‘New Turkey’, Old Family? The Role of the Diyanet in Reproducing the AKP’s Hegemonic Religious Conservative Ideology Through the Family

Sixteen years after the religious-conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP) come to power in Turkey, the debate over the changing dynamics of Turkish secularism is anything but at a standstill. On the contrary, scholars’ dissent is plural to run the gamut of the AKP’s Islamist legacy and the party’s deliberate, predetermined, hidden or rather blatant attempt to dwindled Turkish secularism. However, the manifold attempts to pigeonhole the AKP and its relationship with the secular and the religious relay on a common reification of both religion and the secular as normative concepts. In the attempt to enrich and revive this debate, the contribution proposes to overturn the focus and to assess how the multiple representations and the intertwined relations between religion and the secular are performed in Turkish society everyday. Drawing from George Mosse’s notion of the family as the institution supposed to mirror state and society, this contribution is empirically grounded in the AKP’s policies towards the family. More in detail, it refers to the prominent role the Turkish Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) plays in both the elaboration and the implementation of these policies. In this regard, the paper outlines (1) the tight cooperation between the Diyanet and the Ministry of Family and Social Policies; (2) the employment of female religious officers in social assistance’s structures; (3) the religious officers’ everyday commitment in “strengthening” the family through projects and seminars in local mosques. Based on an extensive ethnographic observation of the activities of Diyanet’s female religious officers in Istanbul, the analysis of informal interviews with Diyanet’s officers and official documents, the paper argues that Diyanet’s involvement in family policies epitomizes a changing role of religious officers whose tasks go beyond the enlightening of population about religious knowledge. They rather contribute in diffusing and reproducing the party’s hegemonic religious conservative ideology also through the intimacy of the family. Related to this, a second main remark is that the expanding competences of the Diyanet’s religious officers not only reflects the blurring boundaries of the secular and the religious in the everyday, it also casts light on the formal development of a twofold channel of social assistance (secular and religiously motivated).