Is There a Turkish Secular Body? Race, Religion, and Embodied Politics of Secularism

Abstract

While Charles Hirschkind presents an ambiguous response to the question “Is There a Secular Body?”, this study argues that, in the Turkish context, a secular body not only exists but is also conducive to racializing practices. Drawing on ethnographic insights from Istanbul’s nightlife—differing from previous research which focused on spatial differentiation and gentrification—this article examines how nightlife spaces intersect with secular subjectivity and the implications of these intersections. By broadening understandings of race and racialization in Turkish genealogy, the secular body is understood to emerge as a site of struggle where modernity and anxieties about backwardness are embodied through assemblages and temporalities that designate certain bodies as lagging behind in progress. Furthermore, this study contributes to the body of scholarship on the entanglements of race, religion, and identity in non-Western contexts, demonstrating how the secular and the race–religion constellation are co-constituted in everyday life.

1. Introduction

In his seminal essay “Is There a Secular Body?”, Charles Hirschkind (2011) wonders why a statement like “they live a very religious life” invokes an image, while “they live a very secular life” tells us almost nothing (p. 641). However, as Liebelt (2019) has stated previously, envisioning the secular might not be as non-sensical in other contexts as Hirschkind imagined. In Turkey, where embodied secularism has long been a site of state intervention and social transformation (Navaro-Yashin 2002), both statements carry powerful social meaning, shaped by nearly a century of state-directed secular modernization. And while Western secular discourse often presents itself as neutral and implicit, Turkish secularism represents what Mahmood (2015) had identified as a more overt project of modern state making, one that deliberately (re)makes and reorganizes religious and social life. With the increasingly authoritarian role of the neoliberal Islamic (Savcı 2020) Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP) led iktidar1, the question of whether a secular body exists does not necessarily become more ambivalent but rather more complex in its manifestations of power, resistance, and embodied practice (Scheer et al. 2019). To elucidate how secularism operates not merely as political doctrine but simultaneously as the selective marking of practices, habits, and life-forms (Asad 2003, from Scheer et al. 2019, p. 4), this inquiry examines secularism in Turkey as a lived practice rather than an abstract principle, seeking to understand not only how the secular body in Turkey is maintained but also what a secular body transmits and produces.

Although political secularism emerged as a framework for mediating state–church relations in Europe, today it is presented as an impartial structure for managing religious and cultural plurality (Lauwers 2024). In the last two decades, critical scholars on secularism and secularity have fundamentally challenged this presumption of neutrality. Asad (1993, 2003) and Anidjar (2009) demonstrate how the category of secular itself emerges from and perpetuates specific power relations, while Mahmood (2015, p. 7) reveals how European secularism remains deeply rooted in “Judeo-Christian civilization”. Goldberg extends this critique by arguing that secularization did not eliminate the religious but transformed it into a mechanism for determining social belonging: “the religious returns with a vengeance, in secularised mode, as a social positioning of who belongs and who does not in society” (Okemwa and Topolski 2022, p. 458). This hierarchization of beliefs and practices inherently produces categories of non-belonging, particularly evident in contemporary Western European discourse where Muslims are frequently constructed as the problematized “other” (Bracke and Hernández Aguilar 2020, 2024).

When examining “the secular” more specifically, Asad (2003, p. 25) defines it as encompassing specific behaviors, knowledge, and sensibilities in contemporary life—practices that are identified and valorized through secular discourse (Hirschkind 2011). Recent scholarship has been examining these embodied and affective dimensions of secularism (Scheer et al. 2019) yet often remains confined to contexts where secular norms appear as neutral background conditions (Bracke and Fadil 2011). However, the case of Turkey disrupts this framework. Here, secularism was neither installed nor intended as a neutral force, nor is it experienced as such today; rather, the secular body exists as a certainty, actively produced through state intervention and maintained through distinct cultural and political practices that require constant negotiation and articulation (e.g., Navaro-Yashin 2002).

