just out in Marketing Theory pre-published open access version pdf available here abstract In this speculative comment I will suggest that, in analogy with Colin Campbell’s argument regarding the Romantic Ethic and the spirit of modern consumerism, there is prima facie evidence that there is also an elective affinity between Sufi-infused Islamic religiosity and the emergent Muslim consumerisms, ...
Paper prepared for the Global Studies Association conference 10th to 12th July 2013 at the University of Roehampton (pdf) While European leaders squabble about whether or not Turkey does or does not belong into the European Union and in Germany, the main destination of Turkish migration in the second half of the 20th century, Turks ...
All too often the political divides in Turkey are simplified into a crude division into a secularist/republican (Kemalist) camp and an Islamic/Islamist camp, with the only complication allowed for being the conflict around Kurdish minority rights. What has been long ignored was that both these camps share a set of outlooks that they inherited from ...
[update 30th July 2013 – İhsan Yılmaz’ critical comments in the conservative/religious Zaman on the combined Kemalist-Islamist witch hunt against the eminent sociologist Nilüfer Göle … and our whole discipline for that matter are interesting reading http://www.todayszaman.com/columnist-320525-gezi-and-kemalo-islamist-attacks-on-sociologist-gole-1.html] In a previous post I refer to the role that pioneering secular sociologists have played in de-demonising the new Turkish ...
This morning there should have been talks between representatives of the protesters and Prime Minister Erdoğan. Last night police moved in on Taksim Square with tear gas and rubber bullets. This could either be a strangely inept attempt at “divide and rule” – separating “violent” and “left wing extremist” protesters and “hooligans” from the “reasonable” ...
It is always flattering when the influence of one’s academic discipline is played up – as here by the religious/conservative intellectual Ali Bulaç (see Guida 2010), emphasising the relevance of a subject that, after Islamic theology, he also studied. In his column for the Islamic-conservative daily Zaman he concludes a reflection on the social composition ...
graffiti on the Institut Français in Istanbul seen on Duygu’s flickr account … I wonder whether the other cultural exchange institutions have been modified in a similar way? ...
If the currently governing AKP government in Turkey can be correctly described as “post-Islamist” movement emerging from the more clearly Islamist Refah… then we may be witnessing the emergence of post-post-Islamists turning their backs on the the AKP – people like Bülent Peker for whom the government reaction to the current protests is the last ...
One of the starting points of my interest in the possible linkages between Sufism and commercial culture was Sultan Veled’s couplet on how the soul becomes ‘a city, a market, a shop‘. Sufism is a thoroughly urban, cosmopolitan phenomenon – The notion that Sufism is a mere expression of rural “folk” Islam is a myth, ...
http://www.pinarselek.com/public/page_item.aspx?id=1810 this is either a case of one-step-forward-two-steps-back or two-step-forwards-one-step-back – hope it’s the latter… ...