since i'm moving into a realm which could potentially be viewed as part of Islamic theology, i'm going to keep this post brief. there is a sense in which thinking about the mobilization of religious language is something which i am qualified to talk about, but i like to have some idea of that religious basis to apply my expertise.
what the heck am i talking about? Ramadan, of course.
as i mentioned in the first blog post about the title of the blog, one reason why i found the title appropriate was the circulation of comments at the beginning of Ramadan directed at the al-assad regime (see for instance, turkish president abdullah gül's comments). gül's comments here suggest that there is something more atrocious about military action and slaughter of civilians if it is done during the holy month. these kinds of comments have continued.
in the case of syria, after breaking the fast and the sunset maghrib prayer, the critical mass of people together has been an important rallying point for protestors of the assad regime- and subsequently a time of the harshest repression. so while there is some objective reason to a heightened focus on violence in syria during Ramadan, using it as the basis for a call to peace and civility does not seem to me to directly follow.
indeed, what made me decide to write a little bit about this rhetoric of Ramadan non-violence were the unrelated comments of turkey's prime minister erdoğan after a recent attack on turkish soldiers by the pkk (kurdistan workers' party, recognized by most countries as a terrorist group- here is the wikipedia page). erdoğan has explicitly said that severe retaliation and military operations in response to these attacks will take place after Ramadan. "wait until Ramadan ends" he is quoted as saying. of course, in between starting this post and finishing it, erdoğan did in fact not wait until Ramadan ended to retaliate, just like assad blithely ignored the calls for restraint during the holy month.
so why use the rhetoric? there is the obvious answer that we should take these statements at face value: Ramadan is the holy month of the first revelations of the Quran, a time meant for focusing on God,introspection, family and, yes, 'community.' as the month of revelation, it is seen as generally a holy month, and thus violence of any kind would deserve special condemnation during the period.
okay, fine. but if we think back to my post about the military and the reliance on reasons of turkish secularism for intervention, we can ask the same question: what special force or gravity comes from an invocation of a religious condemnation of violence? this question of the binding nature of religious authority is a central one to the work of some of my professors (in particular hussein agrama) and one with which i am seriously grappling. hussein's paper on the fatwa courts in egypt succinctly and powerfully expresses many of his thoughts on the question of 'religious authority' (ethics, tradition, authority: towards and anthropology of the fatwa, american ethnologist volume 37, issue 1). he presents a question towards the end of the article (13), which gives a sense of how these two very different cases (the fatwa and the use of Ramadan as a rhetorical tool against violence) of 'religious authority' may be related: "It is the problem not of freedom but of authority, of how selves are maintained and advanced within the traditions to which they bear a sense of obligation, or, put alternately, how a tradition is inherited by its adherents." while not an answer to the question of the authority of the appeal to end violence during Ramadan, it does begin to suggest why such an appeal might work.
otherwise, why not simply condemn killing of civilians? rights discourse is a powerful contemporary vocabulary. why not employ it? and again, i can't do too much more than pose these questions. in addition to a sense of responsibility and authority which is supposed to come from religion (and the more nuanced discussion of 'religion' and 'authority' discussed above), i would venture an additional idea. in particular with the case the condemnations of assad's violence by turkish politicians, we can see what (linguistic) anthropologists have called variously 'footing' or 'figuration' (okay, goffman was a sociologist). that is to say, syria, already under sanctions by the us before the violent suppression, is not too keen on 'western intervention.' by using shared religious language, the turkish officials use a different vocabulary, set of assumptions, etc. which positions them differently from, say, other members of nato. 'look,' the use of the Ramadan rhetoric says, 'as your friendly and Muslim neighbors, we, not nato, the us, the un etc. are telling you that this is unacceptable.' of course, assad replied with arguments about sovereignty based on international law, which is a whole other story (and, given some of the things i've been reading, a possible blog topic).
beyond this, i'd love to hear some ideas about this. it really is mostly a question for me: why, in the face of horrendous attacks on civilians, does Ramadan have anything to do with it? what additional force or authority is being claimed by making these statements? what sorts of alignments does this rhetoric create? i suppose i could have spent more time on the question of authority, but i feel guilty that i haven't written a paper for the class on which authority was a central topic.
about that paper...
