Spreading whose word? Militarism and nationalism in the transnational Turkish mosques

Abstract

In this article, I explore the role of religious discourses and practices in the diasporic Kurdish-Turkish conflict and investigate the ways in which presentations of the political conflict has been disseminated and reproduced via Turkish mosques located in Europe and the United States. Through extended ethnographic research, I examine the imagination of Turkish political theology and the exclusion of the Kurds from the imagined transnational Muslim ummah for which Turkish Islamist discourse promotes the Turkish state as the flag-bearer. I demonstrate that the existence of the Kurds, by virtue of their exclusion from this imaginary worldview, unravels the limitations of Turkish pan-Islamist discourse.