Islamic Conversation

Sohbet and Ethics in Contemporary Turkey

Smita Tewari Jassal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429750212
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

The book evaluates on-going ethical conversations to learn how emotional communication is received, teachings are internalized, and a religious world-view is brought to life. Exploring how religious values saturate people's consciousness to induce subtle shifts in moral and ethical sensibilities, this book is about people's practices that illuminate how Islam is lived.

Based on fieldwork conducted in Ankara between 2010 and 2016, the study enquires into people's ethical, religious, and moral motivations through the use of the ethnographic method and "thick description". Conversations and interviews with officials, community leaders, students, entrepreneurs, professionals, and blue-collar workers were subjected to close scrutiny to foreground societal change and churning. To capture perspectives absent or deliberately overlooked in mainstream public discourse and scholarship, fieldwork was conducted in locations ranging from homes, offices, and university dorms to the shrines of saints. In listening closely to how people talk about their religious practices, the book addresses the question of how Islamic subjectivities are being forged in Turkey. The study unveils how people are pushed to re-think old practices and attitudes in the process of reinterpreting Islam in light of contemporary concerns.

Filling a gap in the literature where micro-level, grounded analyses of culture and society are relatively rare, this book is a key resource for readers interested in the anthropology of religion and gender, ethnography, Turkey, and the Middle East.

1 Reading the Risale-Nur in a women’s sohbet

In this way, I learned how to read the Koran and to adapt its lessons. I learned how to be a good Muslim.

(Notes from the Field: June 2012)

Reviving tradition in modern Turkey

The Turkish term sohbet is derived from the Arabic suhba, the root of sahaba, which refers to the companionship and practices of socialization that were practiced between the Prophet and his companions in Islam. According to Göle (2006), “conversation [Turkish: sohbet] as a discursive practice plays a role in the creation of social bonding and a cultural memory among the members of a movement” (14). As a discursive practice of reading and conversation, sohbet groups evoke continuity with an idealized past in which the Prophet’s life is viewed as a primary source of knowledge, authority, and inspiration. The adoption of the practice by suppressed Sufi orders in Turkey, as well as by other groups, testifies to the resilience of traditional Islamic practices in modern Turkey. Correlated with the increasing size and influence of Turkey’s Hizmet Movement of Fethullah Gülen, the largest and most significant Islamic identity community in the country, the practice of sohbet has become more central to Turkey’s late modern experience. Considering this ongoing shift in Turkey, this chapter strives to explain how the practice of sohbet helps to understand discursive practices about Islam as they are produced and transmitted among pious Turkish women. Indeed, because women are forefront actors in Turkey’s new Islamic Movement in particular, and because they are subjects of conversation and debate regarding contemporary Muslim identity movements in general, modes of engagement such as sohbet provide ideal points of entry to study the gendered Muslim experience.

Contemporary forms of sohbet are unique when compared to their historical precedents. Secular reforms that were implemented during Turkey’s Republican era (1923–1950) sidelined Islamic institutions and symbols, which resulted in ethical and social vacuums and ruptures in memory (Göle 2006: 22, Yavuz 2006). In this context, the updating of traditional sohbet, which historically referred to the practice of Sufi sheikhs transmitting knowledge about the Qur’an to followers, provided marginalized pious Turks with an opportunity to rebuild Turkey’s Islamic memory. Although having survived Turkey’s secularization efforts, Islamic movements such as the Nur Movement of Said Nursi (1876–1960), and its most influential contemporary offshoot known as Hizmet (i.e., the Gülen Movement), have revived the practice to cohere with a modern Turkish context. In an essay titled, “Sohba and Musahaba”, Fethullah Gülen identifies the sohbet as an ideal vehicle to reach God. Just as the Prophet’s companions were privy to enlightened communion, and just as his disciples received benefits from his communion in proportion to their intellectual and spiritual capabilities, so should all seekers find guides worthy of emulation.

For Gülen, the illuminating atmosphere created by sohbet facilitates vast leaps in one’s obedience to God. In addition to divine knowledge, belief is reinforced through the recitation of God’s names. Further, those with humility and self-control are its chief beneficiaries. Contrasting sohbet to idle talk, rumor, or slander, Gülen singles out the elevated conversation of sohbet as a defining feature of modern Muslim identity (Gülen 2004: 240).