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Friday, August 12, 2011
whose community is it? some thoughts on meetings and riots
thursday, with the help of a friend, i began to get over my 'ethnographic shyness' which generally cripples at least a week or so of anytime i spend 'doing fieldwork.' and the question which immediately confronted me was 'what was i looking for?'
in a class which was to help me write my dissertation proposal last quarter, our group was often struck by certain words and phrases which multiple people used in their proposal drafts. 'everyday life' was one which recurred in our class, an idea that is both recently en vogue and which we spent some time critiquing. another is the ever-elusive concept of community. 'community' has been used, abused, reused, and consistently denigrated in the literature. i'm not convinced myself of the work it is supposed to do, but in early versions of my proposal, i claimed that i would be looking at 'the armenian community of istanbul.' last night i was confronted ethnographically with what that might mean.
[a quick aside: as i don't have 'irb approval,' which is ostensibly necessary for publishing about one's fieldwork, and more importantly because i myself am not yet morally sure of what i do and don't want to make public and in what way, a lot of my descriptions of my fieldwork will be cryptic and vague. thus if you're interested in what i was up to thursday, i'll be happy to chat. but this is part of why the blog is and will continue to be based largely on newspapers.]
so this post is going to be a little more theoretical and less historical than the last post.
in addition to my own ethnographic attempts, the newsworthy event that for me raises the question of community comes from england: riots. one question which people pose about the riots is, "why hurt the local shop owners? why hurt your own community?"
so, community...
since i don't have my whole library in front of me, and as i'm not going to claim to be a theorist of 'community,' there will be a lot of gaps. as always, i look forward to comments from people more knowledgeable than myself.
in my opinion, much of the discontent with the concept 'community' comes from the variety of ways in which it has been used and the claim that it is a sort of lowest-common-denominator. that is to say, the only part of the definition of community on which people agree is that it is a group of humans (and with much 'post-human' literature, even this could be contested). further definition immediately leads to debate and often relies on equally vague and problematic terms. for instance, let's try it in the case of istanbul armenians: i get to circumscribe first with geography, 'those armenians living in istanbul.' but then, the next question is, "who is an armenian?" a common answer is to revise our object of study as 'those people living in istanbul who (self) identify as armenian.' but now we've introduced a term which is in recent years has come under heavy critique: identity. so we're left with a still-vague sense of our object of study.
another criticism of the term 'community' follows closely: it obscures the things at which we are actually looking. again, let's use the armenian case. when i said in my proposal that i was going to study the 'armenian community,' what i actually meant was "i'm going to spend time at the patriarchate and at the newspaper agos." so, talking with people thursday, i was often asked "where was i going to go?" "what was i going to do?" to put it concretely, using the term community evades the actual institutions (churches, newspapers), hierarchies of power (most explicitly that of church ranks), practices (worship and otherwise), and modes of representation (given my new focus on this concept, we're not even going there right now...). so to say that one's object of study is a community can be taken both as disingenuous and to lack the specificity of what one is actually studying.
finally, another major criticism of the use of 'community' is its capacity to depoliticize. to talk about a 'class' of people necessarily carries with it a certain political connotation and valence. talking about the 'community of poor people' takes the edge off and almost is certainly an attempt to back away from political ramifications of a situation. now, one can read this stepping back from an immediate political analysis through the use of a more 'neutral' term as a good thing. in fact, many do, and i'd like to turn to some of the potential advantages of the term community. like this depoliticization, the advantages are often mirrors of the criticisms.
thus, to talk about the 'armenian community' would allow me to avoid suggesting from the outset that the church is the defining or even binding element among the armenians of istanbul. likewise, 'the neighborhood community' allows one to ask different questions about the events in england than if we called the same group of people 'the urban proletariat.' for some, this is a virtue which will allow new analyses. one of my favorite writers about community, partha chatterjee (here i am thinking mostly explicitly about politics of the governed) certainly is imaging something of the sort in his use of community. if i remembering the book correctly (it has been a few years), then the use of the term was an attempt to think about different kinds of practices which could still very much be political, but which did not fit into marxist or religious models. so we can say that the use of community allows for the ability to ask different kinds of questions about groups of people.
the response to the first two criticisms would look similar. what we want is that lowest-common-denominator which community applies. we don't want to ask about any subset any specific institution etc. in this, i see the use of 'community' as part of a general trend i see in anthropology which privileges a certain 'bracketing' of theory. the most famous example of this is kathleen steward's ordinary affect. while i think a careful consideration of our terms and a certain unwillingness to apply analytical categories which do all the work before we actually talk about our object is an important point, i don't believe in a 'non-theoretical' starting point.