Because secularism has been historically interpreted—through propagandizing—as an explicit modernizing force in Turkey, I argue that Turkish secularity has become a framework that translates religious, cultural, and ethnic differences into naturalized distinctions. This process constitutes what can be understood as racialization: the transformation of social differences into seemingly natural, hierarchical categories that carry moral and civilizational judgments, following Hall’s (2017) concept of “floating signifiers” that attach meanings to bodies through cultural classification systems rather than genetic facts (Lentin 2008). This process similarly operates through what Topolski (2018) coined the "race–religion constellation" where people are categorized into racialized groups using ostensibly religious frameworks. However, in Turkey this dynamic extends beyond religion to encompass broader cultural and political affiliations. For example, AKP policies that alter the secular character of public institutions or affect consumption practices (like the Special Consumption Tax or the ÖTV) have not merely changed regulatory frameworks: they have catalyzed responses that often frame AKP voters and religious communities through essentializing and racializing discourses. In other words, as religious identity and political affiliation become increasingly entangled in public discourse, secular reactions to AKP policies have sometimes slipped from political critique into forms of (Islamophobic) racism that target those identifying as religious and/or Muslim more broadly—with racist political discourse, sentiments, and attacks at seemingly an all-time high (Şimşek 2021; Ozduzen et al. 2021; Koser Akcapar and Simsek 2018).

Though a comprehensive explanation is given in the next section, I argue that these dynamics materialize in sites of nightlife, where policies affecting alcohol consumption, entertainment venues, and public behavior intersect with secular claims to urban space and cultural expression. As sites where secular lifestyle practices are most visible and contested, nightlife as a case offers ethnographic potential into how broader political and social tensions manifest in everyday life. In the following, I firstly provide a brief scope of previous analyses of Istanbul nightlife and how this approach differs from previous inquiries. Secondly, a context of religion of Turkey and a genealogy of Turkish secularism is provided, addressing more explicitly the methodological as well as theoretical gaps in the study of secularism and secular subjectivities. This is followed by a methodological overview of this qualitative and ethnographic study. Lastly, empirical data are presented and analyzed, followed by a synthesizing conclusion and the limitations of this study.

The Scope of Nightlife in Turkey

In recent years, the study of nightlife in Turkey has predominantly focused on the impacts of neoliberalism and gentrification on nightclubs and bars, particularly in Istanbul’s historic Beyoğlu district. Since the 1980s, urban renewal projects and economic developments have reshaped this area (Ural 2017; Uzun 2003; Daş and Özşahin 2021), a process that accelerated in the 2000s amidst Turkey’s booming tourism industry (Potuoğlu-Cook 2006). The Beautiful Beyoğlu project is among the most notable of these transformations, resulting in a city that is increasingly inaccessible to immigrants and the poor (Eder and Öz 2015). Scholars have described a landscape of simultaneous urban wealth and poverty (Lovering and Türkmen 2011), where sites of leisure and nightlife can function as spaces of both exclusion and resistance for the communities that once inhabited these gentrified areas (Kadıoğlu Polat 2021).2 However, conceptualizing nightlife itself as a site of “resistance” is rare, and when it does occur, it is often related to lubunya or LGBTQ+ communities and their spatial practices of resilience (Atalay and Doan 2020; Savcı 2020). The Gezi Protests of 2013, widely viewed as a response to repressive AKP policies, helped bring such acts of resistance into the academic spotlight (e.g., Tüfekçi 2017).

Nightlife obtains a slightly different position in this inquiry: diverging from the conventional assumption that sites of nightlife create spatial inequalities through gentrification, a potential site of resistance, or adding to the over-saturated literature that concerns Beyoğlu as the main space and district of interest, this article poses to elucidate how sites of nightlife and secular identity-formation intersect and what this intersection produces. In other words, nightlife is not considered merely a scene of exclusion but rather a site of productive secular subjectification.

