Cinar vs. Mitchell

This weekend we're posting on Modernity, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey by Alev Çinar. Here are some of the thoughts I have on this book:

I noticed a couple parallel concepts between Çinar's work and Timothy Mitchell's Colonising Egypt. The first is Mitchell's concept of enframing (Mitchell, ch. 2). Part of Çinar's overall thesis is that both the secular state and the Islamist movement made "modernization interventions" that relate to public spaces. These interventions involve restructuring various public spaces, particularly the spaces of center vs. periphery. Çinar argues that this restructuring is a manifestation of the political/ideological rivalry between secularism and Islam. The idea of architecture reflecting ideology is the key concept in enframing. In Egypt, the colonizers restructured public (and even private) spaces for the purposes of enumeration and control. In Turkey, secularist construction created a new center of power and control. One distinction, though, between enframing in these two contexts is that in Turkey it created only binaries (e.g. urban/rural, Çinar p. 31), but it Egypt it created multiple tiers of socioeconomic status.

The second parallel concept between Çinar and Mitchell is the idea of the "world as an exhibition" (Mitchell, ch. 1) To summarize simply, Mitchell describes the world as an exhibition as a façade that represents something else, the reality. In chapter 1 of Turkey, Çinar describes the public sphere in a similar way: that it is a "field of appearances, visibilities, and performances" and is where national identity is negotiated. The public sphere is very much like a façade.

A theme that I noticed in Çinar's book is that, in all the three types of modernizing interventions talked about, Islam reacts to secularism. Regarding the interventions relating to bodies, secularism denounced aspects of daily life (e.g. the veil) to rescue the body from oppressive Islam. In turn, Islamism did the same thing, but in reverse (e.g. reclaiming the veil to re-rescue the body from secularism, and to try to return to an "Ottoman-Islamic" civilization. Regarding the interventions relating to places, secularism created new centers by building from scratch, whereas Islamism challenged these very constructions by inserting their Ottoman-Islamic symbols into these centers, essentially reclaiming the centers. Finally, this is true in the interventions relating to times as well. Secularism restructured time around a founding moment that rendered the state in control of the nation's history. Then Islamism regained control over time by creating a system of public commemorations of Ottoman-Islamic experiences, thus incorporating Ottoman-Islamic history back into Turkey's national identity.

In all these interventions, we see that Islamism is reactive. But is this because the Islamist interventions occurred chronologically after the secularist interventions? Or is it because Islam is inherently reactive? Or perhaps Islam is inherently reactive, but only when it has something valuable (e.g. bodies, public spaces, and national history) to defend? You can argue that secularism provoked Islamism by being the initial oppressors, thus giving Islamism a legitimate reason to react. But the question still stands: what, if anything, does Islamism's reactivity reveal about Islamism?

-GGM