Charting the “Geography of the Heart”: The Diyanet’s Civilizational Vision and Its European Frontiers

Abstract

Recent scholarship has studied the extensive transformation of Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) over the past two decades as embodying a form of religious populism that mobilizes civilizational antagonisms. Based on a directed qualitative content analysis of Friday sermons, official publications, online material, broadcasts, and public statements by Diyanet leaders, this article makes three contributions. First, while confirming that the Diyanet promotes the civilizational unity of the ummah and casts Turkey as the spiritual custodian of a transhistorical Islamic world, the analysis shows that anti-elitist framings characteristic of populism are barely present in its rhetoric. Second, the article provides a detailed examination of gönül coğrafyası (geography of the heart), a widely invoked yet understudied concept through which the Diyanet reimagines Ottoman-Islamic heritage as a sacred topography of civilizational belonging and responsibility. Third, it examines how Europe is situated both outside and within this imagined geography: at once a constitutive and menacing “other” marked by Islamophobia and cultural decay yet also a moral frontier inhabited by Muslim diasporas through whom Turkish Islam extends its reach. By drawing such symbolic boundaries, the Diyanet frames Islam as both religious patrimony and ethical alternative to Western modernity, portraying itself as a key actor in the re-sacralization of modern life across borders.

1. Introduction

Speaking at a public event in 2024, Mehmet Görmez, former President (2010–2017) of Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), reflected on “a concept that entered our Turkish vocabulary in the last ten years: the ‘geography of the heart’” (gönül coğrafyası). This notion, he explained, encompassed Muslim-majority lands across the Middle East, the Balkans, Central Asia, and North Africa, where people are “bound by ties of faith, affection, language, history, and culture”. Görmez then recalled a conversation with then German President Christian Wulff, who asked whether Germany belonged to this geography. “Of course”, Görmez replied, “six million of our citizens live among you”. When Wulff pressed, “how about those beyond the six million?” Görmez responded with an analogy: “Just as Turkey is a candidate country for the European Union, Germany, France, and others are candidate countries for entering our geography of the heart” (Facebook 2024).

This anecdote is exemplary of how the Diyanet and the affiliated religious intelligentsia in contemporary Turkey under the Justice and Development Party (AKP) conceptualize the “geography of the heart”: not only as an inherited sacred geography encompassing large swathes of the Muslim world, but also as a living, expandable horizon of belonging, articulated through blurred boundaries that can symbolically extend to Europe. Focusing on the various articulations of gönül coğrafyası as a framing tool for the Diyanet’s civilizational vision, this article offers three contributions to the literature.

First, we seek to add further specificity to extant scholarship that interprets the Diyanet’s rhetoric as a form of Islamist populism forging civilizational identities and oppositions (Koskina 2024; Yilmaz et al. 2021a, 2021b). Our analysis of the Diyanet’s various materials confirms indeed the abundant presence of appeals to the civilizational unity of the ummah and to Turkey’s role as the natural custodian of the Muslim world. Yet in line with the populism scholarship’s reminder to “properly distinguish populism from what it travels with” (Hunger and Paxton 2022, p. 617), we question whether this discourse is populist per se. Evidence shows that the vertical antagonism characteristic of populism that pits a virtuous “people” against a corrupt “elite” is scant in the Diyanet’s discourse, overshadowed by a horizontal logic of inclusion and exclusion in which religion, nation, and civilization intersect to construct a fluid yet bounded sense of “us”. Rather than contradicting the framework of Islamist populism, this argument highlights variation within it: the Diyanet undoubtedly plays a constitutive role in the AKP’s religious political project, where nationalist, civilizationist, and populist elements intertwine, but its distinctive contribution lies in articulating the first two registers rather than the last.

Second, we examine the Diyanet’s articulation of gönül coğrafyası, a crucial but insufficiently studied concept that anchors its civilizational vision. Embedded within the larger state discourse and imbued with religious overtones, gönül coğrafyası evokes a poetic and affective imaginary while functioning as a moral cartography through which the Diyanet projects bonds of affinity and responsibility beyond Turkey’s borders. In this sacred geography, encompassing the Ottoman-Islamic legacy and its extensions, Turkish agency is portrayed as both benevolent and divinely sanctioned. Through an analysis of these representations, we demonstrate how gönül coğrafyası has evolved into a routinized idiom of soft power that legitimates Turkey’s transnational presence, aspirations of civilizational leadership, and the Diyanet’s expanding international mandate.

Third, we explore how Europe figures in relation to this civilizational space. In the Diyanet’s rhetoric, Europe occupies a fluid position that is simultaneously outside and inside. Outside, because it represents the perennial Western-civilizational “other” against which the Muslim world should unite and protect itself; inside, because it is a frontier of belonging animated not only by an Ottoman-Islamic legacy—especially in the Balkans—but also through Turkish-Muslim diasporas in Western Europe who are viewed as sustaining the moral and emotional bonds of gönül coğrafyası. Through this dual positioning, Europe becomes both a mirror and a proving ground for the Diyanet’s civilizational mission. By tracing these shifting deployments, the article shows how the Diyanet projects Turkey’s civilizational vision abroad and seeks to mould transnational Muslim identities, at times in tension with European states’ own efforts to co-opt these communities within national frameworks.

In what follows, we first review the scholarship on the Diyanet’s transformation under the AKP, tracing its expanding national and transnational roles. We then situate the institution within broader theoretical debates on populism, nationalism, and civilizationism. After outlining our methodological approach, the analysis unfolds in three parts: (1) an examination of the Diyanet’s Friday sermons in light of the theoretical literature, (2) gönül coğrafyası as a symbolic metaphor of civilizational belonging and leadership, (3) Europe as the fluid frontier of this imagined cartography, where inclusion and exclusion become entangled. The conclusion synthesizes the main findings and reflects on the theoretical implications of the Diyanet’s civilizationism.

2. Diyanet at Home, Diyanet Abroad

Arguably no other institution has attracted as much scholarly attention during the AKP years as the Diyanet, owing largely to its dramatic expansion and repurposing since 2002 (İslam et al. 2023). Founded in 1924, the Diyanet was a product of the contentious secular settlement forged in the transition from empire to nation-state, functioning in its first decades as an administrative body tasked with containing and moderating the social significance of religion in line with the Republic’s unique configuration of secularism, laiklik (Peker 2020). In the Cold War context, especially after the military coups of 1960 and 1980, its remit expanded to promoting national unity and deploying Islam as a counterweight to ideological conflict—most visibly through the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis that fused Sunni Islam with Turkish nationalism as an antidote to the rise of leftist political mobilization (Öztürk 2016). Under the AKP rule, however, the institution has shifted from a relatively passive and tutelary posture to a far more assertive one, marked by unprecedented growth in budget, personnel, and transnational presence, making it both a crucial instrument of domestic social engineering and a proactive actor in Turkey’s foreign policy agenda (Akan 2023; Öztürk 2018).

