Read new publications from BU Alum Feyza Burak-Aldi (PhD 2019)!
Burak-Adli, Feyza. 2024. “The Portrait of an Alla Franca Ottoman Sheikh: Sufism, Modernity, and Class in Turkey.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 56 (2): 207–226. doi:10.1017/S0020743824000631 (OPEN ACCESS)
Abstract: Illustrating the complicated lifeworlds of late Ottoman and early Republican elites, this paper examines the life, career, and Islamic thought of Ken’an Rifai. How does he nuance our understanding of Sufi involvement in the Turkish modernization processes? How did he reformulate Sufism for the modern sensibilities of intellectual elites? How did he reconcile the epistemologies of mystical Sufism with the politics of rational modernity? Demonstrating how his pro-secularization stance was grounded in “Islamic reasoning,” I argue that Shaykh Rifai represents the much-neglected Sufi traditions that aligned with the early Republican regime. Furthermore, I unpack how Rifai’s religious thought was shaped by the complex interplay between Sufi discourses, his ethnic and upper-class social habitus, and the “modern social imaginaries” bourgeoning in the political context of early 20th-century Turkey. I maintain that, by recasting Sufism as an intellectual and ethical tradition of self-formation and disregarding its mystical-magical popular practices, Ken’an Rifai offered his elite followers an Islamic way of life compatible with the new moral order of the modernizing state. In exploring the entanglements of religious ethics, state politics, and social aesthetics underlying Sufi reformism, this paper contributes to broader ethnographic, historical, and religious studies inquiries on the varied adaptations of Sufi tradition to secular modernity in different contexts.
Abstract: Despite longstanding Muslim women’s activism in Turkey, Turkish women did not build alliances with the global platforms of Islamic feminism until very recently. The first Islamic feminist organization, Havle, was established only in 2018. Why was Islamic feminism delayed in Turkey? How did it finally emerge? Who are the Islamic feminists in Turkey? Underscoring how historical and sociopolitical conditions shape, delimit, and alter (secular and/or Islamic) feminist discourses, this chapter will first survey the historical genealogy of many faces of feminism in Turkey since the early 20th century. It will challenge the taken-for-granted division of women’s movements along the secular and religious divide in Turkey by assessing the liberal reflexes (or lack thereof) of different feminist aspirations regardless of their epistemological proximity to Islam and secularism. Rather than proposing a working definition of feminism or Islam, I will analyze how feminist women in Turkey either essentialized both categories or approached them as capacious, polysemic, and dynamic.
Abstract: This paper examines how Samiha Ayverdi, a prominent upper-class Sufi master, novelist, and conservative public intellectual, redefined Sufism with significant implications for women’s public roles in Cold War Turkey. By analysing her literary and non-fiction works alongside her civil society activities, such as TURKKAD (Turkish Women’s Cultural Association), I argue that Ayverdi’s Sufi ethics became intertwined with right-wing politics and conservative nationalism in response to the shifting social politics. Despite her gender-progressive interpretations of Islam, she opposed liberal feminism, instead urging women to contribute to nation-building as part of their Islamic devotion and to rehabilitate the Ottoman-Islamic heritage suppressed by the early Republic. I also show how Ayverdi’s career illustrates that the intersection of Sufism and gender is historically shaped by both political contexts and women’s diverse social positions. Advocating for an interdisciplinary approach that integrates gender and Sufi studies with history and anthropology, I propose a nuanced examination of women’s roles in Sufism by considering social power dynamics and the intersections of gender, race, class, and national politics, beyond merely theological debates.
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