Soon after my arrival in Turkey in January 2008 for a year’s research stay, the country was abuzz about a group of twenty high school students from the city of Kirşehir in central Anatolia that had painted a Turkish flag with their own blood—a broad red field about eighteen inches wide, with a white sickle moon and star at center. The students had presented it to Turkey’s top military chief, General Yaşar Büyükanýt, as a gift to commemorate the deaths of twelve soldiers killed in clashes with Kurdish separatist PKK 1 guerrillas two months earlier. The general displayed the...

Turkey’s three Republican eras all were preceded by coups—political earthquakes that resulted in a substantial shifting of the political and eventually cultural ground. This upheaval included reinterpretations of national identity and what constitutes Turkishness as the state and various governments attempted to shape the subjectivities of their youth through education, rituals, military service, and other forms of socialization, and as new populations gained a voice in this process. These transformations often remained embedded within discourses and practices of the past, especially those related to group membership, whether family, lineage, tribe, or religion, thus providing familiar cultural knowledge that could...

In the spring of 2008 I was invited to an anthropology conference at Yeditepe University, a private university set up by former Istanbul mayor Bedrettin Dalan. In his mid-sixties with the demeanor of an aging boxer, Dalan is known for his strong opinions and has a reputation as an ultranationalist (ulusalcı)—Kemalist, Ataturkist, secularist, supporter of a strong state and military and a pan-Turkish national identity with a hefty dose of racialism. When Yeditepe University was built under Dalan’s direction, its otherwise modern architecture incorporated emblems of ancient Turkic Seljuk design. Special-event dinners are hosted in a large tentlike yurt...

Two key metaphors that in popular discourse represent a perceived threat to Turkish society and nation are the missionary and the headscarf. There are other threats, such as armed attacks by the separatist Kurdish PKK, that elicit a fear of national disintegration and strong feelings of hostility toward the Kurdish minority. I focus here on the missionary and the headscarf because the threat they present is not as clear-cut as a PKK assault on an army camp but, rather, involve out-of-focus images of Turkey’s becoming a Christian nation and Turkey’s becoming Iran or Malaysia—each an extreme inversion of the...

At a political congress in 2009, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan described Turkey as a mosaic. To illustrate his point that there was no room in Turkey for divisiveness, the prime minister listed fifteen names of poets, musicians, writers, Sufi religious leaders, and other historic figures that, he said, represented the unity of the Turkish nation. To the surprise of some, he included artists associated with the left, such as the writer Nâzim Hikmet and the satirist Aziz Nesin, who had been persecuted in their lifetimes (Hikmet spent most of his adult life behind bars or in exile; he died in...

Ayşenur Bilgi Solak’s cell phone pulsed on the desktop to a rumba beat with a sensual female voice singing “El Corazon” in Portuguese. Ayşenur is the thirty-three-year-old assistant to AKP’s Istanbul provincial party leader. She attended grade school in Austria, then earned a BA in sociology at Bosphorus University in Istanbul. I was waiting in her office at party headquarters early one evening for her to finish her duties so we could talk.¹ The high-ceilinged room was bare of ornament, dominated by an enormous desk on which were arranged neat stacks of papers and three phones that rang on and...

Havva is a fresh-faced young woman of twenty-two with a shy but self-confident manner. She works as an intern at a women’s rights association. When she was sixteen, Havva read four books that changed her life:Mavi Saçlı Kız(The Girl with Blue Hair) by Burçak Çerezcioğlu,Sophie’s Worldby the Norwegian writer Jostein Gaarder, andThe AlchemistandVeronika Decides to Dieby the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho, translated into Turkish. These books caused her to start reading the Quran. “It slowly moved to a place in my head,” she explained about the Quran. She also began to wear...

In the previous chapters, I have explored the origins of polarization and social tension around certain key issues in contemporary Turkey, such as the headscarf and a fear of missionary conversion. These have become markers of belonging within the Turkish national community but also represent competing narratives about what it means to be Turkish and what it means to be Muslim. To all appearances, there appears to be a standoff between secularism and Islam, with one side accusing the other of heavy-handed imposition of its own values and practices on Turkish society as a whole.

For secularists, the national tradition...

On June 24, 2013, as the van sped from Ataturk Airport into the entrails of the city along new bypass roads carved through congested neighborhoods under AKP’s infrastructural overhaul, I peered out the window, as I always did, to see what had changed since my last visit. Even though I had been to Turkey only a few weeks before, change had reached such a fever pitch that in the meantime anything could have happened. And something had happened. It began in Taksim, the Istanbul square that, since the beginning of the Turkish Republic, has served as the symbolic epicenter of...