for me, then, if a writer gives a good sense of what they want community to mean, and consistently makes the term do the same work throughout a piece, it can in fact be a theoretical statement of some nuance. at the same time, i think it does very easily evade the actual object of study. perhaps more importantly, community can be an important aspect of a 'meta' analysis. in other words, the project i am putting together asks about the ways in which a group of people is made into a community. benedict anderson's famous imagined communities was an important if flawed attempt to think about this. john kelly and martha kaplan's represented communities, a response to anderson, is a particularly interesting attempt to think through the actual political moments: treaties, congresses, etc where a community is enacted.
which leads me to the final point. as with, say, 'culture,' anthropologists have to be aware that the term community, whether we find it analytically persuasive or not, has entered common speech. so in my mind, looking for the ways in which various institutions such as the widely read agos newspaper represent and in a sense bring into existence the armenian community seems a much different operation than 'looking for the armenian community.' no such thing exists as an actual object in the world until it is circumscribed in some way. the way in which people and institutions try to circumscribe it is, most certainly, worth our attention.
so this turned into a completely theoretical post. not quite what i had in mind. but... thoughts appreciated. and, since it was probably boring, let me end with some music. concerning the events in london, i haven't seen a lot of great analysis, and as an anthropologist not a journalist, i'm willing to wait awhile before i make any kind of definitive statement on the 'meaning' of the riots. but i am willing to leave you with some music which i thought about while reading news stories about london:
Harlem Streets, Immortal Technique
Can't Blame the Youth, Peter Tosh
April 29 1992, Sublime
in a class which was to help me write my dissertation proposal last quarter, our group was often struck by certain words and phrases which multiple people used in their proposal drafts. 'everyday life' was one which recurred in our class, an idea that is both recently en vogue and which we spent some time critiquing. another is the ever-elusive concept of community. 'community' has been used, abused, reused, and consistently denigrated in the literature. i'm not convinced myself of the work it is supposed to do, but in early versions of my proposal, i claimed that i would be looking at 'the armenian community of istanbul.' last night i was confronted ethnographically with what that might mean.
[a quick aside: as i don't have 'irb approval,' which is ostensibly necessary for publishing about one's fieldwork, and more importantly because i myself am not yet morally sure of what i do and don't want to make public and in what way, a lot of my descriptions of my fieldwork will be cryptic and vague. thus if you're interested in what i was up to thursday, i'll be happy to chat. but this is part of why the blog is and will continue to be based largely on newspapers.]
so this post is going to be a little more theoretical and less historical than the last post.
in addition to my own ethnographic attempts, the newsworthy event that for me raises the question of community comes from england: riots. one question which people pose about the riots is, "why hurt the local shop owners? why hurt your own community?"
so, community...
since i don't have my whole library in front of me, and as i'm not going to claim to be a theorist of 'community,' there will be a lot of gaps. as always, i look forward to comments from people more knowledgeable than myself.
in my opinion, much of the discontent with the concept 'community' comes from the variety of ways in which it has been used and the claim that it is a sort of lowest-common-denominator. that is to say, the only part of the definition of community on which people agree is that it is a group of humans (and with much 'post-human' literature, even this could be contested). further definition immediately leads to debate and often relies on equally vague and problematic terms. for instance, let's try it in the case of istanbul armenians: i get to circumscribe first with geography, 'those armenians living in istanbul.' but then, the next question is, "who is an armenian?" a common answer is to revise our object of study as 'those people living in istanbul who (self) identify as armenian.' but now we've introduced a term which is in recent years has come under heavy critique: identity. so we're left with a still-vague sense of our object of study.
another criticism of the term 'community' follows closely: it obscures the things at which we are actually looking. again, let's use the armenian case. when i said in my proposal that i was going to study the 'armenian community,' what i actually meant was "i'm going to spend time at the patriarchate and at the newspaper agos." so, talking with people thursday, i was often asked "where was i going to go?" "what was i going to do?" to put it concretely, using the term community evades the actual institutions (churches, newspapers), hierarchies of power (most explicitly that of church ranks), practices (worship and otherwise), and modes of representation (given my new focus on this concept, we're not even going there right now...). so to say that one's object of study is a community can be taken both as disingenuous and to lack the specificity of what one is actually studying.
