TRANSCENDING GENDER, POLITICIZING THE TRANSCENDENTAL

This section situates Islamist women intellectuals’ critiques of the sociologization of Muslim women within the broader discursive terrain of Islamic activism. I suggest that the intention and importance of their work stands largely outside existing scholarly approaches. A strand of feminist scholarship has emphasized Muslim women's active public engagement in and support for religious revivalism (including participation in Islamic associations, piety movements, and political party networks) in order to contest Orientalist, liberal, and secular depictions of Muslim women as passive, domesticated victims of a patriarchal religion.Footnote ¹⁶ This scholarship has claimed that Muslim women have, at times unwittingly, engaged in gender activism and have unsettled traditional gender norms and relations within their communities.Footnote ¹⁷ Another strand of scholarship on Islamist women's activism in Turkey has depicted these women's public work along two lines. Scholars have highlighted confrontations with state authorities over individual human rights, the secular codes of the republic, and prevailing notions of modernity (vis-à-vis women).Footnote ¹⁸ Others have identified a nascent feminism wherein Islamist women selectively adopt feminist arguments to carve out a space for personal liberation within the confines of Islam and challenge masculine control over gender in Islamic circles.Footnote ¹⁹ However, in both cases scholars use a framework that juxtaposes Islamist women's discourse and activism with the secular women's movement in Turkey. By exploring their parallels and divergences, these authors hope to foster a dialogue between these two seemingly opposed groups.

The writings of Şişman, Ramazanoğlu, Aktaş, and Barbarosoğlu demonstrate that Islamist women intellectuals have concerns that not only exceed existing scholarly accounts of Islamist politics but also appropriate and contest them. The themes addressed in their work include, but are not limited to, colonial and contemporary articulations of the “Muslim woman” as a political trope, the hegemonic nature of the secular public sphere, and the changing moral and ideological outlook of Islamist actors in Turkey since the late 1980s. Turning to their writings, I attempt to convey the broad scope of their thinking and the context in which they work, as well as to explain how they engage with academic discourse.

Over the last decade, Şişman and Ramazanoğlu have produced a body of literature addressing contemporary representations of women and Islam, specifically transnational discourses on Muslim women in the colonial and contemporary, post-9/11 eras. In this literature, they engage with and reference the works of established scholars affiliated with Western academic institutions such as Lila Abu-Lughod, Leila Ahmed, Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Nancy Fraser, Nilüfer Göle, Marnia Lazreg, Saba Mahmood, Chandra Mohanty, Joan Scott, and Amina Wadud. Their writing connects the academy with grassroots pious civil society by introducing, adopting, and contesting scholarly arguments and conceptual frameworks for a local audience. Drawing on these foreign sources, Ramazanoğlu and Şişman seek to reveal the historical and political forces that produce discursive constructs of women and Islam, both in the West and in the Muslim world, and to denaturalize the self-evident status they command.

For instance, addressing the category of “Muslim woman,” Şişman argues:

In this excerpt, Şişman notes that the category “Muslim woman” has become a trope useful to those bearing ideologically opposed agendas. Echoing feminist academic critiques of the War on Terror discourse, Şişman criticizes the savior narrative found in liberal feminist campaigns seeking to “save brown women from brown men,” a narrative that has accompanied and justified colonial and contemporary imperialist projects in the Muslim world. Yet she also criticizes Islamists who reverse, yet uncritically adopt, the terms of debate introduced by Orientalists.

Similar to Şişman, Ramazanoğlu offers a two-pronged analysis that problematizes both the corrective interventions embedded in the political trope of “oppressed Muslim women” as well as defensive Islamist postures that confront the essentialism of Orientalism with the essentialism of a reactionary conservatism, one that denies existing gender discrimination in the Muslim world and thereby distorts “the progressive, revolutionary message of Islamic teachings.”Footnote ²¹

These intellectuals draw upon feminist scholarship in the West (notably the work of Ahmed and Abu-Lughod) that has identified how feminist sensibilities for saving “other” women dovetail with imperialist politics. However, unlike many academic feminist critics (especially poststructuralists), they do not intend their analysis to be a deconstructive, theoretical exercise that refrains from affirming a politics based on transcendent foundations. Instead, as expected from organic intellectuals, they propose to their audience a concrete roadmap to intellectual emancipation. Through their work, they seek to mobilize an Islamic framework for a postfeminist Footnote ²² cultivation of a pious self that is divested of gender consciousness.