My interest in sohbet and in the Gülen Movement (GM), stem from a broader ethnographic interest in how women’s religious practices disrupt male-centered understandings of the social world. Acknowledging Saba Mahmood’s formative study on women’s piety in Egypt, current debates have underlined the paucity of knowledge about women who “are made to disappear from view altogether,” except in accounts of political Islam especially the Salafi-revivalist versions (Mufti 2013: 11). I seek to redress this gap by closely scrutinizing a mode of transmission of Islamic knowledge through which Islamic consciousness is cultivated, and through which a means to acquire cultural capital in engendered. Mahmood demonstrates that the search for “authenticity” and the claim “for the traditional status of a practice is a particularly modern mode of asserting its legitimacy” (Mahmood 2005: 114). To what extent does sohbet in Turkey, as followers of Fethullah Gülen’s Hizmet Movement practice it, provide a vehicle to reclaim “authentic” Islamic knowledge in the process of fashioning a “legitimate” Islamic sense of self and purpose? Moreover, if reflection upon the past is a “constitutive condition for a reformulation of the present and the future” (Mahmood 2005: 115), what kind of personal and political engagement does sohbet foster? How is past and present, modernity and tradition, invoked and understood to create gendered subjects in the new Turkey? To answer these questions, I examine how the practice is experienced by a group of educated, middle-class Ankara housewives among whom I conducted eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in 2012. Through its modes of discursive engagement with specific texts, this chapter evaluates sohbet’s significance in the negotiation and performance of new Islamic subjectivities.

Here I draw from Saba Mahmood’s argument about the existence of multiple forms of agency beyond “subversive” agency, to enquire how a sense of community is constituted (Mahmood 2005). Much like in Turkey, Egypt’s Mosque Movement emerged in response to the increasing marginalization of Islamic knowledge and piety in a secular society. Drawing from Judith Butler’s notion of performativity, Mahmood identifies the construction of a pious self as a mode of agency. Drawing from Bourdieu, Mahmood contends that women’s subjectivity is conditioned by cultural structures and social predispositions (i.e., habitus) that impact an individual’s mind and body. In other words, instead of free will, one’s habitus is more likely to motivate the agency of women in Egypt’s Mosque Movement. Similarly, I am interested in the “dispositions” that the practice of sohbet produces among pious women in Turkey, and the ways in which sohbet shapes one’s propensity to think and act in an “Islamic way.” In this regard, Bourdieu’s conceptual frame of habitus, that is, the collective “preferences and dislikes, ways to perceive, think, and feel,” and the ways in which such perceptions, thoughts, and feelings are “improvised” to facilitate continual correction and adjustment, is central to my analysis (Bourdieu 1977: 7). In Ayşe Saktanber’s Living Islam: Women, Religion and the Politicization of Culture in Turkey, the focus is on the religiously inclined women of a housing society in Ankara and their strategies to achieve greater piety. Kimberley Hart’s ethnography, And Then We Work For God: Rural Sunni Islam in Western Turkey (2013), about villagers’ anxieties regarding preparation for the afterlife, points to peasant expectations about the single fixed and correct path of the Islamic way that overlooks the evolving, living nature of religion. This gives rise to contradictions, uncertainties and unresolvable anxieties among the faithful. While Hart’s analysis draws on rich narrative evidence, the rural setting and lack of tariqats (Sufi orders), and cemaats in this region, make for a different perspective than that fleshed out in this chapter. It shows for example, how people understand Islamization of society as the appointment of Imams and other religious state-trained leaders, at whose initiative a cleaning-up and ongoing ‘purification’ and purging of practices seen as un-Islamic has been underway as early as the 1960s. It is in this context that cultural practices such as folk songs and dances, seen as un-Islamic and “backward” were replaced by the sober sohbet, alluded to in the Introduction. This also shows that villages are by no means isolated from the Islamic cultural transformations of the urban milieu I discuss in the book.

