Petek Onur – författare

This book presents gendered readings of cultural manifestations that relate to the Ottoman era as a preferred past and a model for the future. By means    of claims of authenticity and the distribution of imaginaries of a homogenous desirable alternative to everyday concerns, as well as invoking an imperial past at the national level. In this mode of thinking, shaped around a polarised worldview, Republican ideals serve as a counter-image to the promoted splendour and harmony of the Ottomans. Yet, the stereotypical gender roles inextricably linked with this neo-Ottoman imaginary remain largely unacknowledged, dissimulated in the construction of the desire of an idealised past. Our adaption of a cultural studies perspective in this volume puts special emphasis on agency, gender, and authority. It provides a shared ground for the interrogation, through the contributions comprising this project of knowledge production about the past in light of what constitutes acceptable legitimacy in interpreting not only the canonical literature, but history at large.

​This book provides a meta-reading of how ethnographic discourses on women and Islam in Turkey have changed since their emergence in 1983. It analyses the published ethnographic works in three discursive periods and shows that paradigm shifts in social sciences, processes of neo-liberal globalization and globalization of Islamism as well as political, social, cultural and economic transformations at the local level shape these periods. As an exceptional example of modernization in the Middle East and the post-imperial states in South-East Europe, Turkey has been experiencing tensions between Islamic beliefs and practices and Westernization and secularization processes. Countless aspects of Muslim women’s lives appear as symbols and indicators in this society like in many other Muslim majority societies and to scholars of gender and women’s studies in discussing the faith-based patriarchy. Thus, this book exhibits the necessity of developing a critical perspective on ethnographic representations of Muslim women in Turkey.