For instance, in Şişman's view, serious engagement with the political trope of the “Muslim woman” requires developing a perspective from within Islam that is emancipated from the narrow lens of neo-Orientalist theses, essentialist gendered perspectives on social ills that reduces these ills solely to women's concerns, and defensive Islamist counterarguments.Footnote ²³ Similarly, for Ramazanoğlu contesting the contemporary regime of representation of Muslim women requires not the development of gender consciousness among Muslim women or the catalysis of a clash of sexes, but rather the cultivation of a conscious Muslim self among both men and women.Footnote ²⁴ Thus, these authors explicitly disavow the term “feminist” to describe their intellectual endeavors. Rather than an attempt to explicitly further feminist goals, their critique of imperialist feminism in the Muslim world seeks to raise critical consciousness among Muslim women of the transnational discourses that shape their intellectual horizons. In addition to this immediate aim, their critique strives to service a higher, transcendental project of development (aşkın bir tekamül)Footnote ²⁵ situated on the ontological plane, namely, devotion to God. In sum, although their criticism of the politics of the category “victimized Muslim women” in the post-9/11 era is formulated with systematic reference to (postcolonial) gender scholars, Islamist women intellectuals part company with their feminist (academic) interlocutors via the foundationalist politics (of piety) in which they ground their criticism.

Another important theme in the work of these intellectuals is the dialogical relationship between the secular public sphere and the conservative pious sector in Turkey. Over the past thirty years, in an attempt to achieve greater public recognition, Islamists in Turkey have engaged the public sphere. Yet Barbarosoğlu and Şişman, who consider the public sphere a site of discipline and domestication, question the effects that such politicking may have on the consciousness and religious subjectivities of Muslims:

Furthermore, the authors contend that treating the public sphere as the end goal of Islamist struggle, or, in the words of Barbarosoğlu, as “the sine qua non sphere of existence and self-fulfillment,” risks distracting followers from the grand politics of ontological emancipation. The authors commonly make this argument in the context of the headscarf advocacy that marked the beginning of pious women's engagement with the secular public sphere in the 1980s. Through sit-ins, marches, protests, and demonstrations, veiled university students confronted Turkey's official ban on the Islamic headscarf in state institutions. Yet, through this public engagement, some pious women activists entered “a process of change wherein they eschewed the responsibility of developing a political project of transforming society.”Footnote ²⁷ Accordingly, the activists’ focus on victimization (of veiled university students) deprived them of a grand project and vision for life beyond the immediate exigencies of politics. From the perspective of Barbarosoğlu and Şişman, this transformation amounts to the displacement of morality and the spirit of Islam by everyday politics.Footnote ²⁸

In addition to circumscribing a broader moral and political vision, the authors argue that Islamist reconciliation with the secular public sphere risks transforming the political discourse of pious actors. As evidence, they explain how supporters of the Islamic headscarf in the 1980s and 1990s framed their struggle not in terms of an Islamic imperative but in terms of human rights and the freedom of religious expression. For Barbarosoğlu and Şişman, the headscarf advocates’ rescripting of veiling as a free choice is problematic because it turns a divine command and religious duty into a matter of individual choice understood and defended in liberal-secular terms. This use of liberal discourse, they point out, reflects the unequal power dynamics between pious women and their secular and liberal peers.

Drawing on her personal experience, Şişman illustrates the way in which pious women must account for their beliefs, practices, and desires when communicating with secular interlocutors:

In politicizing the exchange between pious women and their secular interlocutors in the public sphere, Islamist women writers make a twofold argument. They contend that this exchange is structured by a power differential that reinstates the positional superiority of the secular interviewer, and that, relatedly, the exchange transforms the subjectivities of pious women, who, in confronting their interlocutors, find themselves obliged to reverse their hegemonic terms.

For instance, noting how liberal-secular constructions of women's public piety become self-referential, Barbarosoğlu argues that pious women build their self-understanding in opposition to their interlocutors’ theses. As she points out, “when challenged by secularists who argue that they have been forced to veil by their husbands, pious women adopt a radical feminist discourse to prove them wrong.” “Told that veiling symbolizes a political affiliation,” Barbarosoğlu goes on, “they publicly denounce any interest in politics.”Footnote ³⁰ Rather than defend the ontological meaning of veiling in terms of “the journey one takes to shorten the distance between God and subject [kul],”Footnote ³¹ they resort to individualistic, feminist accounts for their veiling. In the view of both authors, this process implies the subversion of Islamic practices by liberal discourse, wherein the unequal terms of public exchange saturate both the political lexicon and the subjectivities of pious women.

