Transnational Turkish Islam

Transnational Turkish Islam provides an overview of Turkish organized Islam in seven European countries. It shows how Turkish Islamic organizations have developed from typical migrant associations in the 1970s and 1980s into present-day European Islamic associations with their own cultural and religious specificities and agendas.

This book brings a transnational perspective to the study of immigrant integration in contemporary Western European societies, with a specific focus on transnational Turkish Islam and Turkish integration in Great Britain. It raises significant questions regarding national citizenship models, and offers original insights into the ways in which they can be extended and renewed to cover the cross-border reality. At the theoretical level, Dikici argues that the idea of multiculturalism can be extended to cover immigrant transnationalism without jeopardising its core principles such as equality and recognition of difference, and promises such as a shared national identity and unity in diversity. At the empirical level, the book illustrates that not all transnational Muslim organisations are the same (i.e. militant), and nor do they all hinder Muslim integration, rather they are diverse, with some deliberately contributing to the integration of Muslims into non-Muslim majority societies. The work will be of interest to scholars and students of contemporary integration and citizenship studies, multiculturalism studies, Muslim integration in Western societies, transnationalism and transnational Islam, Civil Society and Diaspora Studies.

This collection of twelve papers provides case studies and thematic reflections on the growing transnational networking of European Muslims and their involvement with contemporary global Islam. The volume pays particular attention to the mechanisms and significance of this phenomenon.

From sending imams abroad to financing mosques and Islamic associations, home states play a key role in governing Islam in Western Europe. Drawing on over one hundred interviews and years of fieldwork, this book employs a comparative perspective that analyzes the foreign religious activities of the two home states with the largest diaspora populations in Europe: Turkey and Morocco. The research shows how these states use religion to promote ties with their citizens and their descendants abroad while also seeking to maintain control over the forms of Islam that develop within the diaspora. The author identifies and explains the internal and foreign political interests that have motivated state actors on both sides of the Mediterranean, ultimately arguing that interstate cooperation in religious affairs has and will continue to have a structural influence on the evolution of Islam in Western Europe.

In the first book of its kind, M. Hakan Yavuz and John L. Esposito explore recent reformations of Islam and culture in Turkey and the successful Islamist modernist Fethullah Gülen movement. As one of the most significant religious movements to emerge in Turkey in the past fifty years, the Gülen movement combines a devotion to Islam with love for modern learning. especially modern science. This groundbreaking work focuses on and explains the nexus of complex historical and political developments that have contributed to the transformation of Islam in Tukey and to the movement's sphere of influence stretching into the Balkans and central Asia through the establishment of schools outside Turkey. The book cogently traces the origin of Gülen's ideology and his early efforts to propagate his views through educational activities. It details the various strategies employed by Gülen's followers to put his ideas into practice, both in Turkey and around the world. Contributors describe its intellectual and religious formation, its spread across Turkey and Central Asia, and its influence on citizens outside the movement, including leading Turkish politicians.

This book explores how traditional Sunni Muslim conceptions have informed or shaped Islamization strategies in contemporary Turkey. In particular, the author proposes to examine the teaching curriculum of the Ministry of Education, which oversees Turkish public religious education; the activities and teachings of Diyanet, the constitutional organ responsible for managing all religious affairs; and the ideas and activities of three Muslim religious groups currently operating in Turkey. The monograph explains how the interpretation and practice of Islam affects various situations in the Muslim world and analyzes the concept of nature in Islam, which has been an indivisible component of Islamic tradition since the beginning.

This study explores the relationship between migration and political 'development' and asks the question 'how are migration movements and the expatriate communities they create connected to the possibility of enhanced political voice or the preservation of illiberal politics in sending countries?'. The thesis of this work is that politics of origin may be better understood by their extensions into transnational public spheres, because civil society, as a discursive space, may be more liberally grounded in migrant-receiving countries than in sending societies.

Over the last decade the once marginal extreme right of the Turkish ideological spectrum has grown in size as well as in influence and has effectively reshaped party competition in Turkey. Policy mandates and electoral bases of the rising extreme right rely on potentially explosive social cleavages in the country. One such confrontation is between the secularist and pro-Islamist forces, which has always been one of the centrepieces of modern Turkish politics. The rise of pro-Islamist electoral forces from a marginal to an undeniably imposing position in Turkish electoral politics has led many to worry that a deep-rooted schism has come to the forefront of Turkish politics. The frontline of this secularist vs pro-Islamist confrontation is quite widespread ranging from a debate around the ban of turban and headscarves in universities to religious education in the country, from Islamic principles in the economy to Turkish foreign policy towards the Middle Eastern countries. This volume was previously published as a special issue of the journal Turkish Studies.

Widely known for her writings on Islam with a particular focus on the transnational history of politics in Islam and Japan, this volume brings together twenty of the author’s key essays that have been structured thematically.