Turkey: A Nation (Re)Imagined?

Turkey has been changing rapidly in the last fifteen years. Attempts to understand this change, and what it means for state-society relations is enormously strained by the pace of the change. It is also often trapped in the secular-religious binary which can be misleading and too broad to capture historical processes and nuances that undergird the change. I suggest that Turkey’s transformation can only be understood by unpacking what "religious" meant in different phases of the republic. I argue that Turkey has witnessed under the AKP government policies a coupling of religious as a “sense of belonging” with religious as a “sense of belief”. Religion is no longer only a source of national belonging as it has always been since the establishment of the republic in 1923. It is also perceived as a source of belief that organizes and mediates social life and interactions. It is therefore misleading to define it as a move away from “secular nationalism” as ethnoreligious roots of Turkish nationalism are today arguably stronger than ever. We are instead witnessing a departure from secular organization of social life. I will demonstrate how this departure happens with an analysis of the AKP policies in the realm of family and education; and conclude with a discussion on their implications for religious minorities.