finally, another major criticism of the use of 'community' is its capacity to depoliticize. to talk about a 'class' of people necessarily carries with it a certain political connotation and valence. talking about the 'community of poor people' takes the edge off and almost is certainly an attempt to back away from political ramifications of a situation. now, one can read this stepping back from an immediate political analysis through the use of a more 'neutral' term as a good thing. in fact, many do, and i'd like to turn to some of the potential advantages of the term community. like this depoliticization, the advantages are often mirrors of the criticisms.
thus, to talk about the 'armenian community' would allow me to avoid suggesting from the outset that the church is the defining or even binding element among the armenians of istanbul. likewise, 'the neighborhood community' allows one to ask different questions about the events in england than if we called the same group of people 'the urban proletariat.' for some, this is a virtue which will allow new analyses. one of my favorite writers about community, partha chatterjee (here i am thinking mostly explicitly about politics of the governed) certainly is imaging something of the sort in his use of community. if i remembering the book correctly (it has been a few years), then the use of the term was an attempt to think about different kinds of practices which could still very much be political, but which did not fit into marxist or religious models. so we can say that the use of community allows for the ability to ask different kinds of questions about groups of people.
the response to the first two criticisms would look similar. what we want is that lowest-common-denominator which community applies. we don't want to ask about any subset any specific institution etc. in this, i see the use of 'community' as part of a general trend i see in anthropology which privileges a certain 'bracketing' of theory. the most famous example of this is kathleen steward's ordinary affect. while i think a careful consideration of our terms and a certain unwillingness to apply analytical categories which do all the work before we actually talk about our object is an important point, i don't believe in a 'non-theoretical' starting point.
for me, then, if a writer gives a good sense of what they want community to mean, and consistently makes the term do the same work throughout a piece, it can in fact be a theoretical statement of some nuance. at the same time, i think it does very easily evade the actual object of study. perhaps more importantly, community can be an important aspect of a 'meta' analysis. in other words, the project i am putting together asks about the ways in which a group of people is made into a community. benedict anderson's famous imagined communities was an important if flawed attempt to think about this. john kelly and martha kaplan's represented communities, a response to anderson, is a particularly interesting attempt to think through the actual political moments: treaties, congresses, etc where a community is enacted.
which leads me to the final point. as with, say, 'culture,' anthropologists have to be aware that the term community, whether we find it analytically persuasive or not, has entered common speech. so in my mind, looking for the ways in which various institutions such as the widely read agos newspaper represent and in a sense bring into existence the armenian community seems a much different operation than 'looking for the armenian community.' no such thing exists as an actual object in the world until it is circumscribed in some way. the way in which people and institutions try to circumscribe it is, most certainly, worth our attention.
so this turned into a completely theoretical post. not quite what i had in mind. but... thoughts appreciated. and, since it was probably boring, let me end with some music. concerning the events in london, i haven't seen a lot of great analysis, and as an anthropologist not a journalist, i'm willing to wait awhile before i make any kind of definitive statement on the 'meaning' of the riots. but i am willing to leave you with some music which i thought about while reading news stories about london:
Harlem Streets, Immortal Technique
Can't Blame the Youth, Peter Tosh
April 29 1992, Sublime
Monday, August 8, 2011
suspicion, secularism, and the turkish military
so blogging intelligently is much more difficult than writing travel anecdotes...
so that i don't completely lose whatever audience i might have, i'd like to post a handful of thoughts surrounding a couple interviews/news pieces that i've been trying to think about together. i suppose that i don't have to have an outstanding thesis every time i post something, so here goes.
the initial impetus for my trying a different kind of blog came from a conversation i had with some friends on a rooftop in brooklyn the night before i flew to istanbul. the conversation focused on the recent resignation of the top 4 turkish military officials. so a few english language articles later and a few turkish lessons to read a hürriyet article or two about it, i feel compelled to focus on this as a first in depth topic.
the question of the military in turkey has long fascinated me. when the republic of turkey was founded out of the ashes of the ottoman empire by atatürk, it was first and foremost a military operation. atatürk, himself a military commander of repute, along with a cadre of others, again many from a military background, left istanbul and began operations in the heart of anatolia. the war of independence, fought mostly against the greeks, resulted in the founding of the republic of turkey mostly by a group of military men. and, if you've had a conversation with me, you know that this republic was founded on staunch secular ideals. at the same time, atatürk removed his military uniform to enact a separation between the military and the government, such that active officers were not to be elected officials.
