmet Movement in Turkey often wax poetic over “com-munity” as an expression of and vehicle for piety. For in-stance, Ali Bulac,21 a prominent writer, intellectual, and op-ed columnist for the daily newspaper Zaman (a mouthpieceof the Hizmet Movement), valorizes the freedom that sup-posedly inheres in the category of “community”:

One of the most common errors of Turkish intellectu-als is to confuse communities (cemaatler), which relyupon the preferences of individual free will and vol-untarism and express themselves through civil initia-tives, with classical social structures such as tribes andclans, which depend on ties of blood and family . . .

However, this fictional image bears absolutely no rela-tion to the true reality of communities. The communi-ties of a modern Muslim city depend upon voluntarismand free individual choice, operate through initiativesin the civil sphere and pursue their existence through

free will. Within such communities, the strict and im-perious hierarchy that is often witnessed in traditionalsociety does not exist. [2007:15, my translation]22

Bulac makes several related points in this subtle passage.First, he argues that the community is a contemporarysociological form that only emerges within the moderncity—thus, in a historical sense, communities are not Ot-toman. Despite the modernity of community, however, themode of interreligious recognition that applied to the Ot-toman millets applies equally to contemporary religiouscommunities—a point that both Bulac himself and Ce-mal Bey frequently emphasized to me in conversation.In other words, practices of religious tolerance that sup-posedly characterized the Ottoman model of confessionalpluralism—the millet system—remain valid despite the dis-tinct sociology of religion in the contemporary urban envi-ronment, embodied in the “community” (cemaat). Finally,according to Bulac, the institutional domain best suitedto religious communities is civil society itself—his con-tention that voluntaristic communities necessarily “operatethrough initiatives in the civil sphere” precisely encapsu-lates the civil society effect that I have discussed throughoutthis article.

Like the category of the millet, the concept of civil so-ciety espoused by liberal Sunnis such as Cemal Bey andBulac partakes in an Ottoman heritage. The preeminent andpreferable crucible of civil society for the Hizmet Move-ment is the foundation (vakıf; Arabic, waqf ), as under-stood in its Ottoman form rather than its later, Republi-can iteration.23 Cemal Bey emphasized that foundations,rather than the Sultanic state, were the principal providersof community services—ranging from soup kitchens toorphanages to religious schools—during the Ottoman era.Furthermore, he explicitly advocated this civil dispensationof service over a state-based model. As he put it, “The Ot-toman state wasn’t really engaged in anything other thanmilitary affairs. All of the necessary services were providedby foundations (vakıflar). And, in this way, the services werealso separate from politics.”

As I note in my opening discussion, Sunni Turks suchas Cemal Bey, Bulac, and the other members of the HizmetMovement are typically considered to be the antagonists ofAlevis within political society. It is all the more remarkable,then, to find Sunni and Alevi civil society institutions voic-ing identical ideals of liberal religious pluralism. In the quo-tation above, for instance, Cemal Bey marshals a critiqueof the state rooted in the same logic and presuppositionsas the criticism of the state made by Alevi organizations. Inboth cases, the state is conceived as an agent of infelicitousinterference and an inevitable detriment to the organic re-lationship between religiosity and public life. Equally, bothAlevi institutions and the Journalists and Writers Foun-dation evince the civil society effect—the Journalists and

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Writers Foundation too conceives of civil society as a do-main that is inherently free from political power and there-fore uniquely amenable to the emergence of autonomous,self-regulated religious identities and practices. Bulac’s the-orization of communities, in particular, exemplifies this ro-mance of civil society. Notably, the Journalists and WritersFoundation’s valorization of the Ottoman vakıf system ar-ticulates the civil society effect on the basis of a discourse ofpious nostalgia (Walton 2009, 2010b)—just as the OttomanEmpire represents the triumph of liberal Islam and confes-sional pluralism historically, so too contemporary civil so-ciety constitutes a locus for these ideals in the current mo-ment.24 Finally, both Alevi and Sunni civil society activistsconsistently voice skepticism and cynicism over Turkish po-litical society in general. Just as my Alevi interlocutors weredismissive of the relationship between Alevis and the CHP,so too did Cemal Bey, Bulac, and other Hizmet activists ex-press tempered scorn over the activities and aspirations ofthe AKP. In both instances, political society, as such, is con-ceived as a domain of problematic entanglement withinwhich the ways and means of power taint more authenticidentities and aspirations. This whole-cloth denigration ofpolitical society is yet another stirring exhibition of the civilsociety effect.

