Full metadata
Title
Building a pious self in secular settings: pious women in modern Turkey
Description
This dissertation aims to explore the diverse ways in which piety is conceptualized and cultivated by highly-educated Muslim women in Turkey. These women hold active positions within the secular-public sphere while trying to keep their aim of becoming pious in their own way, in relation to their subjective understanding of piety. After a detailed analysis of the formation of the secular modern public sphere in Turkey, in relation to the questions of modernity, nation-building, secularism, Islamism, and the gender relations, it gives an account of the individual routes taken by the highly educated professional women to particular aspirations of piety. The individual stories are designed to show the arbitrariness of many modern binary oppositions such as modern vs. traditional, secular vs. religious, liberated vs. oppressed, individual vs. communal, and etc. These individual routes are also analyzed within a collective framework through an analysis of the activities of two women's NGO's addressing at their attempt of building a collective attitude toward the secular-liberal conception of gender and sexuality. Finally the dissertation argues that Turkey has the capacity to deconstruct the aforementioned binary categories with its macro-level sociopolitical experience, and the micro-level everyday life experiences of ordinary people. It also reveals that piety cannot be measured with outward expressions, or thought as a sociopolitical categorization. Because just like secularism, piety has also the capacity to penetrate into the everyday lives of people from diverse sociopolitical backgrounds, which opens up possibilities of rethinking the religious-secular divide, and all the other binaries that come with it.
Date Created
2012
Contributors
- Topal, Semiha (Author)
- Talebi, Shahla (Thesis advisor)
- Cady, Linell (Committee member)
- Ali, Souad (Committee member)
- Arizona State University (Publisher)
Topical Subject
Resource Type
Extent
vii, 256 p
Language
Copyright Statement
In Copyright
Primary Member of
Peer-reviewed
No
Open Access
No
Handle
https://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.I.15871
Statement of Responsibility
by Semiha Topal
Description Source
Viewed on May 12, 2014
Level of coding
full
Note
Partial requirement for: Ph. D., Arizona State University, 2012
Note type
thesis
Includes bibliographical references (p. 248-256)
Note type
bibliography
Field of study: Religious studies
System Created
- 2013-01-17 06:35:27
System Modified
- 2021-08-30 01:44:20
- 2 years 8 months ago
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