Status Updates From Muslim Nationalism and the ...

[Historical shared coherent traditions, streams of knowledge about what happened in the past relied on to justify the "cultural shock" of the present] are just words, labels that gain meaning only when they are acted out. And in the process of being performed, root identifying traditions [...] are continually modified by experience, manipulated to meet subjective commitments and concerns...

Israel, Uri Ram argues, is becoming increasingly nonsecular, because only Jewish nationality is officially recognised, not Israeli nationality, giving religious groups sway over defining the nation [because] Jewish nationality means that belonging is determined by family of birth, while Israeli nationality is a potentially universal category open to all—Jews, Arabs, and other citizens.

National subjectivity are better described by delineating the processes by which people develop them, rather as categories to label them.

"... A citizen is someone who waits in line and tried to get his papers signed. It's a passive thing to be a citizen. It's lower middle class. A director/administrator (müdür) isn't a citizen. He's the state, so he's above the citizen. . ."

(JW's interview with journalist Mustafa Akyol)

This feeling has extended even to the citizen's relation to Ataturk, whose image, once imposed by the state on public areas and ubiquitous in shops has been privatised and brought into homes, where it is enclosed by small shrines. [...] The relationship with Ataturk's image (and his ideas) has thus been made to appear personal, rather than state-imposed, choice.

[A] special type of bonding [recaputres] nostalgia for mutual assistance, neighbourliness, face-to-face relations, for an idealized Islamic community. Capitalist relations and patron-client systems, like relations between citizen and state, are represented as economies based on family, neighbourly and Islamic love and service...

[...] Hidayet Şefkatlı Tuksal reflected that when people don't feel the need for mutuality and become individuals, they enter "a state that is against human natute—the city person who is alone."

... [I]n the context of globalisation and commercialisation, Islamic ideas, practices and identities have become personalised and uncooked from formal groups that claim to represent them.

[C]ross-cultural comparisons point to an inverse relationship between the prominence of women in allegories of the nation and their access to state politics. Historically, women's activism in nationalist movements tends to be suppressed or forgotten, while female symbols endure.

... Joanne Nagel observes that that the national state is essentially a masculine institution characterized by a nationalist culture that articulates with the "microculture" of masculinity in everyday life. Nationalists the world over have tended to liken the nation to a family in which men and women have "natural" roles to play.

(pp. 160-61, emphasis mine)

The moral obligation between mother and son, imagined as a bond based on milk, is repeated in the moral obligation of citizen-child to the stare—their bond is based on blood and expressed as vatan borcu, military service as a "debt to the nation."

... Cf. the long line of obsession with bodily fluids and biopower; Carolus Linnaeus's advice, classist-bioessentialist, upper class mothers to nurse their children themselves for a suspicion of a pollutive, despoiling character to others' breastmilk.

{In journalist Ayşe Önal's words:} "On a food program {...} you can't say 'Rum food' because it will corrupt honour [namus bozar]." She once heard someone say in this context, "Don't dishonor the kitchen." [Mutfağin ırzina geçme; literally, don't rape the kitchen.]

(Curly brackets mine. Square brackets in the original, White's own. If any misspellings: mine.)

[In] Ayşenir [Bilgi Solak]'s descruption of nationalism, regardless of variety, is male and hard-edged without room for compromise. It is obsessed with an emphasis on boundaries of the nation, women's honor, and blood, and not concerned with the substance of religion. Islam appears rather as a motif.

The maintenance of a national identity requires continuous vigilance against the threat of forgetting, losing the coherence of the national narrative, and disappearing. It requires continual monitoring of boundaries against the incursion of impure elements (in language, ideas, cultural practices and blood).

The sociologist Ferhat Kentel told mr that modernisation was a form of physical shame. "In school, you learn shame at wearing pyjamas to the store, to wear a scarf. You learn how to hold a knife and a fork, how to correctly scratch your nose. Modrrnjtyabd civilization teaches me to be ashamed. Then you learn yo despise others who haven't passed the same test .... I was tamed, domesticated.

[Deborah A.] Starr argues (2009, 5-53) that the possibility of cosmopolitanism and its "sense of an expanded world" is intimately linked to empire, to "the cultural fusion made possible by military conquest," making it short-lived in the nationalist present.

(fn. 36 to Ch. 5)

In Turkey, the individual has become the nation, and the prospect of loss is immeasurably more inspiring of fear because it implies the loss of the "authentic" self. Charles Lindholm has suggested that the search for authenticity is a consequence of a modern loss of faith and meaning. Some seek [it] ... anchor[ing] themselves in more collective forms [...] but also in [...] group identity...