For Gulen-related institutions in particular, denigra-tion of Turkish political society draws force and legitimacyfrom the global network of NGOs, schools, private busi-nesses, and media outlets that loosely constitute the HizmetMovement. As a number of social scientists have noted(Hendrick 2011; Turam 2007), domestic Turkish institutionssuch as the Journalists and Writers Foundation representonly a sliver of the transnational scope of Hizmet. While theinstitutional activities and specific arrangements of stateand civil society vary widely across these different contexts,activists within Turkey imagine and valorize the transna-tional space of the Hizmet Movement as coextensive withtheir depoliticized vision of piety within civil society. Cru-cially, the global thrust of the civil society effect—the com-prehension of civil society as a transnational, prepoliti-cal space of voluntary religious activity—parochializes thespecific politics of Islam and public life within Turkey. AsCemal Bey once remarked to me, “Strict Kemalist secularists(koyu Ataturkculer) claim that we are only interested in statepower, but what do conferences in the Philippines and theUnited States, or Turkish schools in Kazakhstan and Nige-ria, have to do with Turkish politics?” This is not to claim, ofcourse, that Hizmet activities outside Turkey are necessar-ily apolitical or uncontroversial or even that these activitiesbear no consequences for political life within Turkey. How-ever, as Cemal Bey’s remarks emphasize, the global hori-zons of the Hizmet Movement are taken to authenticatethe nongovernmental politics of Gulen sympathizers withinTurkey. By conceptualizing civil society as a transnationaldomain of nongovernmental action, Hizmet actors aspire

to defuse the fraught questions surrounding Islam and sec-ularism within Turkey, at least to a degree.

The civil society effect and the erosion ofKemalist statism

To this point, I have focused principally on the relation-ship between the civil society effect and the practices ofself-definition and confessional pluralism that characterizeboth Sunni and Alevi NGOs in Turkey. I have argued thatthe civil society effect exemplifies and encourages two keyfeatures of the liberal model of religion: the conception ofreligious community and identity as primordially authenticand prepolitical and the assertion that all such communi-ties and identities deserve equal recognition and treatmentby the state. While these two points remain the major con-tribution of my argument, the institutions that I have dis-cussed in this article are also deeply involved in material,socioeconomic transformations that, taken together, indexthe progressive erosion of Kemalist statism in Turkey.

As all students of the Republican Turkish state tradi-tion well know, Kemalism is not merely a laicist–secularistideology about religion—it is also an overarching projectfor the provision of all societal needs by the state. Fromthe ideological perspective of this statist dispensation, thestate should satisfy all of the ratified, public needs of thecitizenry, ranging from piety to health care, from educationto national mass media. It is especially striking, then, thatnearly all of the NGOs I consider here do not merely con-cern themselves with theological, ritual, and identitarianmatters; they also provide services that mirror and competewith the traditional service functions of the Turkish state.For instance, both the Cem Foundation and the Hacı BektasFoundation sponsor a variety of activities and social ser-vices, including soup kitchens, public libraries, radio andtelevision broadcast stations, and intensive test preparationlessons for primary and secondary school students. Theheadquarters of the Hacı Bektas Foundation also houses ahealth clinic and emergency room. During one of my vis-its to the foundation, I was able to speak to a patient at thishealth clinic. When I asked her to explain her decision toseek health care at the clinic, her response was rooted inpragmatism rather than collective identity: The clinic wassimply the most convenient in her immediate neighbor-hood. Even the modest Sultanbeyli Cem House, describedat the outset of the article, aspires to provide a variety of ser-vices to the Alevi residents of the district, including an after-school program for Alevi children, a lending library, and afuneral home.

