| Having grown up in a small town in Turkey’s Black Sea region, I have been disturbed by the negative accounts of Islam and Islamic movements frequently encountered among the Turkish Republican elite and also in some Western intellectual forums because my understanding of Islam and its role in Turkish society has been very diVerent. In rural and provincial Turkey, dominant religious organizations and ritual activity were shaped by the Nak7ibendi SuW order, although in my hometown of Bayburt they were shaped by the Nur movement. In Bayburt, the small shops around the main public square, known as Saat Kulesi Meydan1, hosted the reading circles of the devotees of the founder of the Nur movement, Said Nursi. One often would see the “red books” (k1rm1z1 kitaplar) of Nursi in the hands of shop owners or state employees who came to chat in these shops. They were not only centers of trade but also places of ideas and discussion. People would open the books of Nursi and start to read, interpret, and debate. The debate eventually would move to totally diVerent topics of discussion, but the idioms tended to be similar. I realized that this version of Islam and the eclectic teaching of Nursi often served for the townsmen as a philosophy of everyday life. My curiosity never died down, and I always wondered: Why Islam and this particular tradition? Could the Muslims of Turkey meaningfully discuss and engage in social, ethical, and political issues if they did not seem to share this common religious and cultural idiom? Could there be a social consensus outside Islam in modern Turkey? How did these fairly typical lower-middle-class provincial citizens reconcile their attachment to their religious traditions with their loyalty and devotion to the modern Turkish Republic and its political and military leaders, who often represented an ideological antithesis? |