and this is where it gets blurry for me. i would love someone with more complete knowledge to fill me in here. either that or there is still a really interesting book to be written (in my online research i just came across william hale's turkish politics and the military- time to head to homer's bookstore). somewhere between atatürk's separation of the military and elected officials and his staunch secularism, presumably sometime after his death, the military took on a role not only of an outside 'check' on the government, but even more specifically as defenders of secularism. thus the first turkish military coup in 1960 should be characterized as a response to "undemocratic" measures by the menderes government (Turkey after Atatürk). likewise, the 1971 coup was a response to the violent situation in turkey where left and right-wing groups robbed banks, assassinated professors, and shot each other in the street. likewise with the 1980 coup. nonetheless, both of these coups were justified in part by the fact that many of the fractious parties involved in the violent situation were religious in nature. thus, the tradition of kemalist secularism was invoked as partial justification for the coup. finally, the 1997, so-called "postmodern coup" which pressured the resignation of prime minister erbakan, perhaps most explicitly invoked secularism. a quote translated on the wikipedia page for the "postmodern coup":
Çevik Bir, one of the generals who planned the process said that “In Turkey we have a marriage of Islam and democracy. (…) The child of this marriage is secularism. Now this child gets sick from time to time. The Turkish Armed Forces is the doctor which saves the child. Depending on how sick the kid is, we administer the necessary medicine to make sure the child recuperates.”
which leads us to the recent events of the resignation of the four top turkish generals. al-jazeera's "inside story" did a great roundtable on the story, which i find a great introduction to this specific event: Turkey: A new political era?
a translation from the newspaper 'vatan' gives the statement of the chief of general staff:
General Kosaner's farewell message criticized the government:
"Currently, 173 active and 77 retired, a total of 250 generals/admirals, officers, non-commissioned officers and special sergeants are behind bars in contravention of justice and conscientious values. 14 generals/admirals and 58 colonels have lost their rights to be assessed at this year's Supreme Military Council and they have been punished in advance although they are not convicted.
"Investigations and long detention times are kept on the agenda to create an image that Turkish Armed Forces is a crime organization. Government has not made efforts enough to stop it. I will not be able to continue as Chief of General Staff as I have been impeded by this situation to protect rights of my staff." (a page of translated news reviews of the resignation and aftermath).
i won't try to get into the convoluted ergenekon and sledgehammer plots and trials. the very basic is that there have been a series of arrests based on suspected coup attempts. these are the arrests to which general kosaner is referring. likewise, the end of the 'inside story' above gives some basics about the cases.
this post turned mostly into a background and hopefully a collection of resources in one place to think about this event. i'd like to end by bringing in a recent interview with talal asad on the ssrc (social science research council) website. in the interview, asad discusses the role of suspicion in the revolution in egypt. taken in concert with the ergenekon and sledgehammer arrests as discussed during 'inside story,' i'd like to end thinking about the proliferation of suspicion around the coups and the turkish military. asad mentions earlier work concerning the danish cartoon controversy, where he interrogates our assumptions about freedom of speech in relation some of kind of perceived islamic or religious threat (see 'is critique secular.' the discussion on the ssrc blog does not include much of asad's essay which ended up in the volume).
so the questions i will end with relate to this idea that there is seemingly much more willingness to exercise criticism and the freedom of speech in the face of religious conviction rather than other cases. can we characterize the suspicion surrounding the possible coups and military intervention as a response to the use of explicitly secular criticism by the military? that is, are we witnessing a kind of suspicion which proliferates in the face of secular criticism which asad highlights? when confronted with the clear choice to exercise freedom of expression only in some instances, directed towards some people's religious sensibilities and convictions, is suspicion on the part of the practitioner a 'defense mechanism' or part of a set of possible responses? with these questions, the recent move to amend article 35 could also be seen in this light, as another response tied up with suspicion. given the mass violence which preceded many of the coups, why was religion and the republic's secular character highlighted as justification for the coups? and does this selective use of religious/secular justification help fuel this suspicion?
a long post full of history, but i think i needed to collect many of these things into one place. i hope that some people will work through it. and i'd love to hear thoughts on my final paragraph and questions!