In sum, whereas scholarship has focused on the challenge Islamist women activists pose to Kemalist and Islamist gender discourses in Turkey, I argue that their public agency exceeds the boundaries of the gender politics field. As I have shown, Islamist women intellectuals draw on academic feminist scholarship (especially critiques of imperialist feminism) to contest contemporary representations of women and Islam, while disavowing the term feminist and explicitly seeking to disseminate greater piety in society. Their writings since the 1990s also provide a reflexive and counterhegemonic view of Islamism in Turkey. The authors highlight how mundane politics predicated on a liberal lexicon and pursued in liberal political spaces—the public sphere—can deflect pious actors from a grand politics premised on the ontological bond between man and the Creator. They also underscore how national and transnational discourses (e.g., the victimized Muslim woman stereotype) consolidate the power hierarchies between pious Muslims and their secular interlocutors, and have transformative effects on Muslim subjectivities.

UNPACKING SOCIOLOGIZATION: MAKING OBJECTS AND SUBJECTS

Since the late 1990s, Islamist women intellectuals have turned to challenging the nature of their exchanges with academic interlocutors and the analytical categories that have ensued from them. This challenge is particularly pertinent to Turkish academics (expatriate or local) who have attempted to investigate, categorize, and define the piety politics of Islamist women, and have published their monographs in Turkish (thereby more effectively reaching Islamist circles). In this section, I examine the ways in which Islamist women intellectuals confront what Ramazanoğlu calls the conversion of Muslim women into objects of research (araştırma nesnesi).Footnote ³² This objectification of Muslim women is one part of the process of what I have termed sociologization, which also includes a reverse dynamic of subjectification wherein scholarly categories reenter the social universe they describe.

In academic research, Ramazanoğlu notes, Muslim women become “defined, counted, categorized, observed but invisible, mysterious, exotic, an alluring deviation, researched but inexplicable.”Footnote ³³ Like others of her generation, she is frustrated at “being made, in a new round of Orientalist scholarship, an object of scholarly curiosity after the publication of Said's Orientalism.” The new terrain opened by Orientalism gave rise to “numerous Western women taking research trips to Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Turkey, etc., to meet the women of the Muslim world to investigate their persistent attachment to that archaic belief in [today's] cyber times.”Footnote ³⁴ Exasperated, she writes, “as women of my generation, we do not even recall the number of interviews we have given.”Footnote ³⁵

For Ramazanoğlu, the growing scholarly interest in women's Islamic activism entails a process of objectification (nesne olmak) whereby scholars fail to understand pious women on their own terms.Footnote ³⁶ In many sociological accounts, the author argues, the demands and desires of pious women as subjects, mediated by the analysts’ interpretation of women's subjectivities and practices, do not find their way into printed work. Ramazanoğlu even criticizes works relying primarily on first-person narratives, which seek to avoid reducing pious women's meanings and practices to the analyst's toolkit.Footnote ³⁷ Ramazanoğlu contends that the scholar's decision to “grant these young women the opportunity to speak for themselves” amounts to an “elitist, patronizing standpoint, even though it is scientifically glossed by a hermeneutic approach that utilizes the principle of empathy according to which the objects of analysis are taken as rational beings and their claims as reasonable.”Footnote ³⁸ How could using extensive first-person narrative accounts be patronizing? For Ramazanoğlu, voicing the concerns and demands of pious women, even in their own idiom, discards the intersubjectivity of knowledge production, that is, the reciprocity and connective relations between researcher and object of research. Seen in this light, objectification is not the degree of hermeneutic distance between the analyst's narrative and the lived experience of the subjects whom she studies. As put by Hafez, the asymmetrical power relations in the field encounter generate specific conditions of authorship enabling the interviewer to render the interviewee epistemologically available and place her in the position of Other.Footnote ³⁹ Advancing this point, Ramazanoğlu borrows a passage from the Islamist sociologist Mualla Gülnaz, who narrates the encounter between female social scientists and pious women in Turkey:

Postcolonial feminist criticism has described how, through their writings on colonial women, bourgeois European women of the Victorian era achieved a sense of authoritative selfhood denied at home. These women gained subjecthood in part by “simulating the sovereign masculine discourse” in relation to their same-sex cultural Others.Footnote ⁴¹ Gülnaz's criticism identifies a similar process at play in empirical social analysis, with native women social scientists emerging as sovereign authors and agents of knowledge at the expense of the fellow women whom they research. In this process, native women researchers join the ranks of the “theoreticians of the North” while their objects of inquiry are relegated to the ranks of the “informants of the South.”Footnote ⁴² Extrapolating from the observations of Ramazanoğlu and Gülnaz, one could argue that scholarly research relying on a positivist epistemology, which assigns an objective, detached, knowing, and historically masculine subject position to the woman analyst, objectifies its research subjects by discarding the multiple ways in which the researcher is intricately bound up with the subject position of her interlocutors.

Şişman similarly problematizes the objectification of pious Muslim women in social scientific analyses. However, she emphasizes the constraining nature of generalizing categories and their limited ability to encompass the singular, lived experience of devout women. Focused on the category “Muslim women,” Şişman contends that it is unsuitable for sociological analysis because it relies on the faulty presumption that women's lives in the regions making up the “Muslim world” or the “Middle East” are primarily shaped by religion, thus disregarding the diversity of women's engagements with Islam. Demonstrating the social life of academic discourse, Şişman's critique is indebted to the work of foreign feminist scholars such as Marnia Lazreg and Chandra Mohanty, as she acknowledges in her footnotes.Footnote ⁴³

On the personal level, explaining her reluctance to take part in TV shows or to give interviews to journalists and academics, Şişman cites her objection to being coded as a “headscarved” woman. She sees this common form of coding as a process of objectification (nesneleştirme süreci) whereby pious women are reduced to “headscarf advocates.” As Şişman points out, “I don't build my subjectivity upon the headscarf, nor do I perceive myself primarily as ‘headscarved’ or a woman.”Footnote ⁴⁴ As one of the first headscarved students at Boğaziçi University in the 1980s, and later one of the most prominent Islamist women intellectuals in Turkey, Şişman has been a desirable figure for researchers, but she has sought to keep her distance:

Şişman and Ramazanoğlu have both experienced firsthand the sociologization of Muslim women beginning in the 1980s, and problematized it based on the asymmetrical ground of the research encounter and the incongruence between their self-understanding and their analytical reflections in social scientific accounts. They call into question not only the relationship between scholar and studied, but also the manner in which the former erects the categories into which the latter fall.

Paradoxically, the same process of sociological objectification partakes in Muslim women's subjectification through the interpellative power of analytical categories and typologies. For Aktaş, the sociological objectification of Muslim women as a fixed category of collective affiliation risks permeating and contaminating their self-understanding. She argues that “to let oneself be defined by others is a state of weakness that begins with taking these representations seriously, which increasingly confines you to the narrow field of such discursive constructs.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Seen in this light, scholarly categories used to describe and differentiate Islamist actors are not inconsequential, abstract, discursive constructs with little materiality in real life. To the contrary, they enter the social world, infusing and shaping the vernacular knowledge and vocabulary used by social actors in understanding their own and others’ endeavors. Moreover, as they are politicized and inform tactics of discipline, they acquire novel meanings and functions.

Aktaş seeks to identify such categories and typologies within Islamist discourse and to problematize them. Focused on studies of the “modern veiled women,” she deconstructs the traditional–modern typology characteristic of the literature. This iconic figure of the post-1980 scholarly literature, she points out, presents an ambiguity, synthesizing piety and modernity, which in liberal-secular post-Enlightenment thought are considered mutually exclusive. To illustrate this ambiguity, Aktaş underlines “the sense of discomfort felt by those who name and designate [isim koyucu ve tanımlayıcılar] at the sight of a woman wearing a chador [çarşaf] and playing ping pong.” Aktaş goes on to note how the traditional–modernist typology operates within Islamic circles:

Within Islamic sectors, these widely used analytical concepts function as accusations and political markers, marginalizing and disciplining those seen to deviate from established modes of piety. Seen in this light, “adjectives such as ‘fundamentalist’ or ‘modernist,’ freely circulating around,” amount to “regulatory interventions” that target heterodox voices and incite them to disavow their positions.Footnote ⁴⁸ Aktaş warns her readers of the political uses and effects of analytical categories on pious Muslims, asserting that “modern Muslim subjects—distanced from the quest for meaning and struggling among the ruins of neither-traditional-nor-modern lifestyles—increasingly become oblivious to discursive processes whereby their subjectivity is torn into pieces through numerous terms and adjectives.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Critical awareness of the interpellative effects of scholarly categories on Muslim subjectivities leads her to a broader acknowledgement (shared by Şişman and Barbarosoğlu) of the need for intellectual efforts to generate an Islamic vocabulary through which to recuperate the power of representing oneself in one's own terms. In lamentation, Aktaş asks, “where are our own concepts, our unique point of view?”Footnote ⁵⁰ The attempt to generate an indigenous social science tradition, an Islamic sociology of knowledge, is a central component of Islamist intellectual activism in Turkey and elsewhere.Footnote ⁵¹ Islamist women intellectuals’ first step in that direction, as demonstrated in their writings, is to engage with social scientific accounts and highlight the political (both regulatory and subjectifying) work done by seemingly apolitical, neutral, and scientific categories.

The criticisms outlined in this section—that the autonomous authorship of the analyst and the generalizing categories of social scientific analysis subdue women's lived experience—highlight two means of objectification. First, it occurs through research methods, particularly the positivist epistemologies informing the field encounter between academics and their interlocutors. Even the act of giving voice to Muslim women by reporting their first-person narratives is considered by Ramazanoğlu as othering, patronizing, and categorizing, suggesting that objectification occurs when the exchange between researcher and researched fails to account for the intersubjectivity of knowledge production (the dialogical constitution of research subjects and objects). Absent this condition, the authority of the researcher to question, arbitrate, and voice the researched is reinforced.

Second, objectification occurs through the outputs of research. According to Şişman, generalizing categories, which scholars generate to increase analytical leverage, turn a blind eye to the individual singularity of women's lived experience. This critique springs from a phenomenology of subjective, lived experience: Islamist women intellectuals are simultaneously objects and subjects of knowledge on Muslim women. From this broader perspective emerges a critical discourse wherein subjects of social scientific research speak back to the academic community, calling into question certain sociological accounts of women's piety.

Third and finally, for scholars seeking reflexive accounts of piety politics, it is notable that categories springing from academic discourse can enter into the debates of our objects of study, including these local Islamist dialogues. In this regard, academic categories participate in the continual re-formation of subject positions within the lifeworld of Islamism. Aktaş’s commentary on the politics of analytical categories is particularly illuminating for at least two reasons: it bears testimony to the extent to which “lay members of society routinely reincorporate social science concepts and findings into the world these were coined to illuminate or explain”Footnote ⁵² ; and it points to a novel area of investigation for reflexive, interpretive research into piety politics. Social scientists can gain a critical distance from their disenchanted vocabulary by tracing the entry of social scientific discourses into the social worlds they analyze, the new lives they take on in local contexts, and the new subjectivities they help foster. This reflexivity requires an exploration of the novel meanings scholarly categories may acquire, the ways in which they influence local processes of self-formation and public activism, and how they become entangled in asymmetrical power relations.

ISLAMIST WOMEN SPEAK BACK TO SOCIAL SCIENTISTS

Based on textual analysis of their writings, this section describes three distinct but interrelated critical responses of Islamist women intellectuals to certain scholarly frameworks used in theorizing the relation between piety and politics. I will address each criticism in detail, and conclude by reflecting upon the significance of their work for social scientists.

The first response is to contest the political-instrumentalist explanation of embodied pious practices, such as veiling, common to some social scientific accounts. Şişman argues that sociological research conducted since the mid-1980s has predominantly framed the analysis of veiled university students in Turkey either in terms of identity politics (clashing cultures, subaltern identities) or political movements.Footnote ⁵³ Accordingly, many studies have explained the increased public visibility of women's piety practices in instrumentalist terms. For example, scholarship has portrayed the veil either as an instrument for asserting cultural identity, specifically one that contests the pseudo-liberation promised by Western, secular, and capitalist models of women's emancipation, and/or as a propaganda tool of political Islam. Despite a shared concern for the content and effects of these accounts, such as the political saturation of the veil, Islamist women intellectuals respond to academic discussions of veiling in a variety of ways. Aktaş, for instance, emphasizes the local multiplicity of motives, desires, and subjectivities of veiled women. By contrast, Şişman seeks to contextualize contemporary veiling within a broader transnational context, pointing to the geopolitical and intellectual power asymmetries between the West and the Muslim world.