Staffed by around 140,000 people, with a budget of about ₺130 billion (US$4.5 billion) in 2025 that exceeds major ministries, overseeing nearly 90,000 mosques, and enrolling over 4 million students in Qur’an courses, the Diyanet has become a vast, state-run machinery of religious promotion and moral supervision. Its mission, redefined by a 2010 law, encompasses activities “outside the mosque” to methodically reach into all aspects of social life. Through cooperation with ministries such as those of education and family, 24 h radio and television broadcasting, and “on-demand” religious guidance via hotlines and digital tools, the Diyanet has moved beyond service provision to religious demand creation (Karakaş 2021). In this expanded role, it embeds Sunni-Islamic norms across hospitals, schools, marriage and family counselling centers, workplaces, prisons, youth and social service programs, digital platforms, and even disaster relief operations—which has led scholars to identify it as the AKP’s primary institution of desecularization/Islamization in 21st-century Turkey (Adak 2020; Gümüşçü 2024)1.

Even more relevant for the purposes of this article is the Diyanet’s heightened transnational involvement, shifting from modest diaspora service to an instrument of foreign policy for three key purposes: expand Turkey’s global influence by projecting a civilizational leadership role, mobilize diaspora and culturally affiliated communities through religious channels, and consolidate domestic power by legitimizing the AKP’s rule and curbing opponents (Öztürk and Baser 2022). Institutionally, this shift has entailed a rapid expansion of attachés and affiliated mosques across more than one hundred countries across the Balkans, Western Europe, Central Asia, Africa, and beyond, complemented by programs like the International Theology Program that train diaspora leaders. Scholars observe that the Diyanet’s strategies in these geographies are far from uniform: in the Balkans it invokes Ottoman legacies to bolster local institutions, in Africa and the Caucasus it ties religious outreach to aid and education programs, while in Western Europe it focuses more directly on diaspora governance and political alignment, highlighting the variegated nature of the Diyanet’s religious diplomacy (Gözaydın 2021).

In Europe, Turkey relies on the Diyanet to manage its 6 million-strong diaspora community through embassy-affiliated organizations such as the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DİTİB) in Germany and equivalent bodies in France, the Netherlands, Austria, and Belgium, among others. These networks extend well beyond mosque provision, encompassing Qur’an courses, youth programs, counseling, funeral funds, and pilgrimage logistics, while also serving as instruments of political mobilization, including electioneering and organizing public protests. In this way, the Diyanet officials act simultaneously as religious caregivers and state emissaries who reproduce Ankara’s conservative worldview (Maritato 2021). Yet this expansive role has also generated tensions: while Turkey seeks to de-territorialize religious authority to sustain a Turkish-inflected Muslim identity abroad, European states attempt to reassert control by embedding Islam within their own national frameworks, creating occasional accommodation but also friction over imams, curricula, and mosque governance (Çitak 2018). These frictions are sharpened by Ankara’s bid to project a global Islamic authority even beyond the Turkish diaspora to non-Turkish Muslims, and by the Diyanet’s increasing use of its transnational networks for surveillance and coercion, as it monitors diaspora communities, disciplines dissent, and targets religious contenders such as the Gülenists (Adar 2024; Çitak 2024)2.

3. Theoretical Framework

3.1. Religion’s Relationship with Many–Isms

Such sweeping transformation and expansion, both domestically and internationally, have been interpreted through various conceptual lenses, most notably analyses of how the AKP’s Diyanet mobilizes Islam in relation to three overlapping “-isms”: populism, nationalism, and civilizationism. In this subsection, we briefly revisit the literature examining religion’s role within these dynamics before returning to the Turkish case in the next one.

Scholarship has shown that populism, as a vertical and anti-elitist construct, may interact with religion in multidimensional ways. Ideationally, religion can mark “the people” as a sacred ethnocultural community opposed to corrupt elites and threatening “others”, while also supplying transcendent meanings such as chosenness, moral struggle, salvation that elevate their cause. Stylistically, populists draw on religious symbols, language, and rituals to thicken their claims and embody the “ordinary” people against secular elites and culturally distinct outsiders. Strategically, religion provides networks and mobilizing power, from alliances with religious groups to the sanctification of leaders and the shaping of policy and institutions across social domains (Peker and Laxer 2021; Yilmaz et al. 2021c; Zúquete 2017).

Deeply interwoven with populism’s vertical register is nationalism’s horizontal dimension that distinguishes insiders from outsiders, with populist discourse often, but not exclusively, drawing on nationalist boundaries (De Cleen and Stavrakakis 2017). Accordingly, the people/nation can be imagined simultaneously and ambiguously as plebs (socioeconomic underdog), ethnos (ethnocultural community), and demos (a sovereign political body), where “elites” and “others” may be cast not only above and below the people but also inside/outside the nation in a two-dimensional space (Brubaker 2020; see also Taguieff 2015). Religious framing complements this picture by sacralizing the boundaries of the nation, casting it as a divinely chosen community whose unity and purpose derive from shared faith. In this mode, the antagonism towards secular elites and outsiders is not only political but also moral, with national belonging conceived through sacred history and religious heritage (Gorski 2018; Soper and Fetzer 2018).

Yet populism does not always anchor itself in a national imaginary to define “us”; it can also function below that level (municipal, regional) or above it (transnational) (Moffitt and De Cleen, forthcoming). At the transnational level, this often takes the form of civilizationism, which recasts “the people” as authentic bearers of not (only) a nation, but an entire civilization whose values are pure and superior. Civilizations are typically defined here through religions such as Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism; elites are condemned as betrayers of their own civilization, while minorities and migrants are stigmatized as belonging to rival, hostile ones (Haynes 2019; Yilmaz and Morieson 2023). Political struggle is accordingly framed as an existential battle for civilizational survival, which, rather than contradicting nationalism, often complements it by embedding national myths and achievements within a broader narrative in which some nations present themselves as guardians or vanguards of the civilization they are said to embody (Brubaker 2017; Cerrone 2023). In this sense, religion can become a key vehicle of “civilizational nationalism” that fuses the two registers to defend illiberal norms as culturally authentic and portray the nation as the custodian of a morally superior world order (Morieson 2025).

3.2. Theorizing the AKP’s Diyanet

The AKP’s religiously inflected political project, of which the Diyanet is a vital component, offers a revealing case for examining how populism, nationalism, and civilizationism intersect and are translated into concrete policies, discourses, and practices across national and transnational domains. According to Yilmaz et al. (2021a, 2021b), the Diyanet serves as an agent of Islamist populism—where the authors use a definition of populism that encapsulates three dimensions: (a) a vertical binary that pit the pious “people” against secular “elites”, (b) a horizontal division that stigmatize internal “others” such as Alevis, Kurds, Gülenists, portrayed as endangering religio-national unity, and (c) a civilizational narrative that situates these conflicts within a broader struggle between Islam and a hostile West. In this configuration, the Diyanet sanctifies the AKP’s specific policies, sacralizes Erdoğan’s personal figure, legitimizes violence when deemed necessary, frames obedience as faith, and recasts dissent as heresy—thereby transforming Erdoğanism into a moral order in the name of protecting the ever-victimized “people” and their civilization (Yilmaz and Albayrak 2022). This domestically grounded religious statecraft also extends into foreign policy, where the Diyanet projects Ankara’s influence through a blend of “soft” power, such as cultural diplomacy and religio-civilizational outreach, and “sharp” power, involving surveillance, control, and the disciplining of dissent within diaspora communities (Öztürk and Baser 2022).

