Search

The modernization of Turkey is usually covered as a process primarily generated after the foundation of the Turkish republic. This is a clearly simplistic image that neglects to bring in the continuities between the nineteenth-century Tanzimat reforms and the Republic itself. These continuities may even be traced to the earlier rise of a Turkish bureaucratic class (circa 1780). Another aspect of this simplification is that it neglects the type of institution building policy that goes back to the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II (r. 1876–1909) and the type of synthesis between Islam and modernity that was promoted by an intellectual elite between 1908 and 1923. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses that in modern Turkey the study of religion has been primarily focused around the issues of secularism and secularization. Theologians and pious laymen, statesmen and political scientists, sociologists and ideologues have marshalled their theories, arguments, analyses, polemics and counter-thrusts around this theme. Secularism is, no doubt, an important issue but the Turkish fixation with secularism has markedly impoverished the study of religion, for religious studies have thereby been drawn out of their necessary context of psychological need, cultural meaning, ritual behaviour, societal values and--partly--institutional setting. While the following account describes the functioning of religious institutions in Turkish society it would be a mistake to think that this socio-centric description is, in itself, sufficient to explain Turkish religious behaviour. In a historical sequence, the first of these universes of shared meaning, which make up the variety of Turkish Islam, is that of Shamanism, the earliest religion of the very same Turkic group who later founded the Ottoman dynasty.