“The Turkish Understanding of Religion”: Rethinking Tradition and Modernity in Contemporary Turkish Islamic Thought.

Approaches to the study of Islam in modern Turkey often discuss religious movements in Turkey with reference to a dichotomy between the “secular” and the “religious” and consequently focus on conservative Islamic streams of thought that view these two concepts as inherently in conflict. This means that modernist and reformist strains of Islamic thought in Turkey have been neglected in the scholarly literature, despite their immense importance to the history of Islam in the Turkish Republic. This article discusses the history and context of one important contemporary strain of Islamic modernism in Turkey, what is here termed the “Ankara Paradigm.” Using the theoretical insights of Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood, I argue that Islamic modernism in Turkey is best understood as a theological complex that utilizes traditional texts to authorize certain configurations of the boundaries between the religious and the secular that enable modern religious reform. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]