Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Citizenship and Religious Language Reforms

Cuny Graduate School University Center, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

Doctoral student Yunus Dogan Telliel (City University of New York - Graduate Center), supervised by Dr. Michael Blim, will investigate how and why religious language reform movements vary in their effects. In particular, the study will focus on elucidating the contextual, on-the-ground politics of secularism in a Muslim-majority country by comparing how efforts to reform religious language unfold and how they affect Muslim self-identity and notions of secular citizenship. The research has a comparative design, which will contrast two religious language reform initiatives in Turkey. The first one is a set of reform proposals in the late 20th century put forth by religious scholars and intellectuals who, amid the growing popularity of Islamic revivalism, wished to authorize the use of Turkish in worshipping as a means of countering fundamentalism. The second is the current multiculturalist state policy that endorses the religious use of Kurdish. The former sought to nationalize Islamic faith, alongside rising worries about Muslim citizens' loyalty to the nation-state, while the latter aims to integrate the large Kurdish Muslim minority into the national community, emphasizing Islam as a social cement. To examine this relationship between vernacularized religious language and citizenship in these two different periods, the researcher will employ a combination of social scientific methods. These include participant observation, interviews with key informants, archival research, and multimedia text analysis, which together will elucidate the variable ways that Islamic reform initiatives have been promoted, understood, and talked about by ordinary Muslim citizens as well as reformers themselves. The research is important because it will contribute to better understanding of how, why, with what consequences modern secular governments may choose to support religious reform. The findings also will inform social science theory of what constitutes modernity. Funding this research also supports the education of a graduate student.