Nilüfer Göle

Islam in Public: New Visibilities and New Imaginaries

Islam has acquired new forms of visibility over the last two decades as it has made its way in the public avenues of both Muslim and European societies. New faces of Muslim actors using both secular and religious idiom are appearing in public life; the terms of public debate are being transformed by the eruption of religious issues; Islamic films and novels are becoming popular subjects of cultural criticism; new spaces, markets, and media are opening up in response to the rising demands of recently formed Muslim middle classes. Islam carves out a public space of its own as new Islamic language styles, corporeal rituals, and spatial practices emerge and blend into public life. On the one hand, public Islam testifies to a shift in the orientation of the Islamic movement from macropolitics toward micropractices, and on the other hand, it challenges the borders and the meanings of the secular public sphere. As Islam makes a move into national public spheres, the consensual principles and homogeneous structure of the national public spheres are unsettled, but so are those of the Islamic movement. Indeed two different phases of contemporary Islamism can be distinguished.1 The first phase, starting at the end of the 1970s

The Gendered Nature of the Public Sphere

In Muslim contexts of modernity, women’s corporal visibility and citizenship rights constitute the political stakes around which the public sphere is defined. “Women’s visibility, women’s mobility, and women’s voices”1 are central in shaping the boundaries of the public sphere. To study the intricate nature of connections between gender, politics, and the public sphere, two historical moments of change in Turkish history and contemporary experience are crucial: the projects of modernization in the 1920s, and movements of Islamization in the 1980s. Historical classification of projects of modernism on the one hand and Islamism on the other, and the centrality of the question of gender in shaping political debates, social transformations, and definitions of public and private spheres, can be extended to other Muslim contexts of modernities. Historically, however, since it defined women as public citizens, the Turkish mode of modernization can be considered the most radical engagement among Muslim countries. Equating national progress with women’s emancipation formed the backbone of Kemalist feminism. Simultaneously, during the last two decades, Turkey, like other Muslim countries, has witnessed the advent of contemporary Islamism.2

The public visibility of Islam and European politics of resentment: The minarets-mosques debate:

The public visibility of Islam reveals new political stakes in European democracies around issues of immigration and citizenship. By focusing on the societal debates and the controversies around the construction of mosques and minarets, this article explores the ways in which Islamic difference is manifested, perceived and framed in public life. The ‘visibility’ of Islam in public is conceptualized as a form of agency, a manifestation of religious difference that cannot be thought independent of the materiality of culture, namely aesthetic forms, dress codes, or architectural genres. It is argued that the debates for or against the banning of the construction of mosques and/or minarets reveal the tumultuous transition of Muslims from the status of the invisible migrant-worker to that of visible Muslim citizenship. The public visibility is approached therefore as a radically disruptive, transgressive, provocative form of transformative agency that is intrinsically related to the political process of becoming citizens.

Contemporary Islamist movements and new sources for religious tolerance

Examining the question of tolerance through social praxis in the Islamic context, the author focuses on the voice of Islam as a non-assimilative critique of secular modernity. After discussing the controversial cases of Rushdie and Zeid, where the relationship between modernity and Islamic identity presented an important political challenge, she turns to Turkey - and issues of religious marriages and veiling - and suggests that the politics of tolerating difference in Islam requires reconciliation with history as well as a reconcilliation (as in the relationship between Islam and modernity) that must first come from within Islam.

Manifestations of the Religious-Secular Divide: Self, State, and the Public Sphere

My aim in this chapter is to present a succinct mental mapping of the changes, shifts, and displacements that are currently taking place in our ways of approaching the secular-religious divide. I propose an analysis and selective reassessment of the changes that have occurred during the last three decades in our approaches to secularism. Due to our ongoing conversations across cultures and disciplines, there is an increasing awareness in the social sciences that there is not one ideal-model of secularism, whether it is defined by the Anglo-Saxon liberal model or by French political “laicite.” Rather there exists a plurality of secularisms in different national, cultural, and religious contexts, including non-Western secularisms, as, for example, in India and Turkey. The point of departure of this book is the necessity of decoupling secularism and Western experience and acknowledging the plurality of secularisms. It aims to foster a comparative gaze between different genealogies, historical trajectories, cultural habitations, and political formations of the secular. Not only the plurality of secularisms that supposes distinct national formations but also the cultural crossings and the interconnected histories of secularism need to be highlighted to understand today’s religious-secular formations and their confrontations.

