My central research interest is government regulation of religion with an emphasis on religion-state relations in Muslim countries. I explore this topic in three separate projects, two of which examine state production of religious knowledge and a third that tests a proposition from the theory of religious economy. In another line of research I link my interest in religion-state relations with my background in immigration to study how migrant sending states provide religious services for their nationals living abroad.
Government Regulation of Religious Knowledge Production: State Sermons
My dissertation research, supported by over $47,000 in grants, advances scholarship on religion-state relations and religious markets by investigating a government agency responsible for religious affairs. Government involvement in religion is a global phenomenon, and new cross-national datasets have allowed scholars to study its impact on a range of outcomes, including international conflict and religious persecution. What we lack are qualitative insights about the practices and motivations of religious bureaucrats, who I argue play an important role in shaping religion-state relations alongside legislators and jurists. My work uses the case of Islamic sermon production in Turkey, where clerics employed by the state prepare sermons for mosques nationwide, to explain change in religious policies and government-regulated religious content. Drawing on extensive textual and ethnographic data gathered during 20 months of fieldwork, I reveal how Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs (DRA) has played a central role in creating a distinct brand of Islam.
Chapter 1 provides the theoretical framework for my dissertation. I first build on Alfred Stepan’s concept of “twin tolerations” – the idea that consolidated democracies devise ways to accommodate religious elements of society while maintaining democratic institutions. Stepan’s work helps explain how liberal democracies, notably those of Western Europe, accommodate a long list of religious institutions that include official state churches, federal subsidies for religious education, and church taxes. One way to advance Stepan’s approach is to examine sites where the spheres of religion and government overlap and negotiation of the twin tolerations is ongoing. This is most explicitly the case when countries have an administrative department that oversees religious affairs. When these departments regulate religious production, as in Turkey, they also serve as ideal sites to study the impact of state regulation on religious markets. I extend Fenggang Yang’s tripartite model of religious markets, originally developed to explain religion-state relations in China, by testing its utility in an Islamic, democratic context.
The second chapter of my dissertation draws on expert interviews and documents from DRA archives, which were previously inaccessible to researchers, to trace how the state has regulated Islamic sermons from the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923 to the present. I discuss why Turkey’s founders did not use Friday sermons to legitimize their political reforms and in fact prohibited imams from preaching for or against the regime. Likewise, I address why the DRA prepared several volumes of model sermons over the years but did not standardize sermons until 1981, at which point imams were required to read prepared texts. Finally, I discuss the factors that explain the DRA’s decision in 2006 to decentralize sermon production.
Chapter 3 draws on extensive textual data to understand how and why the content of DRA sermons has changed over time. I created a unique digital database containing more than 1,700 sermons, including sermon collections published in 1928, 1936, 1956, 1973, and 1981, sermons from DRA journals published monthly between 1968 and 2006, and provincial sermons written between 2006 and 2008. This is the first time all DRA sermons have been compiled in one place and the only collection amenable to computer-based coding and searching. Using content analysis I identify trends in the DRA’s moral discourse and use of the Qur’an. In an article published in Poetics, I used a subset of these data to show that recent organizational change was significant enough to alter representations of God in DRA sermons.
Finally, the last chapter explores the consequences of the DRA’s 2006 decision to decentralize sermon production and have committees in each province prepare their own. To learn how centuries of Islamic scholarship and narratives about the Turkish nation are transformed into 600-word sermons, I obtained unprecedented permission from the DRA to observe sermon committee meetings; altogether I attended 50 meetings in five different cities. During the meetings, which averaged two hours, I took detailed field notes on my laptop. These notes, along with audio recordings of twelve of the meetings, offer rich detail showing how religious elites produce sermons while attuned to the media, their superiors, fellow theologians, worshippers with low education, and perceived threats from Western culture. I supplemented these observations by interviewing all muftis responsible for sermon selection in two of Turkey’s seven regions and observing closed-door training and evaluation seminars for sermon authors and committee members representing all Turkish provinces.