While broadly agreeing with this framework, we argue that the Diyanet’s role within the AKP’s Islamist-populist constellation calls for greater conceptual precision. As an alternative to defining populism through three dimensions—vertical, horizontal, and civilizational—we seek to advance the conversation by analytically disaggregating these logics and examining how they interact in specific contexts. Following De Cleen and Stavrakakis (2017, 2020); see also (Moffitt 2020; Moffitt and De Cleen, forthcoming), we treat populism more minimally, as primarily a vertical discursive logic that opposes the “people” and the “elite”, while recognizing that this opposition often intertwines with a horizontal insider-outsider distinction that delineates the boundaries of belonging. The horizontal axis is typically drawn in national terms but may also extend civilizationally, defining the in-group through a wider religious or cultural “us” vis-à-vis a hostile “them”. In practice, these national and civilizational markers may often overlap and blur, allowing actors such as the Diyanet to move fluidly, even ambiguously, between the registers of nation, ummah, and civilization to reinforce a sense of moral and political unity.

Our approach draws on scholarship that advocates studying populism as a distinct logic, analytically separable from thicker ideational or discursive formations such as nationalism, nativism, socialism, or civilizationism—with which it may or may not travel, depending on the case at hand (Hunger and Paxton 2022; Neuner and Wratil 2022). Disentangling these dimensions, rather than subsuming them within a single fused structure of populism, allows for a more precise understanding of the Diyanet’s discursive composition, its operation across scales and contexts, and its specific functions within the surrounding political rhetoric. This perspective also highlights the varying degrees to which vertical anti-elitism and horizontal boundary-making are mobilized in practice. The empirical section examines this multidimensionality.

4. Methodology

This study employs a qualitative content analysis aimed at understanding how the Diyanet articulates its moral and sociopolitical vision at national and civilizational levels across a wide range of textual and audiovisual materials, focusing especially on the post-2016 period. This timeframe is chosen because the aftermath of the failed coup attempt in July 2016 marked, according to many observers, a turning point by sharpening the Diyanet’s rhetoric and lending it a more antagonistic and defensive tone, expanding its role in promoting moral unity and national-civilizational solidarity in opposition to perceived internal and external threats (Yilmaz and Albayrak 2022). The analysis draws on a broad corpus of sources that capture the institution’s official communication across religious, media, and public spheres. Among these are the Friday sermons (hutbe) issued weekly by the Diyanet’s central office, which form the dataset in Section 5.1 below, and provide a record of the institution’s moral and thematic emphases. Complementary materials, drawn especially in Section 5.2 and Section 5.3, include public speeches and interviews by Diyanet presidents and senior officials, as well as official publications and media content disseminated through Diyanet TV, Diyanet Radyo, and related online platforms.

To provide broader political and institutional context, the study also draws from the wider field of governmental discourse and initiatives, including presidential speeches, educational curricula and textbooks, and publications or statements from other government bodies involved in promoting Turkey’s civilizational and moral mission abroad. These sources help situate the Diyanet’s messaging within the larger ideological and institutional landscape of post-2016 Turkey. Given the vast volume of material, selection and inclusion criteria were guided by purposive sampling, with attention to content that demonstrated pertinence, representativeness, and significance in relation to the study’s core themes and questions, while still allowing room for unexpected patterns to emerge through iterative reading across the dataset (Ahmad and Wilkins 2025). Unless otherwise specified, all sources are in the original Turkish and have been translated by the authors.

More specifically, the study employs a directed qualitative content analysis approach. Rather than examining the material with no preconceived categories, a directed method is suitable when existing theories or prior research offer a preliminary conceptual map but require further refinement, enrichment, or empirical testing (Hsieh and Shannon 2005, pp. 1281–83). Given the extensive scholarship discussed above that already links the Diyanet’s discourse to nationalism, populism, and civilizationism across horizontal and vertical registers, these bodies of theory provided the initial sensitizing concepts that guided both sampling and coding. The analysis of the Friday sermons is the most structured component of the study (Section 5.1), where more than 450 sermons from January 2016 to December 2024 were subjected to a close reading, which yielded a focus on three most frequently used terms that denote a collective “us”: millet (nation), ümmet (ummah), and medeniyet (civilization)3. In addition to quantifying the frequency of these terms’ uses over the years, this section exemplifies their connections, partial overlaps, and selective activation against certain perceived enemies in different contexts. Across the empirical analysis, including sermons and other material, new codes were inductively added to broaden the range of categories found in the literature, particularly for themes not fully captured in prior research, such as the widespread uses of gönül coğrafyası (Section 5.2) and the Diyanet’s ambiguous symbolic positioning of Europe (Section 5.3). In these sections, the dataset expanded, until a saturation was reached, to include additional Diyanet and government materials that articulate moral obligation beyond the nation and delineate civilizational boundaries vis-à-vis the West.

Analytically, the coding and subsequent interpretation were structured by three interrelated organizing questions. First, to what extent, and in what ways, does the Diyanet forge vertical and horizontal antagonisms when variously defining the in-group and its adversaries across its post-2016 discourse? Second, how are gönül coğrafyası and related notions mobilized to construct a supranational sphere of belonging and responsibility that extends beyond the Turkish nation-state? Third, how do the boundaries of this civilizational vision interact with, and become contested along, the European frontier, particularly in relation to Turkish Muslim diasporas? In each empirical section, coded segments were examined with these questions in mind, which helped clarify how these categories acquire different emphases across texts and contribute to the Diyanet’s overall messaging.

All materials were imported into NVivo 15 to facilitate systematic organization, keyword searches, and the categorization of patterns across sources and years. Our analytical objective is primarily expository: to provide a structured and descriptive account of relevant content, using direct citation of characteristic rhetoric to map recurring vocabularies, themes, and identity markers as they appear in the Diyanet’s official communications (Vaismoradi et al. 2013). This descriptive orientation is consistent with the directed nature of the qualitative content analysis, where the aim is to relate the empirical material closely to the existing theoretical framework rather than to pursue an independent semantic, critical, or discourse-theoretical interrogation of the texts’ deeper conditions or performative effects (Hardy et al. 2004). This approach is advantageous for the purposes of the article, yet it also carries certain limitations. Although the analysis identifies the political and ideological significance of recurring themes and categories, a fuller contextual political analysis (Goodin and Tilly 2008) that might examine how the Diyanet’s rhetoric is produced, institutionalized, and strategically deployed within the broader dynamics of AKP governance, as well as a more granular hermeneutic reading of individual texts, lies beyond the scope of the present study.