The second response is to pinpoint the limitations of sociological categories of analysis for properly depicting ontological categories of practice such as religious devotion. This intellectual reaction—to defend “the religious” as a sphere of its own (germane to the “ontological” bond between the Creator and the created) against an encroaching “sociological”—may have been triggered by the salience of instrumentalist explanations of piety politics in social scientific accounts. But it is not wholly reactive; it also suggests a critical rethinking of the relationship between the secular epistemology of social science and practices of piety that forge an ontological relationship to the divine.Footnote ⁵⁴

The third response is to challenge scholarly depictions of contemporary veiling movements and Islamic revivalism as an “alternative modernity” that initiates a radical break from traditional forms of religiosity. Such depictions are seen to downplay the phenomenon of “persisting religiosity” (dini süreklilik) in Muslim societies.

In terms of the first critique, Islamist women intellectuals have criticized Nilüfer Göle's Modern Mahrem (Forbidden Modern) for its political-instrumentalist interpretation of embodied pious practices. Göle's book examines the post-1983 Islamist veiling movement among university students in Turkey, which she describes as the expression of “politicized religion asserting a collective identity against modernity.”Footnote ⁵⁵ In her account, veiling appears as a discursive symbol used to convey a political message, especially resistance to Western modernity and sympathy for an alternative politics grounded in the moral code of Islam. Since its publication in Turkish in 1991, the book has been widely read in Turkey's college classrooms and, importantly, widely discussed among the women whom the study attempted to understand. For the Islamist columnist Hilal Kaplan, the book is a pioneer in identifying Islamist women “as an object of analysis” at a time when they were treated as “pathologized subalterns denied a voice as interlocutors.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Yet, the Islamist intellectuals analyzed in this article contest Göle's reading of veiling as a political statement for its inability to accurately capture both the subjectivities of those who wear it and the meanings they attribute to the practice (which is what Göle had set out to do through in-depth interviews and focus groups).

In short, Göle considers the public presence of the veil in Turkish universities to be exemplary of the political project of “radical Islam.” From Barbarosoğlu's perspective, this understanding originates in a fundamental misinterpretation of veiling and of the terms in which pious women describe their practices. Upon being asked their motivations for pursuing higher education, veiled students replied: tebliğ (transmission of Islamic faith). Many, including Göle, used this response to connect the veil to political proselytization. Against this, Barbarosoğlu argues:

For Barbarosoğlu, tebliğ exceeds the narrow definition of mobilizing a constituency for Islamist parties or movements. Rather than a political instrument, it is part of an ethical project of living and spreading the message of Islam, through which individual believers contribute to the betterment of the community. As she points out, articles of faith incumbent on Muslims, such as veiling and tebliğ, belong to a “higher politics” (yüksek siyaset) that transcends Islamist organizations and their immediate political agenda. They attest to one's subjection to the commands of her Creator.Footnote ⁵⁸

Echoing this critique, Şişman claims that Göle ignores the religious content (dini muhteva) of tebliğ while scripting it as a technique of political proselytization. She also contends that Göle errs in viewing veiling as a symbol of the transition from a Muslim to an Islamist identity. In her essay, Göle argues that through the voluntary adoption of the veil European Muslim women resist Western stereotypes and turn a stigmatized symbol into a means of prestige by asserting that “the veil is emancipatory.”Footnote ⁵⁹ While acknowledging that one cannot completely deny the existence of such an anti-imperialist motive for religiosity, Şişman responds that reducing the veil to an identity marker or a political stance, a common move in political-instrumentalist accounts of Islamic revivalism, amounts to discarding what she considers an essential facet of religious practice (more on this shortly). Even as veiled women presented religious motives for their veiling practices, it was this sort of instrumentalist analysis that came to dominate media, political, and academic discourse.Footnote ⁶⁰

Characteristic of this shift is the rise of the term türban within Turkish politics. The secular state, the media, and academia began using this term to differentiate the veil worn by urban, young, educated, and publicly pious Turkish women from the “domesticated, apolitical, presumably authentic, Anatolian-style headscarf [başörtüsü] worn by women of modest socioeconomic backgrounds, who make no claims to enter the public sphere.”Footnote ⁶¹ The türban, unlike the traditional headscarf, is understood as a political signifier because it is worn by women who pursue higher education, seek professional careers, and insist on being accepted as equals in the public sphere without renouncing what they consider to be pious behavior.Footnote ⁶²

Contrary to this political framing of the veil as an instrument of political Islam, Aktaş presents a microanalytical intervention to recuperate the multiple meanings attributed to veiling by its practitioners:

