Cemaats in the Realm of Social and Civil Activity in Turkey: Historical and Modern Dimensions

Abstract

Turkish cemaats (jemaats) have a reputation of highly adjusted to the contemporaneity traditional religious communities. Within the last decades the number of their followers has been rapidly rising both inside Turkey and abroad. However, despite an increasing interest in the modern Islam worldwide the phenomena of Turkish cemaats and their impact on the political process and civil society development in Turkey and beyond remain understudied. What are the defining factors of cemaats’ rising socio-political influence? In what way do they contribute to the alternative perceptions of democracy and civil society in the non-Western and Islamic contexts? This article analyzes special features of civic activity in Turkey focusing on a number of influential Turkish cemaats. Based on a detailed study of various normative and narrative sources the author shows, how cemaats have developed high capacities to adapt to the fluctuations of the Turkish political process in the second part of the 20th century. In doing so cemaats also gradually proliferated beyond national borders functioning as parallel structures for secular civil society and state institutions in Turkey and beyond.