Several anthropologists have recently underscored thecentrality of education to more general debates over pub-lic culture, citizenship, Islam, and the state in Turkey(Kaplan 2006; Ozgur 2012). It is no coincidence, then, thatIslamic NGOs have robustly entered debates over education

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in Turkey, not only by making arguments about the relation-ship between religious identity and national education butalso by providing educational services themselves. As nu-merous scholars have noted (Agai 2003; Turam 2007), edu-cation is a hallmark of the Hizmet Movement on both a na-tional and global scale. Within Istanbul, the Journalists andWriters Foundation maintains ties and coordinates activi-ties among the twenty-odd private Hizmet schools in thecity. At an early point in my research, I had the opportu-nity to visit one of these schools, the Coskun School in theCamlıca region of Asian Istanbul. After visiting a fifth-gradeclass and touring the campus, I shared a cup of tea withthe assistant principal of Coskun. His response to my queryconcerning the school’s relationship to both other Hizmetinstitutions and to Fethullah Gulen’s theology in generalwas telling: “Our goal at Coskun is to provide a world classeducation to students that unites the intellectual and moral(zihinsel ve ahlaki) aspects of learning. We serve as moralguides and custodians (veliler) to the children. While Guleninspires us, we do not teach his beliefs, or for that matterreligion at all, in a direct sense.”

While the response from the assistant principal ofthe Coskun School raises key questions concerning theform that public religion takes in the contemporary world(cf. Casanova 1994), I emphasize another dimension ofthe civil society effect that it illuminates. The bulk of mypresentation has focused on how officials and other af-filiates of Islamic NGOs conceptualize religious commu-nity, identity, and practice in relation to civil society andthe state in contemporary Turkey. As I have argued, thecivil society effect—particularly evident in the discourse ofconfessional pluralism—fosters a liberal understanding ofreligion as a prepolitical, authentic mode of voluntary so-ciality. Alevi and Sunni NGOs alike base their legitimacyon a liberal concept of religion that hinges on the civil so-ciety effect. That said, however, the ensemble of activitiesand services that these institutions offer, from health care toeducation, reaches far beyond explicit debates over the na-ture and politics of religion. It is in these contexts—clinics,classrooms, radio studios, and the like—that the civil soci-ety effect achieves dispersion in a broader, less institution-ally regimented social terrain. Furthermore, it is precisely atthe border between civil society proper and this more dif-fuse social terrain that the erosion of Kemalist statism inTurkey appears most vividly as a congeries of social, polit-ical, and ideological frictions, transformations, and innova-tions.

Conclusion: Confessional pluralism and itsdiscontents

A mere month after the end of my fieldwork in March2007, the Journalists and Writers Foundation hosted a sym-posium on Alevism, in which “many atheist, Sunni and

Alevi scholars, academics, intellectuals, etc. came togetherand discussed various aspects of the Alevi reality, socio-legal situation of Alevis, state-secularism-Alevi relations,Alevi identity, definition of Aleviism [sic], Sunni-Alevi rela-tions and so on” (Yılmaz 2007). This conference receivedwide media coverage and praise as a watershed momentof interconfessional cooperation and rapprochement be-tween Turkey’s Alevis and Sunnis.25 Only two months later,Sadegul Hanım and several of her colleagues at the Sul-tanbeyli Cem House were arrested by municipal police of-ficers on the basis of a technicality after they objected toan attempt by the Sultanbeyli Municipality to build a roaddirectly through the middle of the association’s property.Later that summer, the AKP Municipal Administration ofSultanbeyli initiated yet another court case to close theCem House, igniting protests throughout Istanbul’s Alevicommunity.26

As these two events briefly indicate, the topographyof confessional pluralism in Turkey today is extraordinarilyuneven. On the one hand, a liberal model of religion and theconfessional pluralism that this model supports and pre-supposes constitute a potent ideal for an array of civil so-ciety institutions, Sunni and Alevi alike. On the other hand,the practice and legitimacy of this ideal remain contingentand frequently subject to curtailment by state forces. Norcan confessional pluralism, understood as a means of pro-ducing recognizable, legitimate religious difference, neces-sarily accommodate all theologies or identities that mightaspire to its imprimatur. Certain strains of Islam—notablyNaksibendi Sufism (Mardin 1991; Silverstein 2008)—remainillegal in Turkey. In the context of my own research, I recallthe exasperation of a Greek–Turkish friend and board mem-ber of a foundation responsible for one of Istanbul’s Greekhospitals.27 When I asked him to reflect on the changing dy-namics of Istanbul’s Greek community, he replied, with ev-ident aggravation and exhaustion, “Of course, the EU Pro-cess has improved our lot, but the Greek community is sosmall that even full rights and recognition won’t make muchof a difference.”

