Paper short abstract:

This paper comparatively examines the formation of Islamic canon and its critiques in Turkey, particularly focusing on the the AKP's religious policies within and beyond its borders. It also examines the critiques of Anti-Capitalist Muslims and Kurdish mosques of liberation in Turkey and Europe.

Paper long abstract:

Since the early 2000s, the notion of shared religion and Islamic fraternity has been utilised by the Islamist government of Turkey to govern its Kurdish subjects and incorporate them into an ethnically blind supranational identity of the imagined Muslim ummah. As a result, religious politics has become an integral part of the century-long Turkish-Kurdish conflict. On one hand, the AKP government's consolidation of power and mobilisation of massive resources consolidated its power over pious Muslim subjects and created complicit entities via Islamic civil society organisations in the Kurdish region of Turkey. On the other hand, critical Muslim voices, within and beyond Turkish borders, started to transform prayers and religious spaces/practices into platforms of resistance to imagine non-canonical alternative ways of religiosity free from oppression and assimilation. This paper examines these emerging sites of resistance through examples of Civil Friday prayers, protests, and critiques of Anti-capitalist Muslims in Turkey and the emergence of Kurdish mosques of liberation in Europe. By relying on multi-sited ethnographic research in Turkey, France, Germany, and the UK, I argue that the omnipresence of religious references in the Turkish political discourses and activities has deepened and accelerated further divides among its critical religious Kurdish and Turkish citizens. Although these divides and critiques are constantly suppressed by the AKP government in Turkey, a new proliferation of Kurdish mosques across Europe in the past decade is indicative of a radical transformation that undoes and deconstructs the binary of prayer and protest or sacred and profane.