Oxford Handbook of Religion in Turkey

Since its foundation in 1923, the Republic of Turkey has had a complex and often misunderstood relationship with religion. The constitutional laïcité implemented by its founders is unique in a Muslim context, and although the majority of the population identifies as Muslim, the state recognizes no official religion. Despite this secular stance, Islam has been resurgent in Turkey in the 21st century. Moreover, the relative openness of Turkish society has cultivated vibrant religious (and non-religious) minority communities, placing it at the forefront of global demographic changes in religion. As a result, Turkey has fostered a perennial dynamism among expressions of religious practice, belief, and identity. The Oxford Handbook of Religion in Turkey offers a comprehensive analysis of the ways in which religion is understood, experienced, and contested in contemporary Turkey. The Handbook is arranged into thematic sections dealing with religion and the origin of the state, theological trends in the early republic, Islam in rural and urban settings, religious minorities, religion and culture, religion and politics, and modern intellectual and religious trends. Though this is a seemingly narrow topic, the subject of religion in Turkey attracts considerable interest both within and outside of the academy. Paradoxically, the study of modern Turkish theology is still in its infancy in the Western academy, not only because of the inaccessibility of the sources to non-Turkish speakers, but also because of an over-emphasis on the study of Turkish secularism, to the detriment of the study of religion itself. The Handbook thus represents an important intervention by presenting themes from modern Turkish theology, while opening the field of religious and Islamic studies to include more voices from Turkey. With co-editors in chief specializing in religious studies, theology, and anthropology, the Handbook provides the definitive reference work in this growing field.

Caroline Tee is Professor of the Anthropology of Islam at the University of Chester, UK. Her research focuses on contemporary religion in Turkey, and she has carried out extensive ethnographic fieldwork amongst the Alevis and the community associated with Fethullah Gülen. She is author of The Gülen Movement in Turkey: The Politics of Islam and Modernity (London: IB Tauris, 2016) and her work has also been published in journals including British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Sociology of Islam, European Journal of Turkish Studies, Politics, Religion and Ideology, and Journal of Contemporary Religion. Professor Tee is editor of the Edinburgh Studies in the Anthropology of Islam series at Edinburgh University Press and, between 2024-27, she is Principal Investigator for "Muslims, the Secular, and Existential Risk", funded by Templeton Religion Trust. Fabio Vicini is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Verona, Italy, and founder and convener of the Muslim Worlds Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA). He is the author of Reading Islam: Life and Politics of Brotherhood in Modern Turkey (Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2020). Located at the cutting edge of interdisciplinary inquiry in Anthropology, Islamic studies, and Social Theory, his research has investigated how, in the last one hundred years, Muslims in Turkey have been rethinking the Islamic tradition through the conceptual apparatus of modernity while continuing to rely on longstanding Islamic ideas of the self, discipline, connectivity, and transcendence. His work has been published, among other venues, in HAU - Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Culture and Religion, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Ethnicities, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies. Philip Dorroll is Associate Professor of Religion at Wofford College, USA, and author of Islamic Theology in the Turkish Republic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021). He received his Ph.D. in Religion from Emory University. His published research has focused on the history of modern Islamic theology in Turkish, classical Islamic theology in Arabic, and Eastern Christian theology in classical Arabic. His work been published in venues such as Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Journal of Islamic Studies, Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies, Studies in World Christianity, Contemporary Islam, Review of Middle East Studies, and Religion Compass. His research on Islamic theology has been translated into Albanian, Bosnian, and Turkish. He is also current co-chair of the Eastern Orthodox Studies Unit at the American Academy of Religion.