(Post-)Ottoman Secularities
Friday, 13 October, 2 - 4 p.m.
The Religionization of Din in the Late Ottoman Period
Markus Dreßler (Leipzig University)
Negotiating Secularity: Post-Ottoman Muslims in Bosnia 1878-2020
Wolfgang Höpken (KFG "Multiple Secularities")
Rethinking the Religious History of Turkey and Alevis through the Concept of ‘Multiple Secularities’
Gökçen Beyinli-Dinç (Hamburg University)
Chair: Mohammad Magout (University of Zurich)
The Religionization of Din in the Late Ottoman Period
Markus Dreßler (Leipzig University)
Din has been, due to its rootedness in the Quran and its centrality in Islamic religious discourse, a particularly sturdy concept. Drawing on the Ottoman-Turkish example, the paper will argue that in order to understand its transformations, which nevertheless occurred in the modern period, it is necessary to situate them both within (1) the longer trajectories of traditional Islamic discourses, as well as (2) semantic and conceptual changes particular to the modern period.
The Islamic tradition constitutes until today the most important normative reference point for Muslim elaborations on the meanings of din. This background needs to be considered when investigating in the considerable correspondence that din acquired over time with the modern Western concept of religion, which became increasingly solidified since the 19th century. My contribution will chart this religionization of din in relation to the “secularization problematic of modern political thought” that made itself felt in Ottoman lands at least since the Tanzimat reform period and found its articulation in intensifying debates on the “the place and significance of religion under the changing conditions of modern life” (Davison 1995).
Since the religionization of din came along with new distinctions between din/religion and its thus secularized others, it serves as an example of secularity. Such secularity is especially lucid in the complex translations between political practices and concepts marked as “European” in relation to the practices and concepts that were in the same process reified as traditional “Ottoman” and/or “Islamic”.
Negotiating Secularity: Post-Ottoman Muslims in Bosnia 1878-2020
Wolfgang Höpken (KFG "Multiple Secularities")
From the end of Ottoman rule in 1878 to the present, Bosnian Muslims have been challenged by the necessity to adapt to the changing forms of a secularising environment, forcing them to negotiate and re-negotiate the boundaries between their religious life and the various secular systems in which they had to live. Three periods can be distinguished within this constant process of reacting to the challenge of secularity: After the end of Ottoman rule, the Bosnian Muslims during the Austro-Habsburg period, firstly, were forced to adjust their hitherto strictly religious environment to an Empire, understanding itself as “Christian”, but at the same time as a “modernizing” one, confronting the Bosnian Muslims with a semi-colonial European “mission civilisatrice”.
Yugoslav socialism after World War II posed a second challenge to Bosnian Muslims, now in the context of a strictly secular, even atheist state. While the question of modernity, which had dominated the debates during Austrian rule, faded away as a result of an unquestioned concept of socialism, the question of ethnicity and religion became the most disputed issue.
With the end of the socialist Yugoslav state and the independence of Bosnia in 1992/5 the third necessity to re-draw the boundaries between the religious and the secular arose, this time under the condition of liberal-democratic pluralism and the claim to be part of “Europe” on the one hand, but at the same time increasingly being influenced by transnational debates and actor-networks of a global Islamic revival on the other.
The case of the Bosnian Muslims can be linked to the concept of Multiple Secularities in two ways: First, it offers a particular example for the multiplicity of the secular-religious divide, not only between “Europe” and “Non-Europe”, colonial and post-colonial, but also beyond the dichotomy of “Western“ vs. “Eastern European” secularity, on which the literature on European secularity is mostly based. Casanova´s claim for “rethinking secularity beyond the West“ thus acquires a particular “intra-European” dimension in the case of Bosnia. At the same time, it enriches the ongoing debate on the relationship between Islam and secularity, largely debated with regard to the non-European Islamic world.
Second, the idea of secularity as a process of “boundary drawing” within the concept of Multiple Secularities proved to be a prolific conceptional approach to structure the „long durée“ of post-Ottoman Bosnian Muslim history. Starting from the core aspects of the Multiple Secularities concept of “institutional differentiations” and “conceptional distinctions”, the “critical junctures” of changing institutional and power configurations in the process of boundary drawing could be identified; discourses and taxonomies of the secular and the religious could be contextualised in local and transnational contexts. Having more recently widened the concept of Multiple Secularities in our debates beyond the field of distinctions and differentiations to include the field of symbolic and material dimensions of the religious-secular divide, has also offered enriching perspectives for the Bosnian case.
Rethinking the Religious History of Turkey and Alevis through the Concept of ‘Multiple Secularities’
Gökçen Beyinli-Dinç (Hamburg University)
The extensive research on Alevis mostly explains the exclusion, discrimination and violence they have faced in the history of the Republic of Turkey through the secular or religious policies of the Turkish state and related actors. My initial approach to my archival material on Alevis and Bektashis in Turkey was similar. I tried to situate my findings within this “binary” framework but hesitated to publish them because such an approach did not adequately explain the complexity of the whole story, and there were still “gaps” between empirical material and theory. In this presentation, I will elaborate on, first, how my view on the religious history of Turkey and the role of Alevis within it changed after I applied the concept of “multiple secularities” to my research. Secondly, I will talk about how the discussions at the colloquiums helped to sharpen my perspective, especially on the significance of the secular Law 677 which banned religious orders (tarikat) in Turkey in 1925. In this regard, I will finally discuss whether it is necessary to extend the concept of “multiple secularities” to include the drawing of boundaries within the “religious” in the context of a “secular” nation-state.
