Twelfth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

Neo-Ottomanism as a political ideology has been a major component of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey, particularly since 2007. It is based on the aim to revitalize the glory of the Ottoman Empire in contemporary Turkey with a nationalist and Islamic reinterpretation of history, which is also predominantly patriarchal. Cultural reflections of the ideology have also been widely seen in daily life, popular culture, and media, primarily in TV series and Islamist news media, newspapers, and magazines. This paper is based on a research project which studies how this ideology is reproduced in different Islamist women’s journals and magazines. The research aims to understand and emphasize the creative agencies of the women editors and authors of the publications in reproducing, aestheticizing, and popularizing neo-Ottomanism. The first set of data is obtained from the archive research covering the period 2007-2021 of five journals representing different Islamic groups, communities, and life-styles. The second set of data is based on interviews with the editors and authors of these publications. In addition to offering a comparative textual and visual analysis of this media, the paper argues that this discourse of nostalgia for the Ottoman history offers a spiritual shelter, a vision for future, and means of building and expressing a nationalist-Islamist identity for women in the unstable and spiritually perplexing nature of the contemporary Turkish society.