ON BELIEF

Some Reflections Triggered by Springdance in the Light of Current Political Debates in Turkey[1]


History is the present. When history is the only condition of possibility of making sense of truth, of time, of ourselves and of the creative possibilities we are predisposed to realize, making sense of the present in Turkey separating wheat from chaff, without participating in a collectively re-active euphoria against perceived threats, confusion of information, and drowning in/by numbers is no easy task.

So far, in my reflections, I wanted to keep my sociological self in check and moderated the amount of academic jargon. I also wanted to keep this blog free of socio-political polemics, and wanted it to function as a framework for reflecting on the field of contemporary dance. Yet, after ten days of immersion at Springdance Festival which was thematized around the concept of belief and having encountered the fact that structuring of the debates took place around this concept in the aftermath of important developments in the current Turkish political context, I was incited to reflect on the issues. Another thing which triggered me to write on this is an observation I made at Springdance Festival closing party.

At the closing party of the festival I felt the urge - like a well meaning tourist looking for exotic artifacts to eternalize in a frame - to photograph the woman who was accompanying the DJ (sister, friend, relative, lover?), dancing and singing along with us all. The punctum of the picture would be – for those coming from the doxic experience sharing my habitus in Turkey, that the young woman was clad in turban (the words Turks use to refer to a religious headscarf). As I sustained my temptation to record the evidence that “it is possible” and held hands with her while we were singing and dancing Khaled’s Aysha Aysha equte moi…, my partner, who is thankfully not trained as a sociologist who is supposed to ask for permission before picturing his “subjects”, grabbed my “smart phone” so here are the images that compelled us to reflect on:

Turban is the incongruent element of this image for many Turks; it does not belong in this picture. "It is an aberration; you cannot believe and dance at the same time! If you do so, than you have other intentions. This is a political message indicating that you are coming full speed to demolish the republic and bring sharia!" This kind of threat perception does not leave room for those to dance differently and enjoy it, too.

Wearing the turban as an expression of adherence to a particular world view and self care is not more irrational or spiritual than singing and drumming ‘krishna krishna hare krishna’ on the streets of New York, going to India for retreats where everyone eats nothing but veggies and is dressed in white, or from flying from Scandinavia to Cuba to be converted into Santeria in exchange for 500 dollars. It is probably only not as ‘cool’ as those. Still, it is not totally ungrounded to read the turban as a political symbol. However, radical secularists are mistaken when they claim the “correct” reading of what it is a symbol of.

Like everything else, objects, symbols, and practices have histories and gain new meanings which may at times contradict the previously accumulated ones. Some practices are acts of resignification that might be processes initiated by the actors themselves or may be the result of unintended transformations as they come into contact with different cultural fields of force. Sociological constructivist view of culture teaches us that cultures are not unitary wholes but are webs of meaning, maps of valuation and blueprints for living that are constantly defined and redefined in and through the words and actions of their members. As systems of valuation, cultural differences are real, but the boundaries between them are shifting and permeable. Their content is fluid, internally varied and dynamic.

Nilufer Gole is a sociologist who analyses different dimensions of Islamist movement (especially of female actors) in Turkey in the last two decades under the framework of “alternative modernities.” As she observes, although the original European code of modernity has constituted the crucial starting point and cultural reference point ofr modernization attempts in Turkey, it has been continuously and creatively appropriated and altered, as in some other ‘non-western’ contexts. In the Turkish case of voluntary modernization, the public sphere has been institutionalized and imagined as a site for the implementation of a secular and progressive way of life. Under this “authoritarian modernism” religious signs and practices have been silenced as the modern public space has set itself against the "Muslim social imaginary" (Gole, 2002). In a way, western concepts of modernity acquire not only different meanings, but also unexpected intensities when they travel into different contexts, and secularism is an instance of this. It is possible to become aware of the unspoken, implicit borders and the stigmatizing, exclusionary power structures of the secular public sphere once we analyze the ways in which Islam is problematized in it (178).

L’affaire foulard - the turban/the headscarf issue - has been a hotly contested issue in Turkish politics since 1980s. The debate had reached a climactic heat when Merve Kavakci, a deputy from the moderate Islamist party FP (which was closed down in Feb 28th by a ‘post-modern’ coup de etat) walked into the parliament to take her oath in her headscarf. The event was interpreted by some as resistance to domination, and others as an unexcusable threat to the republican secular values, etc. A very interesting analysis of this incident is Gole’s: Kavakci embodied powerful symbols of modernity (she was a college educated engineer trained in the United States – because one cannot go to public colleges wearing a turban in Turkey, spoke very good English, wore a two piece suit instead of an overcoat like secular, divorced her ex Jordanian-American husband) that ignited more enmity than sympathy. She embodied the stranger intruding into one’s domain, places of privilege. Secular elite women do not want signs of Islam in public space - without really understanding what their notion of “public space” amounts to – and argue that if these women want to cover themselves up, they should do it in the private realm. What can be inferred from this strange proposition is that they want women who cover their hair to be locked up at home therefore contributing to their assumed domination.

Under the rubric of recent developments [1] one founding members of CYDD (Association for the Support of Contemporary Life), a personal acquaintance, formulated the wholesale rejection of “the appearance of Islamic identities in public space” with a Malthusian overtone: “We do not want these [as if referring to ‘things’] to reproduce. This is why we formed the Association.”

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Granted all this, there is no a priori reason to assume that all claims for cultural difference and recognition are justifiable before being submitted to the test of discursive and deliberative justification. Recent history of cultural politics is full of contests where the protection of the identity of a particular group in accordance with the understanding of some of its members would have meant discriminating against its women and children. But, for this process of deliberation to be possible, treat all parts who might be effected by decisions should be treated as equal partners (principle of egalitarian reciprocity) instead of being disqualified from debate with wrong labels attatched to them which deny the historicity of significations. Of course, it should be questionedto what extent a movement based on religion can contribute to social transformation without closing down and/or limiting the identities it has helped to politicize. It can also be debated whether moderate Islamists have the potential to form alliances with other oppositional or resistant political practices by circulating in the fields of religion and power. It can also be inquired how these upwardly mobile Islamic groups with material and symbolic capital to appropriate cultures of modernity relate to other groups within Islam and ask whether they claim the monopoly of legitimate interpretation of Islam, of good and just life. Instead of crying out that secularism is under threat, we should ask how democracy can be possible under the shadow of hawks.


[1] For the unfamiliar reader I can summarize these developments as the events around the presidential election of this year. Immediately after the moderate Islamic candidate was announced who is the current Minister of Foreign Affairs from the ruling party, there was an e-ultimatum in the website of Turkish Military Force. Mass protests against the candidate were organized by seculars led by CYDD under the approving shadow of the military, although protestors also carried slogans against a possible military intervention as well as against shariat.