5. Empirical Findings

5.1. Analyzing the Diyanet’s Sermons

Is the Diyanet’s discourse populist, strictly speaking? If populism is defined narrowly as a vertical, anti-elite construct (analytically distinct from but often intertwined with nationalism and/or civilizationism) such a classification is difficult to sustain. While the AKP’s rhetoric has been shown to pit a pious Sunni “people” at the bottom against a secular, immoral elite—embodied in the Republican People’s Party (CHP)—on top (Sandal 2021; Yabanci 2023), existing analyses of the Diyanet’s sermons and broader rhetoric reveal only a faint trace of this vertical antagonism. The extensive survey by Yılmaz et al. (2021a, pp. 6–8), for instance, identifies only a few instances in which the institution deployed this register, and even then only implicitly, by downplaying or omitting secular-national holidays and Atatürk’s foundational roles, or by making indirect criticisms of the secular-republican elite rather than openly naming or confronting them. Likewise, Koskina’s (2024, p. 156) analysis shows that while the Diyanet’s sermons criticize the imitation of Western lifestyles and the erosion of authentic values, the cited passages do not contain language that attributes these tendencies to identifiable elites.

An important first observation is that the Diyanet’s Friday sermons are often not directly political in the first place. A content analysis of 217 sermons (2016–2020) demonstrates that they operate on three interconnected levels: personal-moralistic (micro), social-regulatory (meso), and national-civilizational (macro)—with politically relevant themes appearing only in the last, which accounts for only about one-fifth of all sermons (Yakarlar 2024). At the micro level, the sermons seek to cultivate pious selves through themes of discipline, sincerity, and compassion, while at the meso level they extend this guidance to the social sphere, promoting conservative family values, gendered morality, and charity. The macro level situates these moral and socially regulatory horizons within a national and civilizational frame that links religion, memory, and belonging. Much of what the sermons accomplish, therefore, is not overtly political messaging, but the weaving of a moral order that regulates everyday conduct and anchors collective identity in religious virtue (Yakarlar 2024). This, however, is not to suggest that the sermons are devoid of political relevance; rather, the moral horizons they continuously construct provide an important normative grounding through which national and civilizational narratives later acquire their more assertive and emotionally charged ideological resonance (see, for instance, (Yilmaz and Erturk 2021)).

Building on this framework, our extended analysis of sermons from the 2016–2024 period shows that, where macro-level themes of political belonging and call to action do appear, the in-group is not constructed vertically against a morally suspect elite, but rather within a horizontal framework that mobilizes religio-historical imaginaries linking the nation, ummah, and an Islamically conceived civilization. Like existing analyses of the Diyanet’s rhetoric (Koskina 2024; Yilmaz et al. 2021a, 2021b), we find a recurring constellation of themes: the sacralization of the nation’s past and its continuity with early Islamic history; nostalgia for ancestral heroism and collective memory; the moral unification of the community against dangerous “others” at home and beyond; portrayals of a nation and global ummah besieged by hostile forces; and the depiction of Turkey as the divinely favored guardian and exemplar of Islamic civilization.

Table 1. Frequency of the words millet, ümmet, and medeniyet in Friday sermons (2016–2024).

	2016	2017	2018	2019	2020	2021	2022	2023	2024	Total
Millet (nation)	91	72	61	40	45	35	39	62	62	507
Ümmet (ummah)	58	24	33	32	17	25	25	30	29	273
Medeniyet (civilization)	43	15	15	11	7	10	9	11	20	141

below specifies the frequency of the most prominent terms used to refer to the collective “us”: millet, ümmet, and medeniyet.

In most cases, these terms are used in a “banal” rather than overtly political sense (Billig 1995): they appear in sermons celebrating religious or national holidays, offering condolences after disasters, commemorating martyrs, or endowed with moral attributes and behavioural expectations such as charity. In other cases, they shift from banal markers of everyday belonging to hot signifiers of a unified in-group, particularly activated through narratives of threat. Below, we briefly illustrate how these three notions unfold and intersect in the sermons4.

Millet is the most frequent marker of collective identity, understood in explicitly non-secular, religiously sanctified terms, often invoked to draw inspiration from the past and to forge unity against opponents. One sermon, for instance, remarks that “as a nation, we have throughout history endured many hardships… In the face of every difficulty, our only source of strength has been Almighty God”. It continues: “As yesterday, so today and tomorrow the dirty plots set against our country and our noble nation will be foiled”, against “internal and external networks of murder” and “traitors who seek to undermine the indivisible integrity of our homeland” (25 October 2024). Another one notes that “our Lord’s help has always been with our noble nation, which has never strayed from what is right and true. … For centuries, the victories our nation has won on every front have been the greatest testament to this. … Let us not forget that no enemy can enter a nation before discord does” (28 May 2021). This is why, “as a nation, we must cling tightly to Islam, the religion of mercy, justice, truth, and righteousness, in order to overcome the discord and challenges that encircle us and endanger our future” (16 January 2016). Across the period studied, the nation is consistently sacralized as a divinely sanctioned community bound by faith and destiny.

Millet operates in complementary rather than competing ways with ümmet or medeniyet. This is because the three are implied to share the same fate against menacing forces, who “resort to every kind of trick and trap to tear out from people’s hearts… the consciousness of being a nation and the awareness of being part of the ummah” (12 July 2024). Believers should “pray to God for the endurance of our state, the peace of our nation and the unity and solidarity of the ummah of Muhammad” (23 February 2024), and rest assured, as “the occupying tyrants who set their sights on our homeland, who harbor hostility toward our nation and the ummah of Muhammad… will certainly lose” (19 January 2024). Muslims’ goal, therefore, should be “to raise our children as generations conscious of being servants to God and members of the Prophet’s ummah, endowed with good morals and devoted to serving their homeland, their nation, and humanity” (25 June 2021). This is because “nations that adopt others’ values in place of their own… cannot stand firm. Societies that forget their own civilization… lose their history, their language, their religion, and their identity” (20 December 2024). Accordingly, we must “stay away from every word, idea, and behavior that alienates us from the purpose of our creation and corrupts our culture and civilization” (17 December 2021).

Ümmet is frequently employed in defensive and politically inflected terms, evoking solidarity against vaguely defined external adversaries. These are typically, though not explicitly, associated with the Western world. One sermon, for instance, condemns “those who rain death on Muslim lands, claiming to ‘bring peace and democracy to the world’” (16 February 2024). Against such hostility, the erosion of ummah consciousness is depicted as the root cause of suffering: “The main reason Islamic lands have, day by day, become realms of blood and tears is the weakening of the sense of ummah and the bonds of brotherhood among Muslims” (4 October 2024), as “the oppressors… draw courage from this disunity of the ummah of Muhammad” (8 December 2023). In response, sermons exhort believers to recover unity and mutual support: “Our exalted religion, Islam, calls us to vahdet [unity] and invites us to stand together and act in solidarity” (3 November 2023), for “when Muslims embrace unity, they preserve their very existence; when they act with ummah consciousness, they maintain their noble and dignified stance” (9 August 2024). Ultimately, despite their differences in “lands, colors, and languages” (19 January 2024), it is only through Muslims’ unity that “the lands of our ummah will be liberated from the oppression of tyrants and the betrayals of traitors” (8 December 2023).

