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This article discusses how state-organized, memory-cultural production drawing on religious signifiers contributes to a sacralization of Turkish public memory institutions and public space. This reinforces an Islamic-nationalist imagination of contemporary Turkey. The article explores state-led, disciplinary interventions in museal space (the Sacred Trusts exhibition of relics at Topkapı Palace Museum) and commemorative ritual in public space, display and education (the rise, fall and recalibration of Holy Birth Week (Kutlu Doğum Haftası). Drawing on theories of symbolic politics, nationalism, memory and space, the article elucidates the sacralization of Turkish memory production as a contesting yet malleable negotiation of nationalism. Innovative Islamic memory practice and ritualization requires careful discursive and disciplinary boundary drawing, catering to theological sensitivities and Sunni-orthodox mores. Then again, the spatial boundaries between various memory-cultural domains are becoming less distinct. Today, Islamic-nationalist imaginaries surface in the interstices of public memory institutions, public education and everyday public space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on primary sources such as field notes, reports, and project memorandums, this article addresses architectural restoration work in Turkey from the 1920s to the 1960s. Despite the country's limited budget and workforce, especially in the early years of the republic, the government crafted an intense preservation program of historic monuments, whereby preservation professionals implemented the scientific protection of architectural heritage mainly through maintenance and repairs. This article argues that the historiography of Turkish art became an agent in restoration, while the concept of the essence of national architecture served as the ideological basis for physical interventions. Seeking to restore the pure forms of Turkish architecture, preservationists searched for the pedigree of built works, and Sinan's style was treated as the zenith of Turkish architecture. Works by him, along with other examples associated with the "Classical Period of Architecture" were subjected to heavy-handed interventions aimed at achieving stylistic purity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers Ziya Gökalp, the received "spiritual father of Turkish nationalism", as an early mastermind of fascism in Greater Europe. During the 1910s, Gökalp acted as a prophet of expansive war and as a mentor of demographic engineering in the Ottoman capital, Istanbul, which was a laboratory for new political styles in a crisis-ridden empire. Gökalp's thinking longed for a supreme leader in an army-like, disciplined and hierarchised society, while it rejected a social contract-based nation and state. An influential inspiration for and beyond the new élites in the capital, Gökalp combined the call for radical modernisation according to "European civilisation" with an assertive essentialism based on völkisch (cultural-racial-ethnic Turkish) and religious (political Islamic) references. He was the chief ideologist of the Young Turk party-state (1913–18) – side by side with Talaat Pasha, its main executive leader – and "the father of my thoughts" for Kemal Atatürk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a strong tendency in Turkish historiography to approach Kemalist policies as purely domestic affairs that emanate from the centre in a top-down manner, reflecting the clear ideological positions of Ankara. The existing scholarship on the Settlement Law (1934), too, has read the development of Kemalist demographic policies in ideological terms, framing them in top-down modernist trajectories that were long in the making since the late Ottoman times. These perspectives often remained analytically singular and nation-centred, failing to engage with the broader transnational developments that were in fact crucial to the making and timing of a range of Kemalist policies. As such, the processes of demographic engineering are framed as devoid of historical conjuncture and immune from unintended consequences or the constraints presented by state capacity. In this article, I seek to overcome such limitations by situating the Settlement Law within its due transnational context of heightened interstate rivalries since the 1930s. Unfolding in myriad ways across the borderlands of Eastern Europe, the complex dynamics of interstate competition created the necessary push and pull factors that started dislodging the Balkan Muslims from those areas coveted by various territorially revisionist states in the region. The demographic engineering their arrival triggered in Turkey, I argue, was therefore as much national as international. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous critics have revisited the Turkish exile of "the founding fathers" of humanist philology, Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer, in the period between the rise of Nazism in Germany and the end of World War II. Yet these recuperative analyses have been centered on the role of the experience of cultural displacement in the intellectual transformation of the émigré scholars. By contrast, this article offers a critical analysis of how the Turkish end of humanism (especially in the case of Auerbach and Spitzer's students) was entangled with the politics of Kemalist cultural reforms. If comparative literature was "invented" during the Istanbul exile of Spitzer and Auerbach, this article re-writes this invention process by highlighting the semantic and ideological inflections it took in the hands of the Turkish humanists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study focusses on converts from Islam to the Christian faith in Turkey. Converts are confronted with special challenges. Based on Islamic theology and Turkish nationalism most Turks cannot think of positive reasons to choose Christianity. So verbal assaults with social consequences like ostracism, prejudice, suspicion, and very low esteem are very common. The First Letter of Peter provides advice for strengthening new Christians by defining their identity as chosen und loved people of God. Personal caring for converts from Islam is crucial to provide a new "home" in assuring them of their new identity. They have to learn to evaluate accusations honestly, and from a faith-based position, and to integrate their new faith with their old environment. In the context of modern Turkey a fresh look at history can be meaningful: There were Turkish Christians before Islam, and there are still Christian Turkish people today. More important however is a genuine spiritual approach that understands verbal assaults within the framework of God's history with his people. Converts should find their identity "in Christ". At the same time, being in Christ must become practical in finding a new family in the local church and seeing themselves as part of the worldwide multinational body of Christ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dead bodies are symbolically effective in the context of politics, and enjoy a particular connection with affect. The mass-mediated mobilizations around Hrant Dink and the dead body of Dink suggest that there is indeed something about Katherine Verdery's insight. Dink was a Turkish citizen of Armenian descent, editor, civic activist and a controversial public figure in Turkey. He was assassinated in 2007. Rather than focusing on the Armenian aspect in context of Turkish nationalism in order to grasp the efficacy of Dink and of his dead body, this article dwells on the intertwinement between his dead body and experiences of state subjects in Turkey. I argue that the efficacy of Dink, the semantic and affective density generated by way of the dead body, is produced in a conjuncture where neither meanings around the body and the person it embodied, nor of the state will stabilize. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article re-opens the discussion about the Ottoman millet practice. The best known stereotypes claim that the so-called 'millet system' only offered rights to non-Muslim religious minorities. This article fundamentally challenges this approach. It focuses on how the millet practice was applied to the treatment of Kurds under the early and late Ottoman Empire, and discusses how millet practices were destroyed by the disease of nationalism. The article then considers how practices like those applied by the Ottomans might act as a useful example for modern nation states facing conflicts with national, religious, ethnic or migrant minorities. It suggests that practices like the millet might be beneficial both if minorities gain territorial recognition and also for those minorities who live in non-territorial communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The vivid interest in the philosophical and legal premises of secularism in Turkey, as well as in its workings in the public and private life of Turkish citizens resonates with an ongoing questioning in Western academia of the validity of established theories of secularization. More importantly, the political and social transformations in Turkey itself, and the growing role and visibility of Islam in the public sphere, especially during the last decade marked by the rule of the Islamic-oriented Justice and Development Party (JDP ), have triggered a search for new explanatory frameworks and re-conceptualization of Turkish secularism. The four books discussed in this article tackle the interrelated issues of secularism, nationalism and minorities in Turkey from a variety of disciplinary and methodological perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]