My search for a suitable sohbet circle for fieldwork as a participant observer in Ankara revealed its ubiquity largely along class and status lines. The sohbet within which I was accepted as a participant observer consisted of 25 women who were all relatively young, and who were all married to “successful” businessmen and professionals. Together, they represented Turkey’s “nouveau riche” and they resided in well-appointed apartment blocks in Ankara’s newly developed gated neighborhoods. This fieldwork universe proved ideal for gaining insights about elite entrepreneurs and upwardly mobile middle-class families who are today defining the primary face of Turkey’s rapidly changing public sphere. I begin my analysis of sohbet practices in Turkey by drawing parallels with practices from other religious contexts. I then offer some general observations based on several months of fieldwork to more specifically introduce sohbet as a sociological practice. In the core of the chapter, I detail my observations of sohbet practices and recount the meaning ascribed to them by my informants in regard to piety, family, and authority. In so doing, I highlight the role of the sohbet instructor as a holder of social knowledge and thus of social power.

Cross-cultural parallels

Contrary to the teaching of Fethullah Gülen and his most devoted followers, the practice of sohbet in Turkey is not without historical and cross cultural parallels both inside and outside Turkey, and beyond Islam. Although the term sohbet is sourced from Sunni Islam, for instance, it is also used by the Alevi saint and healer, Zohre Ana, to designate healing sessions and to describe her interactions with public audiences. Moreover, in different names, the practice of commenting and elucidating upon scripture in an effort to draw lessons for daily life is well known throughout the world. In Christian Puritan churches, this has long been a common format of exposition for preachers to convey the contemporary context of religious text. Protestant sermons, for instance, often begin with a quotation from scripture that is explained by interpreting a doctrine from a particular Biblical passage, which is then applied to everyday affairs (Rosenberg cited in Lutgendorf 1991: 234). Similar practices are observable in Judaism as well.

The Hindu Ramayana or Ramcaritmanas, (Manas) is another correlative example. The practice of commenting and elucidating upon scripture in an effort to draw lessons for daily life is well known throughout the world and not therefore unique to Islam. Locating the contemporary sohbet within broader cross-cultural frames throws into sharper relief both what is unique, as well as universal, about the phenomenon. I have found it illuminating to draw on the theoretical insights of Philip Lutgendorf in his seminal study, The Life of a Text: Performing the Ramcaritmanas of Tulsidas. Although from the very different cultural universe of Hinduism, Lutgendorf’s classic holds many lessons for our discussion. In the katha (telling, or conversation) or performance of Ramayana, not only is a dialogical milieu fundamental, but katha also involves “slow, systematic, storytelling recitation, interspersed with prose explanations, elaborations, and homely illustrations of spiritual points” (Lutgendorf 1991: 115), most of which hold true for the sohbet sessions I attended in Ankara when we collectively read the Risale-Nur. Another striking cross-cultural parallel that sohbet shares with this Hindu universe is the concept of satsang, connoting the community of good people – the interactive recipients of the moral and religious discourse, since the narrative can only unfold in the course of a dialogue between the teller and listener (ibid.: 117). If the Hindu satsang unfolds as a kind of dialogue between divine knowledge and lived experience and listeners become the very treasury of wisdom so as to grasp the deeper meaning of the text, I found the same logic at work in the reading of Risale Nur.

Lutgendorf writes that just as Manas invites comment and interpretation, its narration “must always have a speaker and a listener … a milieu or environment … the environment” he argues, “is itself constitutive of the act” (1991: 118). Similar to that which is created at sohbet, the Hindu environment termed satsang refers to an “association with the good,” devotional assemblies of saints, or good saintly people, that constitute “milieu in which Katha (exposition) arises” (Lutgendorf 1991: 118). In this way, “authentic” knowledge of the text of the Ramayana does not come from memorizing verses but from experiencing the shared community of satsang, which produces an interactive setting for readers to negotiate the relationship between teaching and reception. In this way, the satsang unfolds as a kind of dialogue between divine knowledge and lived experience. Since the Manas “is often terse and enigmatic, dense and allegorical, and full of references to epic, Puranic, and scholastic traditions that preceded it invites not merely retelling and recitation but also expansion, elaboration, and commentary” (Lutgendorf 1991: 119–121).

