Recently I received an interesting
email from someone who was interested in learning more about a topic related to
my research area and found my email address from the University.
The question posed
to me was quite simple; the gentleman wanted to learn about the
“Turkish revival”. There are many people who believe that there
is a Turkish revival (somewhere in Turkey) taking place right
now and that it can be explained with relative ease. If only it was
so straightforward and simple to explain…and then, would anyone, least of all
me, do justice to the so called ‘revival’? There is no denying that Turkey is
dynamic and growing - every second there is something ‘big’ happening that it
is difficult to keep up with the pace of things.
So I needed some clarification, some
specification and a slight narrowing down of the subject area to enable me to
attempt a reasonably intelligent response. The enquirer, clearly
keen to learn about the religious movements in Turkey, specified he wanted
to know more about the Hizmet Movement, Nur Movements, Nakshbendis and other
Sufi groups and their workings as they had become increasingly more visible
over the last decade.
As joyous as I was to have been
contacted by a fellow seeker of knowledge, I remained unable to respond via an
email to this request as the issue remained huge and complex.
Having pondered over the email a few
days later, I realised that though I was not able to provide a satisfactory
answer in an email response, I could attempt to write (excerpts) from my thesis
and elaborate on some of my thoughts occasionally. In this way, I
may be able to answer some of the gentleman’s query and additionally, I will be
able to consolidate my own research and knowledge by reminding myself of how
the Turkish Revival is unfolding each and every day.
In this series of articles I will
begin by providing a brief historical background of Turkey with regards to
religion and politics in particular. I will try to explain the
current political and religious situation and this may shed some
light on why the “revival” took place in quite a different manner (if it took
place at all) in Turkey. May be it will provide some mesn of comparison to
popular “Arab Spring”.
I hope this journey of research, reading,
writing and sharing will prove useful in some way...
All the best