Even as the horizons of confessional pluralism inTurkey remain obscure and circumscribed in myriad ways,the frequency and volume of calls for interreligious toler-ance shed unique light on the shifting arrangement of secu-larism, liberalism, civil society, and Islam, both in contem-porary Turkey and globally. The Alevi and Sunni institutionsthat I have detailed throughout my discussion articulate pi-ous practices, discourses, and ideals that not only emergefrom within civil society but also valorize, naturalize, andultimately constitute civil society itself. They vividly evincethe civil society effect and, therefore, demand comprehen-sion as formations of liberal religiosity. Most crucially, thiscivil, liberal Islam offers sharp critiques of illiberal Turk-ish laicism, with its twin imperatives of Kemalist privati-zation and statist monopolization of Islam. However, this

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contestation of illiberal secularism does not mark Aleviand Gulen foundations and actors as somehow antisecular.Rather, the institutions of my study negotiate and articu-late new constellations of Islam, secularity, and civil society,ensembles that defy the simple antinomies of religion andsecularism, liberalism and orthodoxy, nation and globe, andpublic and private. These new, shifting arrangements offerlessons not only to scholars of Turkey but to all anthropolo-gists who endeavor to comprehend how secularism and lib-eralism operate as lived projects, subject to both tensionsand commensurations in the crucibles of distinct politicalcontexts.

Finally, my argument suggests a series of conceptualand ethnographic openings for anthropologists of Islamand civil society in general. The aspirations and activitiesof Turkey’s Alevi and Sunni NGOs, mediated by the civilsociety effect, demonstrate that the relationship betweenIslam and civil society has undergone massive transforma-tions since Turkish sociologist Mardin’s pessimistic assess-ment that civil society, “the dream of Western societies,has not become the dream of Muslim societies” (1995:295).While anthropologists and social scientists in both Turkeyand elsewhere have productively plumbed the relationshipamong civil society, Islam, and democratization (Hefner2000; Tugal 2009; White 2002), my analysis in this articleshows that the relationship between Islam and civil soci-ety cannot be reduced to questions of democracy and Is-lam’s compatibility or incompatibility with it—a deceptive,false dualism in any event. Rather, and most expansively,the relationship between civil society and Islam is centralto the very conditions of possibility of the Islamic discur-sive tradition (Asad 1986) in the neoliberal present. As Ihave argued, the very practices and notions of communityand identity that distinguish and define civil Islamic insti-tutions in Turkey constitute a synthesis of both liberal andIslamic discursive traditions. The ethnographic task, whichI have only initiated here, is to articulate how these discur-sive traditions meld and affect each other in relation to theensemble of aspirations, institutions, and sensibilities thatwe gloss, both problematically and provocatively, as “civilsociety.”

Notes

Acknowledgments. I am deeply grateful to Hussein Agrama,Adam Becker, Amahl Bishara, Brian Brazeal, John Comaroff, AimeeCox, Erin Debenport, Karin Doolan, Catherine Fennel, AndrewGraan, Joseph Hankins, Kimberly Hart, Angie Heo, Kelda Jami-son, Beatrice Jauregui, John Kelly, Saba Mahmood, Rocio Magana,William Mazzarella, Sean Mitchell, Iren Ozgur, Anthony Petro,Noah Salomon, Brian Silverstein, Martin Stokes, Kabir Tambar,Arzu Unal, Lisa Wedeen, and Angela Zito, both for their invaluableresponses to this article and for the many conversations that havespurred me to greater clarity in my research and argument in gen-eral. I am also indebted to the precise comments and recommen-dations offered by the anonymous reviewers for American Ethnol-

ogist. Versions of this article were presented at the Chicago Centerfor Contemporary Theory at the University of Chicago, the Facultyof Arts and Sciences at Zagreb University, and the Department ofNear Eastern Studies at Princeton University; I am grateful for themany incisive points raised by my interlocutors in each of thesecontexts. The research for this article would have been impossiblewithout the generous support of Fulbright-Hayes Doctoral Fellow-ship, the American Research Institute in Turkey, and the Institutefor Turkish Studies.