Compared to ümmet, the term medeniyet appears not only less often, but also in less politically charged contexts, most often denoting the moral and cultural virtues of Islam. Islam is, for instance, described as “a civilization of compassion and mercy” (14 May 2021) and as “a civilization so compassionate that it would not harm even an ant” (19 November 2021). The collective task, therefore, is to protect and reinvigorate the authenticity of Islamic civilizational values: “As the ummah… what falls upon us is to act in unity and solidarity… to rebuild a civilization that will stand as a guarantor of justice and compassion on earth” (13 October 2023), for “Islamic civilization is a civilization of solidarity. Believers are the representatives of this civilization on earth” (24 March 2023). Such solidarity, the sermons warn, cannot be achieved as “captives of foreign cultures” or through “the values of another society”, for “a society alienated from its own culture cannot build a civilization” (23 December 2022). Instead, believers are called to “strive to rebuild Islamic civilization by taking inspiration from the Qur’an and the Sunnah” (27 May 2022), and through “mosques and masjids”, which are “the very foundation of our civilization” (27 September 2024).

Finally, returning to millet and its place within the wider Muslim ummah and civilization, the sermons repeatedly depict the nation as bearing a sacred duty to protect, aid, and lead the broader Islamic community, a responsibility presented as both divinely ordained and historically entrenched. As one sermon declares, “after embracing Islam, our noble nation served for centuries as the standard-bearer of the faith” (14 May 2024), while another proclaims that “throughout history, we have been a nation deeply devoted to the noble religion of Islam”, and that God’s “help has always been with our noble nation, the adversary of the oppressor and the hope of the oppressed” (25 August 2023). In the present, “our nation continues to contribute to numerous charitable endeavors at home and abroad through the foundations it has established” (15 May 2024), and to the Muslim world, “we will carry the benevolence of our state and the generosity of our noble nation” (24 June 2022). Beyond humanitarian aid, this redemptive mission also takes the form of solidarity with Muslim communities in conflict, where parallels are drawn between past national ordeals and contemporary suffering in the Muslim world: “How tragic it is that the suffering our nation overcame a century ago during our War of Independence is now being experienced, for many years, by our Palestinian brothers and sisters” (27 October 2023). Ultimately, this narrative culminates in the vision of a sacred nation whose historical destiny merges with the moral vocation of the ummah: “Our noble nation, the hope of the oppressed, will, with the consciousness of the ummah, once again turn our world into a land of peace” (3 November 2023).

Taken together, these discursive patterns reveal that the sermons’ core work is not the construction of a people-versus-elite binary, but the cultivation of a moralized antagonistic framework in which millet, ümmet, and medeniyet form interlocking spheres of religiously conceived identity, oriented against variously defined adversaries. By sacralizing the nation through a religious framing—and thereby categorically excluding non-Sunni citizens—, embedding it within the ummah, and situating both within an Islamic civilizational horizon, the sermons articulate a uniform sense of destiny and urgent mission. They thus assume a consequential politico-ideological function by recasting moral guidance as a collective call to action, activating a sense of existential crisis and shared struggle, orienting believers toward unity and vigilance in the face of perceived threats.

5.2. Gönül Coğrafyası as Civilizational Anchor

Extending the affective resonance of the religio-civilizational ethos, the notion of gönül coğrafyası crystallized in the early twenty-first century as a powerful metaphor through which the moral and spatial boundaries of belonging were reimagined in Turkey. Tracing its genealogy, Bölükbaşı (2021) shows that the concept bridges diverse ideological strands, from the nationalist-imperial nostalgia of intellectuals such as Hüseyin Nihal Atsız (“milli miras”, national heritage) and Erol Güngör (“imparatorluğumuzun bakiyesi”, imperial legacy) to the Islamist universalism of Necip Fazıl Kısakürek and Sezai Karakoç (“İslam haritası”, map of Islam) (see also (Balistreri and Pekşen 2023)). The outlines of a neo-Ottoman imagination of identity and foreign policy were already visible in the 1990s among Islamist-conservative intellectuals and during the presidency of Turgut Özal (1989–1993), who sought to reconcile the country’s Muslim identity with post–Cold War regional influence (Yavuz 1998). During the AKP’s early years in government, a central contribution to this intellectual constellation came from Ahmet Davutoğlu, a political theorist and later Foreign Minister and Prime Minister under the party. In his works, Davutoğlu advanced a strategic paradigm that cast Turkey as the central country of the Islamic world, endowed with a civilizational depth rooted in its Ottoman and Islamic past (Cohen 2016).

In what followed, gönül coğrafyası gradually became a soft-power idiom animating a neo-Ottoman foreign policy, cultural imagination, and religious outreach. New bodies such as the Yunus Emre Institute (est. 2007), the Maarif Foundation (est. 2016), and the Presidency for Turks Abroad and Related Communities (YTB, est. 2010), as well as revitalized ones like the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TİKA) and the Türkiye Diyanet Foundation (TDV), translated this vision into practice through humanitarian aid, cultural programs, mosque construction, and educational initiatives across the Balkans, Africa, and Central Asia (Şenay 2022; Tauscher 2025). Through these channels, gönül coğrafyası was institutionalized as a civilizational project, sacralizing Turkey’s transnational engagement as moral responsibility rather than simple geopolitical ambition. TİKA and partner groups, for instance, organize travelling cultural events under the title Gönül Coğrafyası Kültür Buluşmaları (Culture Gatherings of the Geography of the Heart), especially during Ramadan, which bring traditional Turkish-Islamic performances and storytelling to communities across multiple regions (Anadolu Ajansı 2016). YTB, for its part, showcases itself as “one of the key institutions shaping our diaspora policies and our strategies toward the gönül coğrafyası” (Anadolu Ajansı 2025b).

The concept is commonly mobilized by the highest echelons of power, foremost President Erdoğan, who has proudly declared that “from Syria to Gaza, we are present across our entire geography of the heart; we intervene in events, and we stand with the oppressed and the aggrieved” (Anadolu Ajansı 2025a). This is because, he claimed, “Turkey’s political and cultural borders begin not from its official boundaries, but from a much broader line described as ‘from the Adriatic to the Great Wall of China’. … Indeed, we feel the same sentiment for every inch of land within our geography of the heart” (YouTube 2023). The implication in such messages is that Turkey’s presence and leadership is actively desired in those regions. As Erdoğan put it in another public address: “Today, wherever you go in our geography of the heart, you will surely encounter people who pray for Turkey, send their greetings to our nation, and remember us and our ancestors with gratitude. The saying that ‘the Turk is the one awaited, the one whose path is watched for’ is not empty rhetoric, but rather a profound truth” (Instagram 2024). During an electoral campaign speech (AK Parti 2018), Erdoğan further elaborated on the emotional and spatial reach of the idea:

I always say this: our physical borders are one thing, but the borders of our world of the heart [gönül dünyamız] are entirely different. The meaning of Turkey goes far beyond its 780 thousand square kilometers. If one half of our heart is Istanbul, Diyarbakır, Trabzon, Antalya, and İzmir, then the other half is Aleppo, Kirkuk, Jerusalem, Sandžak, Bukhara, and Ürümqi. Just as we share in the concerns of Edirne, Yozgat, and Erzurum, we also feel the pain of those in Crimea, the Caucasus, Turkistan, Africa, and South Asia. … Yes, we are the devotees of a universal love that embraces every corner of our geography of the heart [gönül coğrafyamız]; we are in love with the world.