Aktaş’s commentary is illustrative of the ways in which Islamist women intellectuals seek to complicate the association of the veil with political instrumentality. Though these intellectuals emphasize the connection between veiling and religious devotion (to God), they differ in how they resignify contemporary veiling to counter predominant academic theses. Aktaş underlines the contingency and multiplicity of significations of veiling seen from the perspective of local practitioners. In emphasizing women's situated agency and unique experience, she calls into question the explanatory power of generalizing categories and arguments that inform instrumentalist accounts of piety politics. It is possible to argue that her ethnographic observations point to a phenomenology of women's lived experience as an appropriate epistemology for studying women's piety politics.

Şişman, by contrast, rethinks the political meaning of veiling in late modernity using a transnational, theoretical frame of analysis (as opposed to Aktaş’s local, ethnographic lens that underlines the polysemy of veiling). In her book, Headscarf: The New Frontier of a Borderless World, Şişman depicts the veiled body as symbolic of liminality. She argues that today the veil functions as a boundary marker between two distinct conceptions of the body: “a late modern imaginary of the body as independent of the soul and the afterworld, freed from the responsibility of reproducing [humankind], versus a conception of the body subject to the regulation of a religion, a worldview that draws a frontier from outside/above.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Piety, with its metaphysical ordering of human life through divine laws, operates as the disavowed yet constitutive outside of a liberal cosmopolitanism that thrives on the secular humanistic values of the Enlightenment.

In this context, the veil acquires multiple functions and becomes more than a veil. It is the new frontier of a borderless globalized world:

Şişman's reading asserts that in the face of a globalizing secular and liberal public ethos, the veil primarily expresses an ontological belonging (as submission to divine regulations) rather than a narrow political affiliation with Islamist parties. Situating contemporary piety practices in a subaltern position relative to the hegemony of global liberal humanism, she theorizes the veil as “the frontier of a globalized world” where it acquires greater political meaning. The veil brings into existence a counterhegemonic form of being-in-public, one that invokes the limit of the liberal-secular morality of the globalized world order. Seen in this light, the veil can no longer be understood solely in the context of individuals, nation-states, and domestic political and social environments, but necessitates a transnational analysis that examines piety practices in the context of regnant ideologies of globalization.

This leads us to their second line of critique. From the vantage point of the Islamist women intellectuals under analysis, scholars who translate religious behavior into the secular language of the social sciences do not give adequate attention to the ontological plane of piety. As Aktaş’s and Şişman's earlier comments underline, actual veiling can stem from a multiplicity of individual motives and acquire a diversity of meanings in different social and historical contexts. Nevertheless, the authors concur that piety practices mainly assert an ontological statement of the individual's submission to divine laws, which proffers the possibility of a transcendental home, a state of being-at-home. For Barbarosoğlu, an autonomously undertaken pious practice such as “covering one's hair of one's own accord” is an “ontological stance, which cannot be understood through sociological categories.”Footnote ⁶⁷ The “sociological” is derived from and assumes the presence of observable entities, but hidayet, the process of “being guided into the true faith” by forging a vertical relationship with the divine, cannot be fully comprehended by its observable dimension, the veil.Footnote ⁶⁸ Barbarosoğlu is also skeptical of the extent to which hidayet can be narrated. In published testimonies about their veiling, urban and well-educated pious women commonly pointed to hidayet as their motivation.Footnote ⁶⁹ However, Barbarosoğlu sees such attempts to speak about the unspeakable as potentially corroding the ontological substance of veiling, for “the body of the words cannot haul the metaphysical.”Footnote ⁷⁰

Compared to Barbarosoğlu, Şişman sees this incongruity in less strict terms: on the one hand, she highlights the “acute blindness of modern social sciences” when it comes to interpreting religious practices such as veiling in their ontological dimension. On the other hand, she acknowledges the partial truth of instrumentalist accounts that examine the resurgence of public piety in relation to socioeconomic and political processes: “it is not possible to ignore the fact that religious practices, especially veiling, acquired a social and political symbolism as a result of transformations, traumatic encounters and processes in the modern era.”Footnote ⁷¹ For Şişman, the challenge facing the social sciences is to overcome the assumption that the sole parameters for comprehending piety are its social and political dimensions.Footnote ⁷²

Seeking to problematize the paucity of social scientific attention to the ontological foundation of piety politics, Aktaş asks in astonishment how it is that an individual reaching divine guidance (hidayet) comes to be defined as “an auxiliary element in the current of political Islam rising from the slums.” Continuing, she asks, “how is it that she, having experienced the pride of possessing the most meaningful existential explanation stretching from this to the otherworld, gets to be seen as a member of an ephemeral movement born as a reaction to modernism, as the component of a problem of adaptation [to modernity]?”Footnote ⁷³ Aktaş’s inquiry encapsulates a major contention shared in the writings of all three authors and around which their other critiques revolve—the perceived dissonance between modern social science and individual religious devotion.