1. Gecekondu—literally, put up at night—is the catch-all term forextralegal constructions, shantytowns, and squatter settlements inIstanbul, Ankara, and Turkey’s other urban centers. See Keyder 1999and Unsal and Kuyucu 2010. Pir Sultan Abdal was a Turcoman Alevipoet and bard (ozan) who lived in the Ottoman Anatolian provinceof Sivas during the 15th and 16th centuries C.E. He was unsparingin his criticism of the local governor and was eventually executedfor his insurgent tendencies. He is still cherished as an icon of resis-tance among contemporary Alevis, and many Alevi organizationsbear his name, along with his iconic image, in which he is shownclutching a lute like a weapon defiantly over his head. See Bezirci1986. The cem is a definitive ritual practice of Alevi Turks. There aredifferent types of cem, which often include a reenactment of theProphet Muhammad’s ascent into heaven (mirac; Arabic, mi’raj)and glorification of Ali, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law andthe first of the Shi‘a Imams. In general, a cem features circumam-bulatory ritual performances (semah) by both men and women, ac-companied by bards (ozanlar) playing lutes such as the baglamaand saz. For more detailed descriptions of cems, see Shankland1993:140ff . and Stokes 1996.

2. While I consider the particularities and peculiarities of Ale-vism throughout the article, a minimal doctrinal and ritual defini-tion of Alevism would include an emphasis on Twelver Shi‘a historyand beliefs, especially concerning the unique role of the Imams inthe line of Ali ibn Talib and the martyrdom of his son Huseyin; theritual practice of the cem (see N. 1); and a heritage of central Asianmystical–shamanistic practices. Inasmuch as “Alevi” is not an of-ficial identity recognized by the Turkish state (and, hence, not in-cluded on census forms), precise demographic information aboutTurkey’s Alevi population is sparse; Alevis are estimated to make up5 to 20 percent of the entire Turkish population of approximately 80million.

3. Hanım and Bey are standard feminine and masculine hon-orifics in Turkish, similar to Miss and Mister in English. I use themthroughout the article in reference to various informants.

4. The history of the political incorporation of Alevi Turks withinthe CHP is beyond my consideration here, but a few remarks are inorder. As I discuss subsequently in the text, Alevi institutions andpoliticians have increasingly identified Sunni majoritarianism inTurkey as the primary threat to their communal identity; partiallyas a result of this sense of embattlement, Alevis have typically sup-ported the staunchly Kemalist–secularist CHP, although increasingnumbers have also begun to cast votes for the right-wing National-ist Action Party (Milli Hareket Partisi, MHP). For a lengthier consid-eration of Alevis and party affiliation, see Ciddi 2009.

5. Although Fethullah Gulen and the Journalists and WritersFoundation have gone to some length to distance the civic–religious goals of the Hizmet Movement from the political goalsof the AKP (Sevindi 2008:74), this distinction is regularly elided inboth secularist media portrayals of Gulen’s enthusiasts and quotid-ian political discussions.

6. Mathieu Potte-Bonneville (2007:612ff .) offers a helpful ge-nealogy of the concept of “civil society,” stretching all the wayfrom Aristotle, through Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Ferguson, to Hegel and Gramsci.

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7. For anthropological approaches to civil society and neolib-eralism that emphasize, among other matters, the identificationbetween consumer subjects and citizenship and the political for-mations of development-oriented NGOs, see Yudice 1995 and Maz-zarella 2010.

8. The Hanafi School of Sunni jurisprudence (mezhep; Arabic,madhab) was also the official school of the Ottoman state and itsreligious functionaries.

9. Anthropologists such as Esra Ozyurek (2004a, 2004b, 2006),Yael Navaro-Yashin (2002), Jenny White (1999, 2002), Brian Sil-verstein (2008, 2011), Kimberly Hart (1999, 2009), and KabirTambar (2009a) have made insightful observations concerning therecent transformations of both Kemalism and Turkish Islam (seealso Cınar 2005; Walton 2010b). More broadly, social scientistssuch as Martin Stokes (1992, 1999, 2010), Nilufer Gole (1996), AyseSaktanber (2002), Ayse Oncu (1997), Sam Kaplan (2006), and CaglarKeyder (1999) have assessed the recent fate of the project of Turk-ish modernity in relation to diverse questions of popular music,gender, bourgeois domestic intimacy, primary school education,and urban space (see also Walton 2010a). Simultaneously, criticalstudies have raised questions of pluralism and multiculturalism indirect relation to Turkey’s minority communities, especially Kurds(Besikci 1990; Goldas 1999) and Alevis (Olsson et al. 1998; Shank-land 2003; Tambar 2009b, 2010, 2011; White and Jongerden 2003).