In school textbooks, new modules were introduced to disseminate this transnational belonging. The 2024 Turkish-language curriculum, for instance, designates “intercultural relations, culture, and the states within our geography of the heart” as a theme for sixth graders (Çoban and Polatcan 2025, p. 297). A chapter titled “Gönül Coğrafyamız” in a ninth-grade textbook for the Religious Culture and Moral Knowledge (Din Kültürü ve Ahlak Bilgisi) curriculum defines the concept as follows (Taşkıran et al. 2022, p. 108):

Islam spread from the lands where it was born to distant geographies of the world. … This expansion encompassed a vast geography including Asia, Europe, and Africa. … Thus, it is possible to encounter the traces of Islamic civilization in many parts of the world—from Europe to South Africa, from Japan to South America. There are regions where these traces have become deeper, and we call those regions our geography of the heart. The geography in which the deep traces of Islamic civilization are found includes the Hejaz region, Jerusalem, Damascus and Baghdad, Khorasan and Transoxiana, the Indian Subcontinent, Anatolia and the Balkans, North Africa (the Maghreb), and al-Andalus.

On the same page, an accompanying map visually represents this “geography of the heart” by depicting the historical spread of Islam across Asia, Europe, and Africa over successive periods, highlighting regions associated with the emergence and expansion of Islamic civilization (Taşkıran et al. 2022, p. 108).

The Diyanet plays an indispensable role in the articulation and promotion of such civilizational imaginaries, expressed in sermons, broadcasts, official publications, declarations, and initiatives. One Friday sermon, for instance states that “the cries of the children in our geography of the heart… burn our hearts. In Mosul, Aleppo, Arakan, and in many other lands of Islam… innocent children groan under oppression every day” (12 February 2016). Similarly, “fear, pain, tears, and unrest roam across the world and throughout our geography of the heart, because we have strayed from the right path [sırât-ı müstakim]” and “placed affiliation with sects, schools, languages, races, or geographies above belonging to Islam and to the ummah” (1 January 2016). Another one boasts that “our Türkiye Diyanet Foundation, which serves with the mission of extending our nation’s helping hand to all corners of the world, has through your donations built numerous mosques both within our country and across our geography of the heart” (19 May 2017). The same idea is shared in a news item titled “Diyanet is in 102 Countries”, which informs readers that “the Diyanet community is working for Muslims in our geography of the heart” (Diyanet TV 2017). Linking the national and the transnational, A Diyanet TV news item celebrates how Erdoğan’s victory in Turkey’s 2018 elections “excited our geography of the heart—the countries where Muslim communities live and especially European Turks—as Turkish flags fluttered everywhere”, portraying scenes of jubilation across the wider Islamic world, from the Balkans and the Middle East to Africa and South Asia (Diyanet TV 2018).

Ali Erbaş, the President of the Diyanet, frequently employs the term in his speeches. In one public address, he declared that “Turkey is more than just Turkey; we have our geography of the heart. We are the descendants of forebears who for centuries practiced benevolence across three continents and seven climates” (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı 2025). In another, he reiterated that although “there are many internal and external traitors who conspire against our state and our nation”, believers should rest assured, because “Turkey is not confined to Turkey alone. Our geography of the heart is fifteen times larger than the land of Turkey itself” (Diyanet TV 2025b). During a diplomatic visit to Kosovo, he remarked: “There may be official borders between our countries, but I believe there are no boundaries between our hearts. That is why there is an expression I have loved and used for several years now: ‘the Geography of the Heart’. We regard these lands, where the evlâd-ı fâtihân [the descendants of the Ottoman conquerors] live, as our geography of the heart” (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı 2021). Such examples are abundant.

Diyanet Radio has a weekly program called Gönül Coğrafyamız (Our Geography of the Heart), whose promotional material reads: “Islamic civilization is one that develops and beautifies every place it sets foot on, regards protecting the magnificent nature granted to us by Allah as a sacred duty, and preserves culture. Gönül Coğrafyamız brings together the works, natural riches, and cultural heritage of our spiritual geography with you”. Each episode highlights a site, symbol, or tradition from across this imagined geography, ranging from Istanbul to Bosnia, Kosovo, Albania, Uzbekistan, Zanzibar, Hungary, and Spain (Diyanet Radyo 2025). In 2023, Diyanet TV’s morning show Yeni Güne Merhaba ran an episode titled “The Ummah’s Geography of the Heart” (Ümmetin Gönül Coğrafyası), in which a member of the Diyanet’s High Council of Religious Affairs spoke about the vital importance of keeping the “umma consciousness” alive, recalling examples of the Ottoman Empire’s occupation by Western powers to argue that we have to care deeply about “our geography of the heart” today if we do not “want to face the same helplessness again” (Diyanet TV 2023). This idea—that Turkey would be in danger if the broader geography is not defended as a whole—is also visible in Erdoğan’s rhetoric: “The moment we begin to see these [Muslim] geographies as something outside of ourselves, that is the moment even the homeland we hold in our hands will be in danger. If we fail to respond to what is happening today in Gaza, we will not be able to prevent the fanaticism of the so-called ‘promised lands’ from reaching our own territories tomorrow… Praise be to God, our nation possesses this vision and is aware of these truths”. In this vision, the fate of the nation and that of the gönül coğrafyası are conceived as inseparably linked.

In sum, the discourse of gönül coğrafyası elevates a sentimental civilizational metaphor into a strategic horizon of belonging. By portraying distant Muslim communities as extensions of Turkey’s moral community and tying their fate to that of the nation, it naturalizes a sense of transnational responsibility that aligns with broader neo-Ottoman ambitions, ranging from soft-power outreach and regional influence to humanitarian, cultural, and economic engagement. In this framing, the rhetoric of compassion fuses with a call to vigilance and solidarity, and historical memory functions as justification for an expanded sphere of action beyond Turkey’s borders.

5.3. Europe at the Frontiers

If gönül coğrafyası delineates a moral and civilizational sphere of belonging, its boundaries are also shaped by what lies beyond them. The Western world often functions as the implicit or explicit “other” against which this space is imagined within pro-government religious and intellectual circles. One such academic article, for instance, presents gönül coğrafyası as an “anthropological reality” and contends that Western imperialism rewrote history to erase the formative role of Turco-Islamic civilization. It concludes that gönül coğrafyası today offers an alternative to the moral decay of Western modernity, framing Turkey’s civilizational mission as the restoration of justice and spiritual harmony (Alpar 2019). Another article on the foreign policy vision of the “Türkiye century” and the “Türkiye axis” holds that this Ankara-centered, multilateral geopolitical strategy is “due to its [Turkey’s] loss of trust in its Western allies”, and cites “geography of the heart” to invoke collaboration “with some states or groups of states on the basis of shared cultural and religious values” (Ataman 2023, p. 84). Building on the same dichotomy, Diyanet President Erbaş drew parallels between conflicts affecting Muslim communities from Bosnia to Gaza, remarking that “when it came to Muslims”, the world witnessed “the hypocrisy and double standards of Europe and the West” (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı 2024). Erdoğan himself decried the European Union’s (EU) “bigoted and fascist mentality” and “hypocrisy displayed toward our country’s membership”, adding that “with attacks on the rights of Muslims who are their own citizens, European fascism has entered a new phase” (DW 2020).

