Ida Hartmann defends her PhD thesis at Department of Anthropology

Candidate: Ida Hartmann.

Title: 'Serving God and the Nation. Religious citizenship and societal upheaval in contemporary Turkey'.

Assessment Committee:
• Associate Professor Cecilie Rubow
University of Copenhagen, Denmark (chair).

• Professor Esra Özyürek
London School of Economics, United Kingdom.

• Associate Professor Mayanthi Fernando
University of California, Santa Cruz, USA.

The Department of Anthropology will host a reception after the defence at the CSS Campus, Øster Farimagsgade 5, in building 33, 1st floor, room 33.1.19.
A copy of the the dissertation will be available for reading at Søndre Campus, Building 27, 3rd floor. Room 27.3.46.

Summary: On July 15 2016, a faction in Turkey’s armed forces tried, and failed, to overthrow the government. Fethullah Gülen, the front figure of the influential Sunni Muslim Hizmet community, was immediately identified as the mastermind behind the coup attempt. Although Gülen’s culpability is not confirmed, the vast network of Hizmet-linked educational institutions, business conglomerates and media houses extending across Turkey was rapidly eliminated. Based on a year of fieldwork in Istanbul in 2015, this thesis examines the commitments and concerns of certain people identifying with Hizmet during the period leading up to the coup attempt, when the community’s relation to the AKP government – and with it, its position in Turkey – was dramatically deteriorating.

The thesis sheds light on broader dynamics related to Turkish citizenship, Muslim subject formation and secularism. First, it offers a perspective on one of the most spectacular ruptures in Turkey’s recent history, not by examining the ‘great game’ of politics head-on, but by bringing into view the much more ordinary affects and anxieties, which enabled the falling-out between the AKP and Hizmet to escalate so dramatically. Second, the thesis argues that the mutually constitutive yet uneasy relation between interlocutors’ Islamic commitment and their civic engagement reflects and refracts tensions at the heart of the secular Turkish republican project itself. And third, religious citizenship brings forth a mode of Muslim subjectivity formed neither in singular alignment with Islamic tradition nor through ambiguous alternation between distinct moral registers, but in relation to a normative framework in which various traditions are always already intertwined, but rarely neatly aligned.