Mosque Construction as Nation-Building: The case of Turkey

This article analyzes the question of mosque construction and its interrelationship vis-à-vis nation-building in contemporary Turkey. The dynamics of a secular state ruling over a conservative society have always been conflictual in republican Turkey, and this ever since the modern state began initiating a number of radical secular reforms in the 1920s and the 1930s. Among those reforms, disruptive in a previously conservative society, were the dissolution of the caliphate and dismemberment of religious institutions, coupled with widespread Westernizing policies including the adoption of Western sartorial habits, emphasis on science and technology, and changing the alphabet from the traditional Arabic to the current modern (romanized) Turkish script. On the other hand, the advent of democracy and changeover of government in 1950 brought with it the emergence of a renewed religious discourse and a desire for more mosque construction in order to accentuate the Islamic facet of Turkish culture. Therefore, the religious dimension of Turkish identity has increasingly been buttressed by mosque construction by right-wing governments, reaching its zenith with the current Justice and Development Party (JDP) government (beginning in 2002). Coupled with the emergence of an illiberal democracy bolstered by Turkish populism, this article proposes to analyze the linkage between mosque construction and the building of an Islamic conservative Turkish nation contrasting the secular Turkish identity of the ancien régime.