In pursuing the protocols of academic conversation, social scientists often disavow the tensions endemic to translating the plural embodiments of piety into abstract, generalizing categories that are intelligible to other social scientists working in diverse sites.Footnote ⁷⁴ In that vein, Aktaş’s aforementioned differentiation between the enchanted world of divine submission and guidance and the disenchanted language of instrumentalist social scientific accounts reverberates with the question posed by Chakrabarty to students of postcolonial and subaltern studies: “as we render this enchanted world into our disenchanted prose, a rendering required, let us say, in the interest of social justice, how do we, in doing this, still retain the subaltern (in whose activity gods or spirits present themselves) as the subjects of their histories?”Footnote ⁷⁵ Chakrabarty's question is not intended to point to the impossibility of crosscategorical translations between the divine and the secular, for these are integral to social scientific enterprise. Instead, it calls analysts committed to retaining the subaltern as the subjects of their histories and narratives to be cognizant of the finitude of “the universal middle term” (i.e., scholarly terms) in translating across categories and, furthermore, to make visible the tensions endemic to the act of translating “nonsecular phenomenologies” and discourses into the secular narratives of social science. It is in this sense that Islamist women intellectuals’ critical interpretations of their social scientific portrayals matter for scholars: they help us to recognize, in the words of Chakrabarty, “the existence of scandal in the very formation of our sociological categories.”Footnote ⁷⁶

The third line of critique, shared by all three authors, is exemplified by Şişman's concept of the “persistence of religiosity” (dini süreklilik), which seeks to contest accounts that consider contemporary public piety to be novel, (alternatively) modern, and arising out of socioeconomic and political variables.Footnote ⁷⁷ According to Şişman, scholars have read the “resurgence” of public piety in Turkey against the backdrop of Islamic revivalism in the 1980s, and as an emergent (nevzuhur) albeit marginal political phenomenon in a secular republic. Additionally, the appearance of novel urban manners of veiling (e.g., the so-called türban, which differs from Anatolian traditions of covering) have led analysts to frame piety politics as (alternatively) modern and indicative of a break from past tradition. For Şişman, this conclusion has largely glossed over the old wine in a new bottle, that is, continuous modes of religious practice and devotion.Footnote ⁷⁸

Pursuing this argument, Şişman seeks to reverse the terms of exchange between secular subjects and pious objects of sociological research. From her standpoint, the object of sociological inquiry should be as follows:

Similarly, Barbarosoğlu argues that sociological research “should seek to explain societal deviations such as not wanting to cover. . . . Why does a woman cover her hair? Because God grants guidance to whomever He wishes.”Footnote ⁸⁰ For the authors under analysis, the paradox and irony in the sociological interest in Islamist women, who are coded as a “recent, modern, pathological product”Footnote ⁸¹ of socioeconomic and political processes, is that it is those who carry out these studies (that is, secular academics) who are nevzuhur (emergent), not the objects of their analysis.

As all three criticisms demonstrate, Islamist women intellectuals critically engage with several social scientific accounts of piety politics in Turkey, specifically the political-instrumentalist strand and the alternative modernities paradigm. They argue that sociological categories of analysis fail to properly depict native categories of pious practice. More specifically, these authors suggest that the ontological dimension of piety has been undertheorized in many social scientific analyses, which approach piety from an instrumentalist lens and contextualize its “resurgence” within existing social, economic, and political structures and processes. Taken together, these dialogical engagements constitute a context-specific instantiation of the social life of academic discourse and bear witness to the “mutual interpretative interplay between social science and those whose activities compose its subject matter.”Footnote ⁸² Extrapolating from the tensions that surface in these engagements, I suggest in the conclusion that were scholars to take a reflexive approach and investigate the “informed sociological reflections” of lay practitioners, they would deliver a more refined understanding of their subject matter (in this case, piety politics).