10. Wendy Brown (2005:37ff .) and David Harvey (2005) offerhelpful summaries of the multiform relationship between politicalliberalism and neoliberalism.

11. Alevis are generally divided into two genealogical lineages,dedeler (lit. grandfathers but in this context closer to instructorsor ritual specialists) and talipler (suitors). Dedes constitute ap-proximately 10 percent of all Alevis; members of dede lineages arestill accorded great respect among Alevis in general (Shankland1993:86–87). The dedes I observed here were debating cases likethat of the Zaza-speaking Kurds of the province of Tunceli (Der-sim in Kurdish), who generally consider themselves to be Alevis butfrequently experience resistance to this claim from Turkish Alevis.On this particular occasion, I witnessed an argument over this veryquestion between a Kurdish man from Dersim–Tunceli and a Turk-ish dede from the province of Sivas. See also Munzuroglu 2004.

12. See, for instance, the interview in Radikal Gazetesi withKazım Genc, chairman of the Federation of Pir Sultan Abdal Asso-ciations, titled “Alevism Is Not a Part of Islam” (“Alevilik Islamiyet’inicinde degil”; Duzel 2005). The debate over the relationship be-tween Alevism and Islam is equally strident among Alevi organiza-tions in Germany, despite the relative lack of pressure for GermanAlevis to identify as Muslims per se; for a fascinating comparison,see Sokefeld 2008:278ff .

13. “Ehl-i Beyt Vakfı tarafından her yıl geleneksel bir sekilde kut-lanan Hacı Bektas-ı Veli anma torenleri.”

14. “Dunya Ehl-i Beyt Vakfı’nın mesalesinde ayrılık yoktur, birlikvardır, sevgi vardır, muhabbet vardır, Alevilik-Sunnilik yoktur, Islamkardesligi vardır, insan kardesligi vardır.”

15. Indeed, the very notion that a cem ceremony might havean anonymous “audience” marks the distinction between the ru-ral tradition and its urban analogue. See also Erdemir 2005 andTambar 2010b.

16. This theme of global tolerance and love is expressed in thetitles of many of Fethullah Gulen’s own works, for example, To-ward a Global Civilization of Love and Tolerance (2004) and Insanınozundeki sevgi (The love at the heart of humankind; 2003).

17. It is also worth noting that the Journalists and Writers Foun-dation has strong ties to Zaman Gazetesi, one of Turkey’s mostwidely read daily newspapers, which in turn has strong connec-tions to the Gulen community as a whole. Cemal Usak, the vice

president of the foundation, is a frequent contributor to Zaman,and many of Zaman’s columnists, including well-known writerssuch as Ali Bulac, are regular guests at the foundation.

18. For instance, in a 1997 interview with Hakan Yavuz, Gulenstates that “rather than identitarian questions involving ‘Ottoman-ism,’ ‘Turkishness,’ or ‘Muslim-ness,’ my theory of ‘returning to thesource’ describes the dynamics of a nation that is able to preservethe balance between state and nation and ensure vitality in boththe era in which we live and future times” [Oze donmek . . . bir ‘Os-manlılık, Turkluk ve Muslumanlık’tan ziyade, icinde yasadıgımızcagda ve gelecek caglarda hayatiyetini ve devletler—milletler den-gesindeki yerini muhafaz edebilecek bir millet olmanın dinamik-lerini ifade etmektedir] (Yavuz 1997:18). More generally, Gulenis particularly hesitant to valorize the Ottoman era when he isquestioned about his relationship to Sufi orders (tarikatlar); hisadamant insistence that the Hizmet Movement is not a Sufi orderexplains his compunction concerning Ottoman-era Sufism.

