Abstract
This chapter focuses on the gender politics of mosque architecture within the current context of Turkey in which the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has encouraged the neo-Ottoman idiom. This particular idiom produced distinct ideological meanings within different political contexts. Currently, it serves the absorption of nationalism and the remoulding of the nation-state by the AKP’s Islamism and the making of the Islamic nation—millet. The AKP has also been promoting the mosque as a social space. A significant aspect of this process has been the gradual increase in women’s involvement as users and designers of space, demanding to have a say in the spatial organization of women’s sections in the mosques. The overlap between women’s demands and the governments agenda to endorse mosques also played role in the promotion of neo-Ottoman mosque architecture. The chapter discusses the instrumentalisation of gender politics to legitimise the government’s approach to mosque architecture.
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Notes
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- 2.
The AKP’s definition of “nation” departs equally from the rejection of nation(alism) by traditional Islamists in favour of a global ummah, and its secular conception by the Turkish nation-state. It presents Turkishness and Islam as qualities of the same entity, which differs significantly from the republican definition’s reference to a secular and ethnically homogeneous body. While the Kemalist state invented the term ulus in the 1930s to define the secular nation, the ideologues of the AKP use millet, a term of Arabic origin which denoted religious communities in the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman millet system allowed limited autonomy to non-Muslim communities to conduct their internal affairs. The term took on the meaning of “nation” in the nineteenth century; emergent nationalisms of ethnic groups within the Empire drew essence from their religious-communal experience in the millet system (Karpat 2002, 611). It has been used in the twentieth century, especially by conservative intellectuals, as a reaction to linguistic Turkification; yet, as I discuss below, the reference to millet by the AKP is significantly different.
- 3.
For a discussion of the politics of mosque architecture, see Rizvi (2015).
- 4.
The dominant right-wing ideological current that contained Islamism was labelled “nationalist conservatism” (Bora 2009). With the end of single-party rule and the rise of Cold War geopolitics, the nationalist-conservative current successfully blended nationalist and Islamist streams on the common ground of anti-communism. This ideological amalgam merged opposition to radical modernism and secularism (as well as any strands of leftism) while emphasising the need for a powerful state to defend national unity. The origins of this current mainly lay in a circle of intellectuals representing conservative thought in opposition to the radical modernisation efforts of the early republican years (Taşkın 2007).
- 5.
For details, see Batuman (2018b, 24–26).
- 6.
For an historically contextualised assessment of the mosque’s architecture, see Özaloğlu (2017).
- 7.
Interview with Salim Alp, 25 July 2017.
- 8.
Despite the optimism of this period and the establishment of a Ministry of Women’s Rights to adapt EU regulations, the AKP soon reverted to conservative defence of patriarchy (Acar and Altunok 2013).
- 9.
In response to criticisms from female Islamic intellectuals on the inadequacy of proper spaces for women and the miserable conditions of the existing women’s sections, the Mufti Office (a branch of Diyanet) in Istanbul launched a project to assess the state of the mosques in Istanbul in terms of women-friendliness, which concluded that half of the approximately 3000 mosques in Istanbul were not suitable for the performance of women’s prayers (Erdemli 2013, 127).
- 10.
İlbay had twenty years of experience in the construction unit of a public bank before starting her own office. Her work in Ahmet Hamdi Akseki Mosque led to new commissions on mosque interiors in Turkey and abroad. Interview with Sonay İlbay, 21 March 2017.
- 11.
“Ahmet Hamdi Akseki Camii”, available online: http://enderinsaat.com/Icerik.ASP?ID=1316 (accessed on 02 August 2016).
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Batuman, B. (2023). Claiming the Neo-Ottoman Mosque: Islamism, Gender, Architecture. In: Raudvere, C., Onur, P. (eds) Neo-Ottoman Imaginaries in Contemporary Turkey. Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08023-4_6
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