| Ethnographically and conceptually, this dissertation is concerned with the discourses and practices through which a panoply of civil Muslim actors and institutions articulates a coherent mode of liberal piety in relation to both the imperatives of Turkish secularism and other definitions of Islam that maintain currency in contemporary Turkey. In the most schematic sense, I am interested in how liberal publicness, secular laicism, and the practices of piety act upon one other in mutually creative, as well as constraining, ways. Through a fine-grained, 'thick' description and analysis of civil society institutions associated with Turkey's Nur Community ( Nur Cemaato), Gulen Community (Gulen Cemaato ) and Alevi Community (Alevi Cemaato, Aleviler), I examine how questions of history and tradition, space and place, and religious and political pluralism articulate liberalism and piety as both means to and ends of each other. A second central concern of my argument is to delineate the different implications and effects that liberal secularism and laicist, Jacobin secularism have upon practices and definitions of piety themselves---as I demonstrate, public piety in Turkey is defined against the horizons of both liberal and illiberal/laicist secularism. This double emphasis on the creative relationship between liberality and piety and the differential effects of distinct secular programs upon religion places my dissertation at a productive angle to recent anthropological work on secularism, which has tended to focus on the constraining and hegemonic character of liberalism, especially in postcolonial contexts.;Keywords: (Ethnography of) Secularism, Civil Society, Publicness, Piety, Pluralism/Multiculturalism, Historicity, Spatiality; Islam, Turkey. |