Yet Europe is viewed not only an external frontier to gönül coğrafyası, but also a partially internal and contested one, shaped not only by the Turco-Ottoman legacy of the Balkans (or the more distant memory of Islamic presence in Andalusia), but by the enduring presence of Turkish Muslim diasporas across the West. Indeed, diaspora communities in Europe have become a key arena where competing projects of Islamic authority and belonging unfold. Here, Turkey’s state-sponsored transnational Islam, articulated as an extension of the gönül coğrafyası imaginary, at times confronts European states’ efforts to nationalize and regulate Muslim religious life.

The Diyanet leadership’s strongly worded declarations illustrate a sense of bitter rivalry, accusing European states of fostering Islamophobia and of interfering in its religious activities. Speaking in Germany at the 2nd Meeting of European Muslims, Ali Erbaş urged believers to unite under the universal banner of Islam, asserting that “talking about Islam with geographical or cultural qualifiers such as ‘European Islam’, ‘French Islam’, or ‘moderate Islam’ is unnecessary and a futile endeavor”. He criticized European governments for “treating the presence of Muslims as a security issue”, and for tolerating “racism, exclusion, and attacks on mosques”, which, he argued, “threaten Europe’s moral and civil foundations”. Erbaş also condemned attempts “to reshape or control Muslim NGOs” describing such measures as “interference in religious and individual freedoms” (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı 2019). In another speech, Erbaş cited certain restrictions in France and Austria that are “negatively affecting our religious services abroad”, and declared that “attempts to engineer or reshape Islam in Europe are unacceptable… We must take this danger seriously” (Anadolu Ajansı 2023).

The image of a beleaguered yet resilient Turkish-Muslim minority in unwelcoming European societies is a recurring one in such discourses. A Diyanet TV program Avrupa’da Beş Vakit (Five Daily Prayers in Europe), for instance, focuses on the “hopes, dreams, and plans” of Turkish Muslims in Europe over generations, and “tells the story of these people’s struggle; the story of those who, standing shoulder to shoulder in the prayer rows, come together five times a day so that they may not disappear” (Diyanet TV 2025a). Speaking to the media, Mehmet Ali Güldemir, president of Diyanet-Sen (the union representing Diyanet employees) condemned what he described as Europe’s growing hostility toward Islam and Muslims, spreading “like a virus with each passing day”. He argued that Europe is “disturbed by the strengthening of Islam” and added that “as Muslims and as the ummah, I say without distinction of country that Muslims are one nation. If we could achieve this, many other problems would resolve themselves” (Diyanet-Sen 2020). Erbaş’s diagnosis of the situation is even more dire (Instagram 2020):

Today, especially in Europe, we are witnessing shameless assaults on Islam’s noble messenger, carried out without morality, fairness, or decency. … It is a clear indication that the West has lost its most basic human values. … Therefore, as believers who take pride in belonging to the community of the last prophet, we are obliged to take a firm stand against all these attacks … as a nation, as a country, as Muslims, as the Islamic world.

Despite such tensions, the Diyanet and pro-government bodies also seek to frame the Turkish-Muslim presence in Europe in affirmative terms, as an opportunity to extend the affective boundaries of gönül coğrafyası into Western Europe. As Veyis Güngör (2023, p. 77), president of the Union of European Turkish Democrats in the Netherlands, puts it, “we believe that Europe, where we live, is itself part of Anatolia’s broad geography of the heart”. Mehmet Güllüoğlu, head of Turkey’s disaster relief operations, uttered that “the geography of the heart begins from the heart of Asia and reaches to the heart of Europe” (AFAD 2018). YTB president Abdullah Eren likewise includes within “the boundaries of the “’geography of the heart’… the lands where our citizens migrated to all over the world, especially Europe” (İLKE 2022, pp. 33–34).

Inspired by this perspective, the Diyanet promotes a distinctive “Turkic model of civilizational Islam” in Europe, framing it as modern, moderate, and compatible with European democratic values, while positioning itself as a reliable partner for countering radicalization and fostering coexistence (Oprea 2020, p. 3). Discursively, this approach is confirmed by a study of Friday sermons delivered in DİTİB mosques across Germany between 2011 and 2019, which finds that they employ a non-confrontational and community-oriented language that emphasizes moral values, social cohesion, and integration, often portraying Germany as a “new” or “second homeland” (Carol and Hofheinz 2022, p. 663). At the same time, the analysis documents how homeland references intensify during periods of political turbulence in Turkey, such as the failed coup attempt in 2016, when sermons invoke unity, loyalty, and collective resilience, suggesting that DİTİB discourse remains highly responsive to developments in the Turkish political field even while rooting its normative language in German civic frames. More recent analyses of DİTİB sermons delivered between 2018 and 2022 likewise show that they cultivate an image of trustworthy, law-abiding Islam focused on civic virtue, moral responsibility, and peaceful coexistence, presenting the organization itself as a credible partner in sustaining social harmony, while simultaneously grounding these civic messages in a familiar Turkish-Islamic moral repertoire through themes such as trustworthiness (eminlik), divine entrustment (emanet), and references to shared historical experiences (Aslan 2025).

Beyond discourse, diplomatic and organizational efforts stand out. Diyanet officials routinely engage with host-country ministries, local municipalities, and integration offices, thus participating in the institutional frameworks of European religious governance while ensuring that Turkish Islam remains visible and officially recognized. This cooperation encompasses areas such as mosque construction, imam training, religious education, family counseling, interreligious dialogue initiatives under bilateral agreements (Adar 2024). It is further exemplified by institutional collaborations such as DİTİB’s participation in the German Islam Conference, the Comité de Coordination des Musulmans Turcs de France within France’s Conseil Français du Culte Musulman, and the involvement of Diyanet-trained imams in Austria’s Islamische Glaubensgemeinschaft in Österreich (Çitak 2024). Such forms of cooperation reflect not only local institutional pragmatics but also Turkey’s long-standing strategy of governing its diaspora through religious instruments: the Diyanet has become a central channel for maintaining cultural ties, administrative oversight and political influence over citizens abroad, in part because Europe’s various “Muslim fields” often lack the financial and human resources, which transnational religious institutions, such as those of Turkey, can supply (Bruce 2019, p. 5). At the same time, European states’ limited and fragmented capacities for governing religion, spread across policy areas such as education, security, and migration, mean that they cannot fully regulate Islamic affairs on their own, making them structurally dependent on institutions like the Diyanet for religious personnel, organizational expertise, and administrative continuity, a condition that Bruce (2019, pp. 115–64) has termed “partial governance” of public policy instruments in countries such as Germany and France.

