Istanbul
a “mysterious page of history” as Yalman wrote in a newspaper series, a
disappearing relic of the Ottoman past.
As the category of religion (Islam) was reconceived, the term “Muslim”
was reconceptualized. “Muslim” signified the ethnic core of the Turkish
nation, whose public practices were avowedly secular. A term that had de-
noted religious identity in the Ottoman Empire became an ethnic marker
in the nation-state of Turkey, whose civic religion is secularism. Thus re-
ligious Muslims bore the brunt of the state’s concern with controlling
religion in all its manifestations, from education to prayer, since secular
elites were under the spell of the secularization thesis and laicization, the
transfer of institutions from religious to centralized state authority. Yet
asking religious minorities to assimilate means they have to abandon their
own beliefs and identities, while the majority does not have to. Even in
the Turkish case, where religious Muslims had to convert to secularism, to
be Turkish meant to be ethnically Muslim.
Ethnicized religion was expressed in an Ottoman parliamentary de-
bate from 1920 , when one MP asked, “Is not Turkish the same thing as
Muslim?” and another responded, “Sir, when one says Turkish one is say-
ing Muslim.”^130 The late Ottoman and early republican statesman Celal
Nuri argued that “the true citizen was a Hanefi Muslim and spoke Turk-
ish.”^131 Although the Dönme appeared as Muslims, persistent rumors
and their own testimony, especially that of Rüştü, suggested that they
maintained a set of beliefs and communal consciousness—also mani-
fested in their self-segregation, separate schools, and distinct cemeter-
ies—inappropriate for people whose ancestors had converted to Islam
centuries earlier.
The politics of secularization require that ethical moralities supersede
theocentric ways of being based on corporate communities.^132 In Tur-
key, this meant converting religious Muslims to secular Kemalists and
compelling people to abandon Islamic morality and ethics and replacing
these with lay morality and ethics.^133 State-imposed morality replaces in-
dividual moral conscience. The nation-state requires a self-determining
citizen, but it is an illusion of freedom, since citizens are presented with a
set of propositions to which they must assent.^134 The clash between self-
ascribed religious identities and state-granted rights that deny subjectivity
and the ability to define the self exacts a heavy price, because it allows
people fewer alternatives and less flexibility in determining their iden-
tities.^135 The apparently liberating aspects of state-enforced secularism,