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Paper short abstract

Where do the technical and the devotional meet in Turkey's digital religious landscape? This paper examines how digital religious artifacts, such as prayer counters, mediate the quantification and temporal ordering of religious obligation through design.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how digital artifacts of Islamic practice in Turkey mediate the relationship between pious devotion, digital quantification, and state governance of religion. Drawing on interviews and interface analysis, it traces how objects such as apps for prayer timing, pens that recite the Quran, and digital prayer counters reorganize the rhythms of Islamic devotion through new logics of notification and progress tracking. STS literature has demonstrated these technologies are never neutral delivery mechanisms for content, but infrastructures that organize social relations and temporal experiences. Building on this insight, the paper conceptualizes these devices as infrastructures that compose new forms of moral temporalities that shape how religious obligation is sensed and practiced. We are particularly interested in how these objects mediate the sensing of religious obligation and the “valuation” of devotional labor. When a prayer counter quantifies repetitive prayer into a data trail, or when a prayer rug teaches correct bodily posture through embedded sensors, what happens to the moral meaning of endurance, discipline, and sincerity that traditionally anchor Islamic piety? How does the notification logic of the smartphone reshape the phenomenology of sacred time? By situating these artifacts within Turkey's distinctive arrangement of state-managed religion through the Presidency of Religious Affairs, the paper asks how bureaucratic and devotional infrastructures converge into a single digital interface. We ask what forms of hybrid piety emerge at this intersection, and how the boundary between the technical and the devotional is not materially produced through design decisions.