Forgetting to Forget, 1923–1944 which was used as a pillar of the nation-building process in the transition
from multi-religious empire to homogenizing, secular nation-state led to
the transformation of religious identity into an ethnic category and made
cultural conversion a limited possibility for those groups wishing to un-
dertake it for the sake of integration.
Although secular nation-states attempted to remove manifestations of re-
ligion that did not support the modern state project from the public sphere
and to restrict them to the private, this process ironically increased the sig-
nificance of religion and religious identity and made them issues of public
debate. In theory, the problem of how minority citizens related to the state
and civil society would be resolved by their subjective choice to integrate.
In practice, racialized nationalism and ethnicized religion hindered their
earnest efforts.
The waning years of the Ottoman Empire witnessed changing percep-
tions of religious difference and the rise of race-based nationalism, which
serve as the background for how the Dönme were treated in the new
nation-state of Turkey. The Dönme flourished when they were allowed
to be religious international merchants in plural Ottoman society, but
were pressured to dissolve as a group when bearing stigmatized racial and
religious status in the secular nation-state of Turkey.^136