Public-Private Distinctions, the Alevi Question, and the Headscarf: Turkish Secularism Revisited

Abstract

From the beginning of the Turkish Republic, its political elites promoted a secular nationalism as the social bond intended to overwrite religious and ethnic divisions and create a sense of coherence and unity. Ever since it became a guiding principle for politics in the late Ottoman period, Turkish nationalism aimed at creating national homogeneity and identity qua a rhetorical inclusivism (around categories of Turkishness and Islam) and practical exclusivism (as for everything that did not fit said categories), which was sometimes more and sometimes less forceful and violent. In the Turkish republic, united under the banner of Kemalism, Turkish nationalism and Turkish secularism—or better laicism (laiklik)—determine the parameters for the negotiation of the legitimacy of particularist group identities and practices in public. Indeed, it is in cases of dissent to the significations and internal logic of the homogenizing nationalistlaicist discourse that its grammar becomes most palpable.