Prof. Dr. Markus Dreßler

My engagement with the genealogy of Turkish secularism is motivated by the question of how Islamic discourse, and notions of religion more broadly, far from merely constituting the distant and silent other of secularist discourse, were in various ways implicated in the formulation of Turkish secularism. In late Ottoman-Turkish intellectual discourses, distinctions between the secular and the religious as different, other, or antithetic, were not yet clearly formulated. In other words, these discourses offer us insights into the historical formation of the knowledge regime of religio-secularism, a notion by which I aim to draw attention to how the concepts of religion and the secular have been intertwined within the modern context as a binary pair with each always implicating the other. These intellectual discourses further provide us with insights into the role of nation-state formation in the conceptualisation of a non-religious, secular sphere in the late Ottoman-Turkish context. Against the background of late Ottoman historical experiences and political configurations, this work of conceptualisation was shaped by local religious and cultural traditions (Ottoman and Islamic concepts), as well as by modern European discourses that were locally appropriated.

This project will engage with the texts of selected late Ottoman and early Republican authors to trace how conceptualisations of the religious and the non-religious gradually formed into the Turkish discourse on secularism. The aims of the project are to (1) establish a more nuanced picture of the dynamics of cultural translation that accompanied the late Ottoman/early Turkish republican reception of Western work of distinction between religious and secular spheres, and (2) probe the possibilities and limits of translating Western concepts, such as the secular and its derivatives, into Ottoman-Turkish and Islamic - religious as well as non-religious - insights and sensibilities. This will contribute to a more complex understanding of the rapidly changing dynamics between religions and non-religious/secular insights during the hot phase of nation-building at the margins of European modernity.