Islam and Secularity: The Future of Europe's Public Sphere

In Islam and Secularity Nilufer Gole takes on two pressing issues: the transforming relationship between Islam and Western secular modernity and the impact of the Muslim presence in Europe. Gole shows how the visibility of Islamic practice in the European public sphere unsettles narratives of Western secularism. As mutually constitutive, Islam and secularism permeate each other, the effects of which play out in embodied and aesthetic practices and are accompanied by fear, anxiety, and violence. In this timely book, Gole illuminates the recent rethinking of secularism and religion, of modernity and resistance to it, of the public significance of sexuality, and of the shifting terrain of identity in contemporary Europe.

Decentering Europe, Recentering Islam

Focusing on public controversies around Islam in Europe and the emergence of Turkey as a model within the framework of the Arab Spring, this essay attempts to articulate an alternative conceptual and critical frame in order to recenter the conceptions of Europe from the perspective of Islamic difference. It seeks to understand the displacement of Islam from the margins to the center, from the postcolonial past to the European present, as it follows various historical trajectories and creates new interpenetrations and mixings between different cultural codes, values, and practices. Drawing on the interconnected histories of Muslims and Europe at different moments that raise issues of memory, identity, and religion, this essay invites a new critical turn—one that cannot be fully grasped in the mirror of the postcolonial, insofar as Islam and Europe exist face-to-face in the present time, relating and confronting their experiences in the same chronotope.

Turkish Delight in Vienna: Art, Islam, and European Public Culture

This article focuses on the ways in which the European aesthetic realm becomes a battleground of intercultural and intercivilizational conflicts as well as a domain of borrowings and mixings between “native” and “Islamic” values, thereby creating a transnational public sphere. Through a two-way interpretation of a controversial statue depicting a naked woman with headscarf, entitled Turkish Delight and exhibited in a public garden in front of the Kunsthalle Museum in Vienna in 2007 before it was wrenched from its pedestal and left lying on the ground, the author examines how the artistic scene as an interactive space between art and politics, between cultures and publics, participates in the elaboration of a bond between Muslims and Europeans, a bond not without elements of confrontation and violence. It is argued that while the statue violates the intimacy and piety of a Muslim woman by exposing her nakedness to the public gaze, it also seeks ways to relate to the familiar other, Turkish migrants in Europe, albeit in a provocative manner. The purpose of this analysis is to demonstrate how the public space is not fixed once and for all but is always being recreated anew and inhabited through performativity, conflict and confrontation.

Undesirable Public Intellectuals

Nilüfer Göle: I would like to approach this by reflecting upon the changing structural conditions that create more vulnerability for academics and intellectuals in their participation in the affaires de la cité. This is a shared phenomenon; we observe this in India, in Russia, in Poland, in Hungary, and even in France. Social scientists in general and sociologists in particular are accused by political powers of developing excuses to terrorists; in some countries, they are stigmatized as external agents, as enemies of the nation. In the Turkish case, we are witnessing the penalization of academicians in the most ruthless and unjust way. Academic freedom is two-faceted; it concerns freedom of inquiry within the university on the one hand and freedom of expression in the public sphere on the other. In democratic societies, academicians do not fear to bring their voices to the public sphere freely, to be part of the public debates. The autonomy of the researcher and the figure of the public intellectual are interrelated. The struggle for academic freedom has been on the agenda in Turkey since the beginnings of the Republic; research on the Kurdish question, the Armenian genocide, even the study of Islam were taboo subjects that constrained intellectuals and researchers within the academia. And in this context, it is necessary to remember the transformation of academic and public life in Turkey, the climate of democratization that is too often dismissed, if not despised by cynical observers of the country. After recovering from the 1980 coup, academic life in Turkey underwent a period of freedom, openness and productivity. With the establishment and proliferation of private universities, new opportunities were created for young researchers. Even those who were studying at and had PhDs from Western universities wanted to come back to Turkish universities. And they did. They conducted research on new subjects, published in Turkish, established

The Freedom of Seduction

For most of human history, the other half of the species, women, were on the sidelines. Now they are central actors in all our societies as we negotiate the fraught transition from male-dominated tradition to modernity and beyond. In this section we hear the voices of powerful women who in their own lives are making this historic shift.