Paper short abstract:

Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey on an alternative health network that observes Islamic and prophetic medicine, I inquire into the interaction of religion, therapeutic uncertainty, and future anticipation with a focus on the temporalization of the lived present as the "end times".

Paper long abstract:

Being ingrained in Islamic eschatology, the notion of the end times informs my interlocutors' moral striving with an orientation towards worldly and otherworldly futures. Treating the end times as "affective time" which is experienced collectively and resembles the working of the "times of war" (Bryant and Knight 2019), I will demonstrate how this temporalization denotes anticipating apocalypse and shapes my research participants' truth and knowledge claims in overcoming therapeutic uncertainty in their quest to lead healthy and moral lives. I will proceed to detail that the deterioration of the seeds, genetically modified foods, ecologically harmful materials as well as biotechnological practices involved in in-vitro fertilization, milk banks, sperm banks are all seen by my research participants as signs of an approaching apocalypse. While anticipating apocalypse induces fear, it also generates hope with a motivation of keeping the faith strong in the end times and taking responsibility for changing lifestyles. This requires my interlocutors to take care of the body, regulate the consumption habits, and embrace Islamic healing methods as part of the "embodied apocalypse" (Webster 2021). I will conclude with a discussion that taking care of the body in my research community intersects with the Islamic notion of individual fight (jihad) which translates into taming the self (nafs) and resisting the practices of international pharmaceutical companies in close relation to my interlocutors' conviction that the truth and purity would manifest themselves in the end times, be it in the form of food, cleaning materials, and therapeutic modalities.