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2 results

  • 7 - Religious Counseling and Moral Support for Women and Families

  • from Part II - Women in the Diyanet
  • Chiara Maritato, Università degli Studi di Torino, Italy
  • Book:
    Women, Religion, and the State in Contemporary Turkey
    Published online:
    22 May 2020
    Print publication:
    28 May 2020, pp 204-244

  • Summary

    The chapter presents the religious guidance and moral support (irşad in Turkish) that the Diyanet preachers provide to women and families. In line with a redefinition of religious services as a pastoral care designed to enlighten the believer on any aspects of life, the irşad’s activities have been deeply reshaped. This has occurred through old and new institutions that have been put in place. The chapter refers to the fatwa services provided in local mufti offices, as a phone service and via online platform, and to the Family Guidance and Consultation Bureaus established in 2002 with the aim to provide religious counseling to women and families. It also emphasizes how religious officers’ activities are conducted outside the mosques, in prisons, hospitals, orphanages, and women’s shelters. The expansion of the Diyanet’s moral mission is thus characterized by a pervasive moral support that goes beyond the mosques to penetrate and reshape the spaces of the secular.

Women, Religion, and the State in Contemporary Turkey
  • Chiara Maritato
  • Published online:
    22 May 2020
    Print publication:
    28 May 2020
  • Tracing the centrality of women in the definition of Turkish secularism, this study investigates the 2003 decision to increase the number of women officers employed by the Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet). It explores how, as professional religious officers, the female Diyanet preachers epitomize a pious, modern and highly educated woman whose role in society has been raised to prominence. Based on extensive fieldwork in Turkey, and drawing on a rich ethnography of the activities conducted by Diyanet women preachers in Istanbul, Chiara Maritato disentangles the state's attempt to standardize a multifaceted female religious participation. In using the feminization of the Diyanet as a prism through which to understand the significance of a renewed presence of Islam in the Turkish public realm, she casts light on a broader reformulation of religious services for women and families in Turkey, and pinpoints how this pervasive moral support has been able to penetrate and reshape even secular spaces.