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2 results

  • 5 - Vaizeler’s Invitation

  • 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 146-177

  • Summary

    The chapter presents the vaizeler’s engagement in inviting women to participate in the mosque’s public realm. This invitation (davet in Turkish) consists of a call of the vaizeler that dates back to the origins of Islam, a period reported as a “golden age” for women’s participation within the religious community. The Diyanet’s projects sought to invite women to mosques and to forge a “new religious woman” who is representing these old, traditional models in a modern way. In everyday life, inviting women to mosques requires the vaize to be aware of the communities’ heterogeneous attendance. Their sessions are places in which women share concerns with both the group and the preachers. Far from any wishful thinking about women’s resistance, victimization, or fears of “false consciousness,” the engagement of women in the Diyanet’s sessions embodies the concept of a “good Muslim woman” behaving piously in everyday life.

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.