2. A Genealogy of Turkish Secularism

The Turkish Republic emerged from what has often been framed as the traumatic collapse of the Ottoman Empire—a time marked by political upheaval, the devastation of a lost world war, occupation by Allied forces, and a subsequent war of independence. This culminated in the establishment of the Republic in 1923 under military leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and while modernization efforts within the Ottoman Empire predated the Republic, it was only after the founding of the nation-state that these projects were accelerated, shaped by transformative interventions that reshaped the socio-political order (Çınar 2005). At the heart of the Republic’s civilizing mission was laiklik—or state secularism modeled after the French laïcité—enshrined in the Altı Ok, or Six Arrows, of Atatürk’s Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (CHP) which came to be known as Kemalism. Reforms in the 19th century and the rise of Kemalism in Turkey further institutionalized secular norms, redefining religion in line with nationalist and modernist ideals—particularly through the role of Diyanet, which centralized control over Sunni Islam while marginalizing minority groups like the Alevis (Zengin Arslan 2024). Building on this trajectory, Kemalist interventions—far more abrupt and transformative than the earlier Tanzimat reforms—recast the Ottoman past and restructured the cultural and social fabric by placing Islam at the center in a newly defined, state-sanctioned form (Savcı 2020). This process involved crafting a modern Islam that appeared compatible with the values of secularism and modernity. Therefore, Turkish secularism represents not merely a political separation of religion and state through the installment of secular state ideology (Navaro-Yashin 2002) but rather a comprehensive project of modern state making that has actively shaped religious life, public discourse, and individual subjectivities (Asad 2003; Fadil 2013).

Following the genocidal policies of the İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti (Committee of Union and Progress, CUP), the project of national homogenization turned to Muslim communities considered outside the Turkish–Sunni core of the new nation, specifically targeting the Kurds and Alevis3 (Dreßler 2024). The CUP’s actions were driven by both strategic concerns about loyalty in eastern Anatolia and economic needs to replace agricultural labor lost during the genocide, all reinforced by religious and racial prejudices and a developing ideological agenda of Turkification in the name of cultural homogeneity (Üngör 2011, pp. 108–22; from Dreßler 2024). Zeydanlıoğlu (2008) contends this project as a “White Turkish Man’s Burden”, in which the Kemalist elite—acting as agents of a self-imposed civilizing mission—sought to rescue Anatolia from what they saw as its backwardness, while simultaneously redefining Islam to serve national purposes. This Ottoman Orientalism4 (Makdisi 2002), or what Eldem (2010) came to call Turkish Orientalism, was built upon a rejection of the Ottoman past for its religiosity and alleged primitivism, while cultivating a “Turkish Islam” that was rational, modern, and nationalistic (Dreßler 2024). In this context, modernization came in the form of heavy promotion of “Western” dress codes, particularly the policing of women’s veiling practices (Kandiyoti 2000), the Latinization of the alphabet, and the nationalization of education. Rather than abandoning Islam entirely, the Kemalist project sought to reform and nationalize it, creating what Gökalp envisioned as a distinctly “Turkish Islam” compatible with modernity. Yet the drive for a modern, homogenous nation (millet) (Gökalp 1968) also entailed the exclusion of many, as Turkish republican citizenship and “Turkism” denoted as “a system of belonging proper to the modern age” (Isyar 2005, p. 344) emerged as a racializing technology. The Kurds exemplify the ongoing consequences of these homogenizing policies: over the following decades, Kurds have been systematically subjected to policies of forced assimilation, disappearing as a distinct ethnicity in official discourse (Zeydanlıoğlu 2008; Savcı 2011). In this nationalist project, Kurds became the nation’s silent racial “other” whose very existence was erased in the pursuit of an imagined, Turkish homogeneity.

