heptagrammaton’s Reviews > Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks > Status Update

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. . ."

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.