Similar to the satsang, sohbet sessions facilitate such interactions of dialogue, and, in the case of my work with pious women, illustrate female visibility in neighborhood-based communities. The same is true for gender segregated satsang groups in urban India. At satsang gatherings, rather than reading and discussing a text, women meet periodically to collectively sing bhajans (devotional songs) or celebrate calendric festivals and vratas (fasts), and to engage in diverse forms of devotion fuelled by the media and the fervor of tele-religious discourses (Marshall and Sabhlok 2009). On the one hand, these forms typically reinforce traditional Hindu feminine stereotypes; on the other, they provide women with deeply rewarding support systems in urban settings. The psychological benefits of this ubiquitous aspect of Hindu religiosity, particularly in regard to the ways in which informal support structures are mobilized, remain under-researched and undertheorized. Much the same can be said about the extra-religious social function of sohbet circles among pious women in Turkey.

By attempting to eliminate religion from the public sphere, modern Turkey’s early regime perceived collective religious practices as subversive (Turam 2007: 42). Consequently, participation in sohbet was a clandestine activity. Although muted before 1950, after the rise of Turkey’s Democratic Party and a subsequent relaxation of religious suppression, followers of Said Nursi revived the practice in the form of the Nur ders (lesson, reading group) (Yavuz 2003). Mobilized around Nursi’s teachings, the Nur Movement collectively opposed intellectual discourses of materialism and positivism and sought to invoke the sacred language and practices of Islam as counterweights to Kemalist social life. Followers of Nursi copied his commentaries by hand and then distributed them widely throughout Anatolia. The production and distribution of the commentaries constituted a unique network, which became the embryo of civil society in Turkey (Yavuz 1999: 589). Although more public about their collective identity after Nursi’s death in 1960, up until the late 1980s the Nur were stigmatized as a potential threat to the integrity of the Republic. This was because resistance against the secular state was interpreted in with the Islamist conception of Zulm (injustice) that was attributed to the state. Darul harb (zone of war) referred to a situation where there was no Islamic political authority, which was required for the emergence of darul Islam (zone of Islam) (private conversation, Ankara, December 2012).

The fieldwork context

Muge, my informant in Ankara, first attended sohbet during her first year of marriage. She did so without telling her husband. One day, she explained, they “crossed each other and she realized that he too attended his own sohbet group” (Field Interview: June 2012). This anecdote speaks volumes about the secrecy associated with the practice until fairly recently. Muge’s father was imprisoned for ten years in the 1960s for being caught with Said Nursi’s Risale-i Nur Kullıyatı (The Epistles of Light, RNK) in his possession. At that time, Nursi’s RNK was the primary text for ders meetings.

In Ankara in 2012 among loyalists in Turkey’s Gülen community, the RNK was read alongside essays and books authored by Fethullah Gülen. During the course of an interview, one of my informants, Serpil, remarked that in addition to mastering the RNK, there were 92 Gülen-authored books to read, and therefore, much to be accomplished (FieldInterview: May 2012).

Although focus on reading the RNK and other texts assumes high levels of literacy, the young women I met during fieldwork related with these texts at various levels. Although they viewed them as inexhaustible sources of meaning, their enthusiasm to participate in sohbet was not often framed in terms of study or meditation. Arranged at homes, what struck me was the greater interest in more general discussions about life, relationships, and family rather than discussions of piety, spirituality, and the divine. It was not so much about one’s faith; meeting at sohbet created a space for women to quench their overwhelming desire for knowledge and understanding about how to be a woman in contemporary Turkish society. For the duration of eight months of fieldwork, wherein I attended a sohbet nearly every week, following prayers were meals prepared by hostesses. Revolving this duty week by week, sohbet functioned for these women as special environments where they could reflect upon their life practices. Each was led by an instructor called an abla (elder sister), who was appointed by the Movement to administer a reading of texts and who offered herself as a model for others to emulate.

Women uniformly commented about how little they knew about Islam before encountering the RNK. To grasp the significance of this statement, it is important to note that these young sohbet participants were often from liberal, “secular” backgrounds in Turkey, and were r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: art of ethical conversation in Turkey
• 1 Reading the Risale-Nur in a women’s sohbet
• 2 The “modernity” of zakat in Turkey
• 3 Healing the social body: sohbet with Ankara’s Alevi saint
• 4 Art of dreaming: at the tombs of saints
• 5 Discourse in the dorms
• 6 On places of worship and Diyanet
• Index