As the Turkish Republic only recently celebrated its centennial, its relatively short history has been marked by the instability of laiklik within the state apparatus, the public sphere, and private life. Since the AKP came to power in 2002, steadily gaining votes and consolidating influence, the role of secularism at the state level has increasingly been viewed as under threat (Kandiyoti 2012). The AKP’s political discourse, characterized by a “passive secularism” or Islam-inspired approach (Tombuş and Aygenç 2017), is often portrayed as a return to the religiosity that had long persisted among parts of the Turkish population. Within contemporary, and even academic, discussions of Turkish politics, this seems to have translated as a pervasive fear of a return to an Ottoman or more overtly Islamic past as the AKP continues to hold power (Ruacan 2020), a fear that has only intensified with each election cycle. Conversely, there is also the view that the AKP represents a threat to secularity (Liebelt 2019)—a force that will hinder or reverse the country’s supposed progress. Political polarization became more pronounced after key events such as the 2013 Gezi Park protests, the failed 2016 coup attempt—an event still shrouded in conspiracies—and the adoption of a presidential system in 2017. Consequently, “for the [Turkish] secular (…) this threat is typically described as one of Islamization and includes a sense of loss of cultural and economic hegemony” (ibid., p. 110), and religion remains to be perceived as counter-progressive (Navaro-Yashin 2002). And despite the continued presence of Kemalist symbols in public and institutional life, those who align themselves with secular ideals express concern that these foundational principles are being slowly eroded, with the AKP viewed as the primary threat to this legacy (Tombuş and Aygenç 2017).

Contextualizing the history of Turkish politics reveals a critical caveat often overlooked in research conducted outside the European context. Turkey, much like the Ottoman Empire before it, is frequently excluded from discussions of the “colonial world” (Çınar 2005). However, such an exclusion misrepresents its historical and political reality. While much scholarship on racialized bodies focuses on European colonialism (Atanasoski and Vora 2019), this Eurocentric lens leaves significant gaps in understanding racialization beyond these borders. Critical engagements with Europe’s colonial past and its contemporary manifestations are undoubtedly vital and have rightly gained prominence in recent years (Bracke and Hernández Aguilar 2020; Tembo and Topolski 2022). Yet, expanding scholarship beyond Europe and the United States is equally necessary to fully grasp the global dynamics of racialization—albeit understood to be relational with its gravitational pull towards the core in world systems. For instance, the Ottoman Empire’s practices of enslavement and subjugation of “Orientalized” others, as well as its racialized discourse—such as the portrayal of Armenians as a threat to be “cured” or eliminated to purify the millet (Isyar 2005, p. 358)—demonstrate that racialization operated in ways distinct from, albeit in times relational to, European coloniality. Furthermore, this racism was weaponized and escalated into policies of segregation, revealing that the Ottoman Empire was not immune to ethnoracial differentiation (Minawi 2022). Similarly, the discourse of the “Sick Man of Europe” reflects how Ottoman and later Turkish identity was shaped in relation to European coloniality, yet the contemporary implications of this history remain underexplored. And while it may not be accurate to claim that the Turkish nation-state is therefore immediately a racial state as Goldberg (2006) contends or pertains to the racial contract as Mills (1997) theorized, failing to analyze the Turkish context through a lens of racialization risks overlooking how race operates in non-Western contexts.5

Therefore, as similarly argued by Zengin Arslan (2024), I find it productive to regard secularism as not holding a neutral stance toward religion but rather consider it a normative discourse that actively shapes subjectivities and religious life. As Mahmood (2015) explained, the “dimensions of political secularism—its regulatory impulse and its promise of freedom—are thoroughly intertwined, each necessary to the enactment of the other”, and analysis of it is required to “deprive it of innocence and neutrality” (p. 15). For example, the sentiment that secularism feels “under threat” under the AKP’s present-day Islamic policies should therefore not be understood as a mere desire to “return” to the modern state that allowed for progressive pluralism within Turkish borders; rather, it requires an engagement with a genealogy of secularism itself—a history interwoven with exclusion, regulation, and governmentality (Zengin Arslan 2024).

By focusing on the Turkish context, this article addresses both theoretical and methodological gaps, critically examining the legacies of racializing histories outside the Western framework and analyzing how these histories have intersected with secularism in ways not solely shaped by European experiences. In doing so, it aims to unravel the complexities of secularist subjectification and its entanglement with racial anxieties, offering a nuanced perspective that contributes to broader theorizations of race and dehumanization.

