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Abstract
This dissertation explores the modern state’s role in shaping the collective life of Turkish Muslim women under conditions of polarization. Rather than framing state involvement in religion solely as a problem of secularism, it approaches this involvement as a site where political and social polarity becomes ethnographically visible. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and archival analysis, the study examines how state-appointed women preachers engage with ordinary Muslims. In Turkey, these preachers operate simultaneously as Islamic educators and public servants. Their teaching practices—administered through a vast state bureaucracy—are interpreted in divergent ways: some view them as ideological mouthpieces of state authoritarianism, while others regard them as sources of legitimate ethical guidance. The dissertation traces how these preachers, in this divided social landscape, interact with ordinary Muslims who voluntarily seek their services through one-on-one counseling and group sermons. The first half of the dissertation examines how these women preachers, whose role as a gendered state apparatus was born out of a reform responding to a deeper authoritarian history of state secularism, create the conditions of possibility for authentic religious authority to emerge. I show how this authority as a social bond becomes legible only from certain situated standpoints among conservative and pious Muslim women navigating today’s world. The latter half shows how Islamic lessons produced through this gendered bureaucracy enable indifference to emerge as an indispensable virtue for today’s conservative Muslims who strive to sustain everyday interactions in a society marked by deep divisions and disagreements. Throughout the dissertation, I argue that in such a polarized conjuncture, the primary mode of sociality is not characterized by overt culture wars or sustained open debate, but by selective engagement and reticence—practices enabled through the mobilization of indifference. I further suggest that the shape this indifference takes depends on how one relates to the dominant tradition of the society—in this case, Sunni Islam, including its historical entwinement with modern state custodianship. To account for the heterogeneous ways individuals relate to the dominant tradition, I mobilize the concept of sensibility. The concept enables us to deconstruct the conventional analytic language of ideology that tends to portray polarized collective life as a constant clash between opposing camps with clearly defined ideological cores and thereby reifies rigid binary thinking that constrains both our political analysis and imagination. I thus suggest that sensibility offers a more precise analytic tool for understanding how polarization emerges, is lived, and persists in collective life. It also helps illuminate the uneasy proximity between claims to authority and accusations of authoritarianism that characterizes many manifestations of political polarization.