so that i don't completely lose whatever audience i might have, i'd like to post a handful of thoughts surrounding a couple interviews/news pieces that i've been trying to think about together. i suppose that i don't have to have an outstanding thesis every time i post something, so here goes.
the initial impetus for my trying a different kind of blog came from a conversation i had with some friends on a rooftop in brooklyn the night before i flew to istanbul. the conversation focused on the recent resignation of the top 4 turkish military officials. so a few english language articles later and a few turkish lessons to read a hürriyet article or two about it, i feel compelled to focus on this as a first in depth topic.
the question of the military in turkey has long fascinated me. when the republic of turkey was founded out of the ashes of the ottoman empire by atatürk, it was first and foremost a military operation. atatürk, himself a military commander of repute, along with a cadre of others, again many from a military background, left istanbul and began operations in the heart of anatolia. the war of independence, fought mostly against the greeks, resulted in the founding of the republic of turkey mostly by a group of military men. and, if you've had a conversation with me, you know that this republic was founded on staunch secular ideals. at the same time, atatürk removed his military uniform to enact a separation between the military and the government, such that active officers were not to be elected officials.
and this is where it gets blurry for me. i would love someone with more complete knowledge to fill me in here. either that or there is still a really interesting book to be written (in my online research i just came across william hale's turkish politics and the military- time to head to homer's bookstore). somewhere between atatürk's separation of the military and elected officials and his staunch secularism, presumably sometime after his death, the military took on a role not only of an outside 'check' on the government, but even more specifically as defenders of secularism. thus the first turkish military coup in 1960 should be characterized as a response to "undemocratic" measures by the menderes government (Turkey after Atatürk). likewise, the 1971 coup was a response to the violent situation in turkey where left and right-wing groups robbed banks, assassinated professors, and shot each other in the street. likewise with the 1980 coup. nonetheless, both of these coups were justified in part by the fact that many of the fractious parties involved in the violent situation were religious in nature. thus, the tradition of kemalist secularism was invoked as partial justification for the coup. finally, the 1997, so-called "postmodern coup" which pressured the resignation of prime minister erbakan, perhaps most explicitly invoked secularism. a quote translated on the wikipedia page for the "postmodern coup":
Çevik Bir, one of the generals who planned the process said that “In Turkey we have a marriage of Islam and democracy. (…) The child of this marriage is secularism. Now this child gets sick from time to time. The Turkish Armed Forces is the doctor which saves the child. Depending on how sick the kid is, we administer the necessary medicine to make sure the child recuperates.”
which leads us to the recent events of the resignation of the four top turkish generals. al-jazeera's "inside story" did a great roundtable on the story, which i find a great introduction to this specific event: Turkey: A new political era?
a translation from the newspaper 'vatan' gives the statement of the chief of general staff:
General Kosaner's farewell message criticized the government:
"Currently, 173 active and 77 retired, a total of 250 generals/admirals, officers, non-commissioned officers and special sergeants are behind bars in contravention of justice and conscientious values. 14 generals/admirals and 58 colonels have lost their rights to be assessed at this year's Supreme Military Council and they have been punished in advance although they are not convicted.
"Investigations and long detention times are kept on the agenda to create an image that Turkish Armed Forces is a crime organization. Government has not made efforts enough to stop it. I will not be able to continue as Chief of General Staff as I have been impeded by this situation to protect rights of my staff." (a page of translated news reviews of the resignation and aftermath).
i won't try to get into the convoluted ergenekon and sledgehammer plots and trials. the very basic is that there have been a series of arrests based on suspected coup attempts. these are the arrests to which general kosaner is referring. likewise, the end of the 'inside story' above gives some basics about the cases.
this post turned mostly into a background and hopefully a collection of resources in one place to think about this event. i'd like to end by bringing in a recent interview with talal asad on the ssrc (social science research council) website. in the interview, asad discusses the role of suspicion in the revolution in egypt. taken in concert with the ergenekon and sledgehammer arrests as discussed during 'inside story,' i'd like to end thinking about the proliferation of suspicion around the coups and the turkish military. asad mentions earlier work concerning the danish cartoon controversy, where he interrogates our assumptions about freedom of speech in relation some of kind of perceived islamic or religious threat (see 'is critique secular.' the discussion on the ssrc blog does not include much of asad's essay which ended up in the volume).
