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Photo of Torsten Janson

Torsten Janson

Researcher

Photo of Torsten Janson

Inventing Sacred spaces: Islamic symbolism in Turkish Visual Politics. Paper accepted for 10th Nordic Conference on Middle Eastern Studies: Middle Eastern Connectivities. Odense, Denmark

Author

  • Torsten Janson

Summary, in English

This paper draws attention to the increasing prominence of religious symbolism in Turkish visual politics, focusing state sponsored expositions, cultural events and public celebrations, orchestrated by the Turkish AKP Government and municipalities. The appropriation of Islamic and neo-Ottoman symbols in such public events appears to have become an important strategy for forwarding religious values, while avoiding square imposition of religious norms in official political or legal discourse, hence strategically by-passing Turkish secular provisions. The paper also explores such appropriations of religious symbolism in public space in terms of a (re)drawing of the boundaries for what is considered as acceptable from an Islamic institutional perspective. In short, this paper explores recent examples of public, religio-cultural and populist orchestrations of Islamic symbolism as aspects of the current struggle about the very identity of Turkish nationalism.

Department/s

  • Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies (CMES)
  • MECW: The Middle East in the Contemporary World

Publishing year

2016

Language

English

Document type

Conference paper

Conference name

The Nordic Society for Middle Eastern Studies Conference

Conference date

2016-09-22 - 2016-09-24

Conference place

Odense, Denmark

Status

Published