Allah, Bread, Freedom: Turkey’s Muslim others and transnational mosques in Europe

Contemporary Islam https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-023-00538-5 Allah, Bread, Freedom: Turkey’s Muslim others and transnational mosques in Europe Mashuq Kurt1 Accepted: 6 August 2023 © The Author(s) 2023 Abstract Scholarship on political Islam has often addressed settings where Islamist movements and political parties operate as anti-colonial and oppositional entities. On the other hand, this article focuses on a less explored aspect of Islamist governmentalities in a case when Islamism becomes a part of the governing canon and rules over its Muslim others. I investigate situations where Islamist politics incorporates neo-imperial, nationalist, and colonial practices in creating a desired Muslim ummah at home and abroad. I explore marginalized critical discourses and praxes within this imagined Muslim ummah in Turkey and examine its transnational reverberations among the Kurdish and Turkish communities and mosques in Europe. In other words, I examine the dialectical relation between the formation of the Turkish Islamist canon and its non-Western critiques that comes from within and the margins through protests and critiques of Anti-capitalist Muslims in Turkey; examples of Civil Friday prayers (Sivil Cuma namazları) of the Kurdish imams; and the reconfiguration of Kurdish mosques of liberation in Europe. In doing so, I present how religious practices and discourses are instrumentalized for Islamist colonial governmentalities on the one hand but also serve as a decolonial critique to deconstruct contemporary Muslimness and open room for a plurality of Muslim perspectives excluded from the overly militarized and nationalist rhetoric espoused in Turkish Islamist discourses and practices. Keywords Turkish Islam · Diyanet · Islamist civil society · Anti-capitalist Muslims · Kurdish diaspora · Transnational mosques * Mashuq Kurt 1 Department of Law and Criminology, Royal Holloway, University of London, London, UK 13 Vol.:(0123456789) Contemporary Islam Introduction Each canon starts as a critique. Each critique can also generate a new canon as far as it resonates with the discontent of a wider community and accumulates the necessary means and power to implement its critiques. The reconfiguration of Islamist politics globally is a good example. Islamism as a political ideology arguably started as a critique of Western colonial practices and has become a part of anti-colonial and postcolonial struggles in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. As a result, Islamism has taken many shapes, often as a response to the exploitation of the land and resources of Muslim-majority countries at the hands of colonial and postcolonial administrations. This aspect of Islamist political thought and mobilization has been widely explored. Most studies have focused on examples of how Islamism operates as an anti-colonial or postcolonial movement, force, or ideology (Maussen et al., 2011; Motadel, 2014). Conversely, this article focuses on a less explored aspect of Islamist governmentalities in a case when Islamism becomes a part of the governing canon and rules over its Muslim others. Components of the Turkish Islamist canon self-identify as a mahalle (neighborhood) to indicate the common interests and similarities they maintain against their political rivals (Özet, 2019), who are often understood within a religious (hence righteous) and secular (therefore immoral) binary. Mahalle connotes a community of believers sharing the same morals and politics, although its class component has significantly transformed during the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) rule. It correlates to a power bloc comprising a conglomerate of Islamic networks, cemaats (communities), and institutions overseen and mobilized by the governing Islamist party. They often predate the AKP and come from various Islamist backgrounds, yet they accumulated power and reached exponential growth under the Islamist government of Turkey. The AKP relies on this power bloc for electoral success and implementation of its conservative policies. Members of this canon, or mahalle, retain certain autonomy in their pursuit of Islamist ideals and personal/collective gains. Nevertheless, they operate under an authoritarian Islamist governmentality that incorporates religious politics to consolidate power and mobilize the masses. Through ethnographic research evidence, I argue that Turkish nationalism, neo-Ottomanism, and a quest for global Muslim leadership are integral to this Islamist canon. It aims to monopolize Islam and form an imagined Muslim ummah at the service of the Turkish state’s political interests. I examine the accumulation of power and canonization of Islamist governmentality under the AKP’s rule in Turkey since 2002. Nevertheless, I present examples of non-Western critiques that come from within and from the margins of this canon and investigate how religious texts, spaces, practices, and prayers are transformed into an alternative religiosity that resists the utilization of faith and imposition of nationalist agendas. By relying on multi-sited ethnographic research in Turkey, France, and the UK—and interviews with Kurdish imams working in Germany—I propose that the dialectical relationship between the Turkish Islamist canon and its critique 13 Contemporary Islam from within provides us with an opportunity to rethink how contemporary Islam is constructed and deconstructed. In other words, I present how religious practices and discourses are instrumentalized for colonial governmentalities on the one hand and serve as a decolonial critique to deconstruct the canonization of Islamist politics and contemporary Muslimness on the other. I argue that the omnipresence of religious references in Turkish political discourses and practices in the past 20 years, both nationally and transnationally, has created a religious field in which multiple actors constantly construct and deconstruct what it means to be Muslim and how Islam is understood in this dialectical relation (Türkmen, 2021). Although the Islamist government of Turkey constantly seeks to monopolize the mahalle, growing discontent and critique from Muslim actors and a new proliferation of Kurdish mosques across Europe are indicative of a radical transformation that undoes the binary of prayer and protest. In the empirical sections, I present examples of counter-hegemonic discourses emerging from anti-capitalist Muslims and Kurdish imams who expand the interpretation of religious texts in defense of freedoms and Kurdish civil rights. In this, I argue that Kurdish imams and anti-capitalist Muslims are making room for a plurality of Muslim perspectives excluded from the overly militarized and nationalist rhetoric espoused in Turkish Islamist discourses and practices. Following this introduction, the article is divided into three sections and a conclusion. In the first section, I focus on the transformation of the Turkish Islamist canon in the national and tra (...truncated)