so the questions i will end with relate to this idea that there is seemingly much more willingness to exercise criticism and the freedom of speech in the face of religious conviction rather than other cases. can we characterize the suspicion surrounding the possible coups and military intervention as a response to the use of explicitly secular criticism by the military? that is, are we witnessing a kind of suspicion which proliferates in the face of secular criticism which asad highlights? when confronted with the clear choice to exercise freedom of expression only in some instances, directed towards some people's religious sensibilities and convictions, is suspicion on the part of the practitioner a 'defense mechanism' or part of a set of possible responses? with these questions, the recent move to amend article 35 could also be seen in this light, as another response tied up with suspicion. given the mass violence which preceded many of the coups, why was religion and the republic's secular character highlighted as justification for the coups? and does this selective use of religious/secular justification help fuel this suspicion?
a long post full of history, but i think i needed to collect many of these things into one place. i hope that some people will work through it. and i'd love to hear thoughts on my final paragraph and questions!
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
breakfast during the month of reflection
i'm going to start all over- i had begun with a long, boring introduction about how easy it was to get to my nice apartment and how this trip, as a research trip rather than even partially a pleasure trip deserves a different kind of blog. i had a little bit on how Ramadan was the perfect month for reflection and for a blog which tries to focus more on how my academic interests intersect with the current situation in the region and world. it's not that such an introduction would be irrelevant, it's more that i just did it in two sentences because yesterday was already full of exactly those things on which i hope to focus. and having already decided on the title for the blog on the plane, i was surprised by how appropriate the title became. so, let me jump right in:
"and how is it in california, is there a revolution there?"
says one of the 3 syrians living with me in the apartment where i am renting a room. thinking about the 'debt ceiling crisis,' unemployment in my home county, attacks on (public) education, and a host of other events and circumstances that deserve a more radical response, hell any kind of response, i am forced to admit, that, no, there is nothing of the sort. but, but, i respond, we did have a little excitement in wisconsin, where the governor abused his power during a union-busting attempt. but 'from tahrir to madison' lost its steam quite some time ago, and while the so-called 'arab spring' has mostly faded from public attention in the united states, i was to spend my evening with 5 syrians who would occasionally translate dark humor about the state of affairs in their country from arabic to english for my benefit.
"in half an hour we will have breakfast, and you will join us."
"breakfast?"
"well, since we are fasting it is the first meal of the day, so we call it breakfast"
used to spending my time with westerners and leftie-type young secular turks, i hadn't really expected the title of my blog to be quite so accurate. Ramadan (Ramazan in turkish), began on August 1st, the day of my plane trip, and ends on August 29th, just a couple days before i return to new york. so while i found it an appropriate title for my blog, especially given that various turkish politicians have used Ramadan as part of the rhetoric against syria's attacks on its own citizens, i can't say i actually planned on breaking fast with practicing Muslims, let alone from syria. in the back of my mind, i thought about the possibility of a trip to the southeast which i knew i wouldn't actually take. instead, i found myself in an apartment in istanbul with 5 syrians who were breaking the fast.
"one of my friends was just killed in syria."
"...i'm sorry..."
"he's not the first i've lost."
and how does one respond to this? the use of such a level of force against protesters by the united states government is virtually unthinkable. sure, there are beatings, and more subtle types of violence, but hundreds dead? and the idealistic leftist from california falls silent. even listening is hard. the 5 syrians sit around the table telling stories and joking. what does one do? what does one so removed do? what kind of stories move us? what does it mean to joke in the face of death and violence? later that evening, the same young man mentioned that he had seen not only others deaths, but his own, as bullets buzzed past his head. democratic ideals and protests on the street which have faded from us news sources... and death.
"i met a turkish journalist yesterday, and asked her why the turkish media wasn't covering the events in syria. she told me there weren't any syrians around to talk to."
the media seems to play such a huge role in the way we view events, so what happens when the media chooses not to cover certain events? is mobilization the point of covering such events? the young woman was convinced there was a 'political' point to the lack of coverage in turkish media. i am reminded of the ban against publishing photos of dead soldiers and caskets in the us.
so, with a few statements from those i have met, i begin mostly with questions. my historical and theoretical readings with come to bear on my further posts. i am in no way an expert, certainly not on the regional events and politics which will motivate many of my posts. i hope those who i know and who know more than i will correct my misinterpretations and wrongheaded ideas about those things i will touch upon.
i look forward to anyone's comments as i attempt to write about some of the questions i have posed and further questions to come, and to frame some of them in the context of my own work. as the comments about syrian violence during Ramadan suggest, my own narrow expertise should be of some use in thinking about the current situation. while what i experience here in istanbul will be the impetus for many of these posts and reflections, i expect that this blog will look fundamentally different from my older travel blogs. and i hope that some will join me in thinking about my experiences and the events at large.
oh, i began reading through the Qur'an today, although fasting when there is so much manti to be eaten sounds much more difficult.