19. I am not claiming here that liberalism was an extant politicalproject during the Ottoman Empire, although certain 19th-centuryTanzimat-era reforms—notably the Gulhane Edict of 1839 (Hatt-ıSerif, Gulhane Fermanı) and the Hatt-ı Humayun (Islahat Fermanı)of 1856, which together established individual legal equality formembers of the empire’s religious minorities—point to the incip-ient influence of liberal thought on Ottoman policy and politics.My argument is merely that the Ottoman era as a whole has beenreinterpreted in a liberal vein by contemporary Sunni thinkers, ac-tivists, and institutions in Turkey. See also Silverstein 2011.

20. Again, I do not maintain that the foundation’s vision of themillet system is historically accurate or uncontested. As Peter F.Sugar (1977:43ff .) argues persuasively in his study of early Ottomanrule in southeast Europe, the millet system depended on and pro-duced a congeries of asymmetric relationships of power, both be-tween specific millets and the Ottoman state and within milletsthemselves.

21. For discussions of Bulac and his place among contempo-rary Muslim Turkish intellectuals, see Meeker 1991:197–205, Yavuz2003:117–120, Cınar 2005:11, and Ozyurek 2006:70.

22. “Kisilerin serbest iradi tercihlerine dayanan, gonullu calısanve sivil inisiyatif kullanan cemaatleri, kan ve akrabalık bagınadayanan klasik kabile veya asiret yapılarıyla aynı sey sanmak,Turk aydınlarının suregelen onemli yanılgılarından biridir . . . Oysa,bu kurgusal imajın cemaat gercegiyle uzaktan yakından ilgisiyok. Modern Musluman kentin cemaatleri iradidir, kisi tercihler-ine dayanırlar, sivil alanda inisiyatif kullanırlar ve gonullu olarakvarlıklarını surdururler. Aralarında, geleneksel toplumda gozlenenkatı ve emredici hiyerarsi mevcut degildir.”

23. A related but tangential question here is whether one canspeak of “Ottoman civil society” in a historical sense. Although thelate Ottoman era was characterized by the influence of Enlighten-ment republican and liberal philosophy and Ottomans themselvesdistinguished between the instruments of the state and variousother institutions, it is unclear whether “civil society” as an abstractdomain opposed to the state existed conceptually or institution-ally in the Ottoman Empire. Mardin (2000) offers insight into thisquestion. Provocatively, he notes that Namık Kemal, the doyen ofOttoman political philosophy, does not conceptualize “civil soci-ety” per se, even as he theorizes the distinction between state andsociety (Mardin 2000:304).

24. It is important to note that Alevis do not share this nostalgiafor the Ottoman Empire and its dispensation of religious communi-ties. While there are a variety of reasons for this difference relatingto the politicization of Alevis within the Republic period, the mostimportant factor is the relatively recent, post-Republican emer-gence of Alevism as a coherent identity itself (see Tambar 2009b).

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25. While violent Sunni–Alevi clashes date back to at least the1970s, the definitive moment of Sunni–Alevi strife occurred on July2, 1993, when 37 Alevi intellectuals died in a hotel blaze in thecity of Sivas. A colloquium of Alevi civil society organizations hadsponsored a conference and festival at the hotel on that weekend.Reportedly, a group of incensed, conservative Sunni protesters ig-nited the building because of the presence of the famous writer AzizNesin, who had translated Salman Rushdie’s controversial novelThe Satanic Verses into Turkish. See Kaleli 1994.

26. For reportage in Turkish on both of these events, see Sultan-beyli Pir Sultan Abdal Association n.d.

27. The Treaty of Lausanne, which ended the Turkish War of In-dependence in 1923, stipulated specific minority rights for threeof Turkey’s communities, Greek Orthodox Christians, ArmenianChristians, and Jews. These three “Lausanne Minorities” (LozanAzınlıkları) were allowed to organize self-governing foundations(vakıflar) for their churches, synagogues, hospitals, and other in-stitutions (Ozturk 2003). Given the frequent hardship experiencedby Jews and Christians throughout Republican history, it is ironicthat the stipulation of the “Lausanne Minorities” has consistentlyfrustrated Kurdish and Alevi aspirations to official minority status.

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Jeremy F. WaltonLevant Post-Doctoral FellowCenter for Contemporary Arab StudiesGeorgetown University241 Intercultural Center37th and O StreetsWashington, DC 20057

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