The cooperative image, however, runs parallel to DİTİB’s promotion of an assertive Turco-Islamic civilizational narrative through architecture, commemorations, and discourses in its mosques (Cengiz 2025). The Diyanet’s presence in Europe has thus been described as a hybrid one—acting both as an extension of Turkish state ideology and as a participant in European civil society (Mutluer 2020). This hybridity is corroborated by other works in the recent literature. In language policy, for instance, Turkish-founded mosques in Germany increasingly adopt bilingual practices, combining German-language instruction, youth work and civic engagement with the continued use of Turkish as a heritage and devotional medium, revealing how linguistic choices become a key arena through which the Diyanet seeks to fuse “transnational ties and domestic demands” (Emmerich 2023). During the first COVID-19 lockdown, Diyanet-affiliated associations publicly positioned themselves as loyal actors through early mosque closures and coordination with health authorities, yet internal documents and local-level interviews reveal uneven implementation, disagreements within mosque committees, and pragmatic adaptations that exposed the organisational frictions beneath their unified public stance (Emmerich 2021).

Such persistent duality reflects Ankara’s effort to maintain Turkish-Islamic identity in the diaspora while institutionalizing its presence across Europe, with the Diyanet serving as a key agent in extending the gönül coğrafyası westward and reframing Europe not only as a frontier of difference but as a moral landscape where Turkish Islam can function as a stabilizing and exemplary presence. By portraying Turkish Islam as a moderating, civilizational force that can remedy Europe’s moral or institutional deficits while claiming to safeguard diasporic communities, the discourse seeks to present the Diyanet as an indispensable intermediary for national governments. Diyanet activity in Europe, therefore, does more than manage religious life: it helps reproduce a strategic imaginary in which Turkish Muslim presence abroad becomes integral to Turkey’s projection of influence in the West.

6. Conclusions

This article employed a directed qualitative content analysis to identify the recurrent patterns and categories of the Diyanet’s post-2016 discourse, with the explicit aim of engaging and refining the theoretical debates surrounding populism, nationalism, and civilizationism. Available evidence shows that while the Diyanet may function as a central pillar of the AKP’s religiously inflected populism, its contribution lies less in overt anti-elitist agitation than in moralizing the unity of religion, nation, and civilization, thereby lending symbolic depth and legitimacy to the government’s populist project. The Friday sermons themselves are often not overtly political; yet the moral order they cultivate, from micro-level personal conduct to meso-level social regulation, performs essential political work through which the macro categories of millet, ümmet, and medeniyet acquire force. These three categories are mutually reinforcing and contextually mobilized, developing their sharpest resonance through narratives of internal discord or external hostility that evoke nostalgia, victimhood, vigilance, and redemption. In this constellation, medeniyet typically denotes a shared Islamic culture and moral heritage, ümmet transnational solidarity and struggle, and millet—still the most salient and arguably the most agentive category—a sacralized community entrusted with a divinely sanctioned, historically grounded mission to safeguard and lead the broader Muslim world. The findings suggest that the Diyanet’s rhetoric is primarily nationalist and civilizationist, but not populist per se, which has theoretical implications for the literature on the populism-religion nexus, particularly for how we understand the division of discursive labour within populist governance. The Turkish case illustrates that a religious institution can sustain populist politics without directly mirroring its form: rather than enacting its characteristic anti-elitist antagonism, it can mobilize its theological resources to enrich insider-outsider distinctions and imbue populism with spiritual resonance.

In this respect, the relative weakness of populism in the strict theoretical sense should not obscure the cumulative politico-ideological tasks performed by the Diyanet’s discourse. By naturalizing the unity of national and civilizational horizons through Islam, the Diyanet furnishes an affective moral vocabulary through which broader state priorities—ranging from national cohesion to transnational involvement—are presented as natural, necessary, and legitimate. Rather than offering explicit policy prescriptions, the discourse provides a fertile moral-ideological ground that complements and endorses the government’s strategic narratives. This is all the more significant given that our analysis focuses only on centrally produced sermons and official communications: how these discourses are adapted and operationalized by individual imams and muftis, diaspora coordinators, and other religious actors may potentially give rise to more direct political effects, thus underscoring the need for further ethnographic research on how the Diyanet’s ideological repertoire is enacted on the ground.

Another contribution of the article lies in bringing analytical attention to the hitherto understudied notion of gönül coğrafyası, which amplifies the Diyanet’s civilizationism by giving it spatial and affective anchorage, transforming moral belonging into an expansive, transnational topography. Now a staple of official political and institutional discourse, the concept’s power lies less in definitional precision than in imaginative flexibility. The boundaries of this “geography of the heart” are fluid, articulated in varying ways across government actors and agencies, yet the idealization of a broader neo-Ottoman, Turco-Islamic space as a site of responsibility remains constant. Within a constellation of ministries and “soft-power” organizations (TİKA, YTB, and others), the Diyanet stands out as the principal interpreter of gönül coğrafyası, casting a multifaceted geopolitical project as a religious and ethical obligation. Its sermons, broadcasts, and transnational initiatives invoke the concept as a sacred geography of service and solidarity, linking the nation’s destiny with that of a wider ümmet and medeniyet, and positioning Turkey as the custodian of a global moral order. In doing so, the Diyanet lends the idiom its pastoral dimension, translating a civilizational vision into a theology of memory, presence, and care. By tracing the workings of this understudied concept, the article shows how religion operates across scales, mediating between national belonging and transnational ambition. This demonstrates that gönül coğrafyası functions not merely as a cultural metaphor but as a symbolic architecture that aligns moral obligation with geopolitical aspiration. Its ideological force lies precisely in its capacity to represent expansive foreign-policy ambitions, regional leadership, and diaspora engagement, as extensions of selfless ethical duty and inherited civilizational responsibility.

Finally, the European dimension of gönül coğrafyası reveals the elasticity and strategic adaptability of the Diyanet’s civilizational discourse. Europe is depicted simultaneously as a site of moral decline and exclusion, against which the Muslim world must remain vigilant, and as a potential “candidate” geography of the heart—as former Diyanet president Mehmet Görmez put it—an emerging space where Turkish Islam can exemplify virtue, solidarity, and coexistence. While Diyanet leaders denounce Western hypocrisy and Islamophobia, its European branches such as DİTİB seek to present Turkish Islam as a stabilizing and cooperative moral force, cultivated through civic engagement, interreligious dialogue, and integration. This dual posture of reproach and outreach illustrates how the Diyanet extends the gönül coğrafyası beyond the Muslim-majority world into the heart of Europe, where religious authority functions as a form of moral diplomacy that frames the continent not merely as an external frontier but as a field of civilizational presence and renewal. In this sense, the Diyanet’s European activities illustrate how civilizational discourse acquires concrete strategic relevance: the institution simultaneously counters perceived Western hostility and positions Turkish Islam as a normative partner for European governance, a dual strategy that enables it to blend cooperative messaging with assertive claims to cultural and institutional authority.

More broadly, the analysis contributes to ongoing debates on secularization and religious change in Europe. The Diyanet’s activities demonstrate how the regulation and expression of religion can be shaped by cross-border institutional networks that link Europe to other geographies—in this case, to Turkey’s state-managed religious apparatus. Seen from this perspective, secularization appears as a process negotiated through the movement of people, ideas, and institutions rather than one confined to national or continental frameworks. Examining religion and secularism through these transnational connections makes it possible to understand how European and non-European actors together reshape public norms, civic identities, and moral vocabularies. The Diyanet’s “geography of the heart” exemplifies this interaction, showing how a state religious institution can participate in, and seek to impose its vision on, a redefinition of Europe’s moral and secular landscape.