"God desires your well-being, not your discomfort. He desires you to fast the whole month so that you may magnify God and render thanks to Him for giving you His guidance."
-from the Qur'an, Sura Al-Baqara, 'The Calf'
welcome to "ramazan in istanbul, after the spring"
"and how is it in california, is there a revolution there?"
says one of the 3 syrians living with me in the apartment where i am renting a room. thinking about the 'debt ceiling crisis,' unemployment in my home county, attacks on (public) education, and a host of other events and circumstances that deserve a more radical response, hell any kind of response, i am forced to admit, that, no, there is nothing of the sort. but, but, i respond, we did have a little excitement in wisconsin, where the governor abused his power during a union-busting attempt. but 'from tahrir to madison' lost its steam quite some time ago, and while the so-called 'arab spring' has mostly faded from public attention in the united states, i was to spend my evening with 5 syrians who would occasionally translate dark humor about the state of affairs in their country from arabic to english for my benefit.
"in half an hour we will have breakfast, and you will join us."
"breakfast?"
"well, since we are fasting it is the first meal of the day, so we call it breakfast"
used to spending my time with westerners and leftie-type young secular turks, i hadn't really expected the title of my blog to be quite so accurate. Ramadan (Ramazan in turkish), began on August 1st, the day of my plane trip, and ends on August 29th, just a couple days before i return to new york. so while i found it an appropriate title for my blog, especially given that various turkish politicians have used Ramadan as part of the rhetoric against syria's attacks on its own citizens, i can't say i actually planned on breaking fast with practicing Muslims, let alone from syria. in the back of my mind, i thought about the possibility of a trip to the southeast which i knew i wouldn't actually take. instead, i found myself in an apartment in istanbul with 5 syrians who were breaking the fast.
"one of my friends was just killed in syria."
"...i'm sorry..."
"he's not the first i've lost."
and how does one respond to this? the use of such a level of force against protesters by the united states government is virtually unthinkable. sure, there are beatings, and more subtle types of violence, but hundreds dead? and the idealistic leftist from california falls silent. even listening is hard. the 5 syrians sit around the table telling stories and joking. what does one do? what does one so removed do? what kind of stories move us? what does it mean to joke in the face of death and violence? later that evening, the same young man mentioned that he had seen not only others deaths, but his own, as bullets buzzed past his head. democratic ideals and protests on the street which have faded from us news sources... and death.
"i met a turkish journalist yesterday, and asked her why the turkish media wasn't covering the events in syria. she told me there weren't any syrians around to talk to."
the media seems to play such a huge role in the way we view events, so what happens when the media chooses not to cover certain events? is mobilization the point of covering such events? the young woman was convinced there was a 'political' point to the lack of coverage in turkish media. i am reminded of the ban against publishing photos of dead soldiers and caskets in the us.
so, with a few statements from those i have met, i begin mostly with questions. my historical and theoretical readings with come to bear on my further posts. i am in no way an expert, certainly not on the regional events and politics which will motivate many of my posts. i hope those who i know and who know more than i will correct my misinterpretations and wrongheaded ideas about those things i will touch upon.
i look forward to anyone's comments as i attempt to write about some of the questions i have posed and further questions to come, and to frame some of them in the context of my own work. as the comments about syrian violence during Ramadan suggest, my own narrow expertise should be of some use in thinking about the current situation. while what i experience here in istanbul will be the impetus for many of these posts and reflections, i expect that this blog will look fundamentally different from my older travel blogs. and i hope that some will join me in thinking about my experiences and the events at large.
oh, i began reading through the Qur'an today, although fasting when there is so much manti to be eaten sounds much more difficult.
"God desires your well-being, not your discomfort. He desires you to fast the whole month so that you may magnify God and render thanks to Him for giving you His guidance."
-from the Qur'an, Sura Al-Baqara, 'The Calf'
welcome to "ramazan in istanbul, after the spring"
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)