Dr Esra Özyürek's Publications

Being German, Becoming Muslim: Race, Religion and Conversion in the New Europe, Princeton University Press, 23 Nov 2014.
by Esra Özyürek

Every year more and more Europeans, including Germans, are embracing Islam. Being German, Becoming Muslim explores how Germans come to Islam within this antagonistic climate, how they manage to balance their love for Islam with their society's fear of it, how they relate to immigrant Muslims, and how they shape debates about race, religion, and belonging in today's Europe.

Esra Özyürek looks at how mainstream society marginalizes converts and questions their national loyalties. In turn, converts try to disassociate themselves from migrants of Muslim-majority countries and promote a denationalized Islam untainted by Turkish or Arab traditions.

Being German, Becoming Muslim provides a fresh window into the connections and tensions stemming from a growing religious phenomenon in Germany and beyond.

The Politics of Public Memory in Turkey (Modern Intellectual and Political History of the Middle East), Syracuse University Press, 15th December 2006.
by Esra Özyürek

Turkish society is frequently accused of having amnesia. It has been said that there is no social memory in Turkey before Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded modern Turkey after the first World War. Indeed, in 1923, the newly founded Turkish Republic committed to a modernist future by erasing the memory of its Ottoman past. Now, almost eighty years after the establishment of the Republic, the grandchildren of the founders have a different relationship with history. New generations make every effort to remember, record, and reconcile earlier periods. The multiple and personalized representations of the past with which they engage allow contemporary Turkish citizens to create alternative identities for themselves and their communities. Unlike its futuristic and homogenizing character at the turn of the twentieth century, Turkish nationalism today uses memories to generate varied narratives for the nation as well as the minority groups.

Contributors to this volume come from diverse disciplines of anthropology, comparative literature, and sociology but they share a common understanding of contemporary Turkey and how its different representations of the past have become metaphors through which individuals and groups define their cultural identity and political position. They explore the ways people challenge, reaffirm, or transform the concepts of history, nation, homeland, and Republic through acts of memory - effectively demonstrating that memory can be both the basis of cultural reproduction and a form of resistance. The introduction of comparative material to other societies is rare and adds an important new dimension to the analyses.

Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey (Politics, History and Culture), Duke University Press, 30th August 2006.
by Esra Özyürek

As the twentieth century drew to a close, the unity and authority of the secularist Turkish state was challenged by the rise of political Islam and Kurdish separatism on the one hand and by the increasing demands of the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank on the other. While the Turkish government had long limited Islam - the religion of the overwhelming majority of its citizens - to the private sphere, it burst into the public arena in the late 1990s, becoming part of party politics. As religion became political, symbols of Kemalism - the official ideology of the Turkish Republic founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923 - spread throughout the private sphere.

In "Nostalgia for the Modern", Esra Ozyurek analyzes the ways that Turkish citizens began to express an attachment to - and nostalgia for - the secularist, modernist, and nationalist foundations of the Turkish Republic. Based on her ethnographic research in Istanbul and Ankara during the late 1990s, Ozyurek describes how ordinary Turkish citizens demonstrated their affiliation for Kemalism in the ways they organized their domestic space, decorated their walls, told their life stories, and interpreted political developments. She examines the recent interest in the private lives of the founding generation of the Republic, reflects on several privately organized museum exhibits about the early Republic, and considers the proliferation in homes and businesses of pictures of Ataturk, the most potent symbol of the secular Turkish state. She also explores the organization of the 1998 celebrations marking the Republic's seventy-fifth anniversary. Ozyurek's insights into how state ideologies spread through private and personal realms of life have implications for all societies confronting the simultaneous rise of neo-liberalism and politicized religion.