As scholars turn their attention to the consequences of religious regulation, agencies like the DRA are earning recognition for their potential to shape the religious landscape of entire nations. A long-term goal is to expand this research beyond Turkey to include other countries and other religions; a logical first step is to study Turkey’s neighbor, Azerbaijan, which shares many linguistic and cultural similarities with Turkey but experienced harsher religious regulation under Soviet control.
Government Regulation of Religious Knowledge Production: Fatwas
I plan to complete a book manuscript that expands on my dissertation by addressing how the DRA has reinvented the practice of issuing fatwas (religious rulings on matters of Islamic law). Historically, fatwas were given by muftis renowned for their erudition and discernment, but the DRA has taken steps to centralize fatwa production and assure that all pronouncements are delivered in the name of the agency rather than a particular individual. Email and phone hotlines run by the DRA called “Hello Fatwa!” have become extremely popular, but they face competition from independent Islamic scholars who offer their own fatwa services in the form of newspaper columns and personal websites. I will study how the DRA has tried to legitimize its fatwas as the definitive source of “correct” Islamic knowledge. This research is a natural extension of my dissertation, both substantively and methodologically, because fatwas and sermons are both important means for transmitting religious knowledge, and sermon committee members answered questions from the Hello Fatwa phone line and in person during my visits. These observations allowed me to learn how provincial clerics field questions, arrive at their decisions, and coordinate their actions with DRA headquarters. In addition to conducting more observations, interviews, and analysis of media discourse, I will analyze a unique database containing over 150,000 questions emailed to the DRA by Turkish citizens to understand the audience for DRA fatwas; the database includes information on questioners’ age, sex, and educational attainment together with the answers provided by DRA experts.
Testing the Theory of Religious Economy in an Islamic Context
Another project I have planned builds on the work of Fenggang Yang to adapt a dominant approach in the sociology of religion – the theory of religious economy – for use beyond Christendom and Western societies. The theory of religious economy treats religious organizations as firms competing in a religious market to increase their adherents. Scholars in this tradition emphasize supply-side factors to explain religious consumption, arguing that competition in the marketplace leads to the production of higher quality and more diverse religious goods, which results in greater religious activity because people are more likely to find religious products matching their preferences. State regulation, on the other hand, restricts the market and reduces competition, resulting in fewer goods of lower quality, particularly when a monopolistic firm controls production. I treat the 1997 “soft” coup in Turkey as a natural experiment that allows us to test whether increased regulation of religion affected religious practices. After the coup, a law was passed that required plans for new mosque construction to be approved by the DRA and for management of all Turkish mosques to be signed over to the agency. On paper, this law increased the cost of building new mosques and in theory should have dissuaded some citizens from carrying out their plans. Institutional data on mosque construction combined with qualitative research on mosque benefactors and DRA officials responsible for approving construction requests will be used to test this proposition. Additional analysis will test whether the 1997 intervention had the predicted impact on mosque attendance.
Immigration
Institutional ties between Muslim migrants in Europe and their countries of origin are often viewed with suspicion, but sending states remain heavily involved in migrant religious affairs even as European governments increasingly seek to partner with local representatives of Muslim communities. In Germany, for example, the largest Muslim organization is the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB), a branch of the DRA. Hundreds of imams are sent to mosques in Germany by the DRA and they follow policies set by administrators in Ankara. In this way, a Turkish government agency plays a key role in shaping migrant religious practices on foreign soil. In 2006, I spent two months in Berlin interviewing top DITIB leaders and visiting local mosques. In a paper to be published by Brill in the book Living Islam in Europe, I draw on this fieldwork to argue that theories of transnationalism emphasizing action from above or below cannot account for DITIB, which relies on cooperation between state and civil actors. Now that the German government has signaled its desire to make DITIB the official representative of Islam in Germany, I plan to conduct follow-up research for a journal article that will examine how a one-time homeland organization transforms itself to become the primary local partner of a host country on matters of Islam and the integration of Muslim immigrants.