Late Modern Transformation of Islam or Islamic Transformation of Late Modern Religiosity?: Use and Function of New Age Elements in the Writings of the Turkish Islamic Self-Development Author Muhammed Bozdağ (b. 1967)

Abstract

The Turkish author Muhammed Bozdağ, who has no formal religious education, has been popular since the late 1990s because of his self-help seminars and self-help books. Though they are based on the adaptation of Western New Age-inspired models, Bozdağ uses many of the models’ parascientific concepts while carefully eliminating other elements that could undermine Islamic normativity. Furthermore, he emphasizes that worldly success must not be sought without being aware of the hereafter. For this purpose, he has written a book dedicated to the interpretation of traditional Islamic eschatology in parascientific terms. The strong emphases on collective normativity and on a theistic worldview clearly characterize his adaption of elements from new religiosities as highly selective and restricted to very specific purposes.