3. Methodology

The ethnography was based in Istanbul, in the neighborhoods Firuzağa, which is located near Cihangir in the Beyoğlu district on the European side of the city (Avrupa yakası), and the center of the Kadıköy district, located on the Asian side (Anadolu yakası), between mid-December 2022 and mid-March 2023. The timespan of this project in these specific months proved to be of distinctive importance: the worsening state of the financial crisis and hyperinflation had made living expenses more and more unaffordable for those working in Turkey and consequentially political tensions accumulated further whilst the date of the general and presidential elections drew nearer on 14 May 2023. With the catastrophic earthquake striking central Turkey and northern and western Syria, the general state of the country was affected tremendously, be it politically, financially, mentally, or emotionally. Consequently, the tragedy also affected relations between people and their everyday conversations. Since a disastrous earthquake hit the Istanbul area in 1999, people had experienced a lot of anxiety, and fear of an earthquake hitting the city with a population of eighteen million was simultaneously on the rise. Many news reports, columnists, and activists stated that the earthquake claimed as many victims as it did due to false permits due to corruption (Elidrissi 2023), causing dissatisfaction among the citizens in support of the opposing parties to become more vocal than ever before. A calamity of such a scale had undoubtedly influenced my interactions with the city and its people, as well as the way I gathered data and the outcomes of my research, a discussion I will return to later in this chapter.

I purposively sampled (Braun and Clarke 2013, p. 56) districts in Istanbul, which are centrally located and have historically been regarded as cultural and progressive hubs of the city. Additionally, as “people in Istanbul are highly likely to move to districts administered by a political party they feel closer to, or to a neighborhood in which people hold similar political attitudes” (Daş and Özşahin 2021 p. 5), it is important to note that the selected neighborhoods have traditionally voted for the secular, Kemalist Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (CHP), which is currently the largest opposition party in the country. Historically, Beyoğlu has been the central district for culture, leisure, and nightlife, which includes the busy and famous Istiklal Caddesi shopping street, Taksim Square, and The Grand Rue de Pera (Sandıkcı 2015). In the last decade, however, a socio-cultural shift took place with the city’s cultural gravity moving to the other side of the Bosphorus, namely Kadıköy. One interlocutor described this shift as being due to the Gezi protests in 2023: “Since the displacement of people in the Taksim area, honestly, it all went to sh*t. Everyone escaped the place since Gezi, and the government pushed them away, too. But it was mostly the people that had moved over to Kadıköy.” Though he stated that “none of the theatres, collectives, and galleries moved with them”, both Kadıköy and Beyoğlu are notable for their rapid, policy-led urban regeneration and gentrification processes (Aşar 2020), with a growing population of students, artists, and “digital nomads” (Tuncer 2024), or as a young sound engineer had mentioned: “Everything changed.” This simultaneously caused an exponential rise in clubs and bars specifically targeting audiences such as tourists and expats but also those considered to be of the Turkish “higher class” (Eder and Öz 2015).

While researchers like Eder and Öz have examined the aesthetics and exclusivity of entertainment districts, I shifted my attention to those who gather outside high-end bars and clubs due to rising costs, such as the “Special Consumption Tax”, which has doubled alcohol prices and made entry fees prohibitive for many at the time. My fieldwork focuses specifically on semi-improvised outdoor spaces near popular bar streets in Istanbul, as it provides a materialized representation of spaces that are deemed “secular” or “progressive” that are under threat. For example, near Kadıköy’s bar street (home to known venues like ArkaOda and Karga) and Beyoğlu’s Firuzağa (near NOH Radio and Tavern), people often bought drinks from nearby tekels (liquor shops) and gathered in close proximity to these venues but not inside, as it was too costly. These outdoor spaces, such as the famous staircase in Firuzağa, however, became lively hubs for socializing and attracted street vendors, like the local amcalar (“uncles”) selling popcorn, candies, and cigarettes every weekend. It highlights how economic pressures reshape nightlife practices and create alternative social spaces, ultimately affecting the conditions of how secularity is conducted and what secularity enacts.

I employed critical ethnography by triangulating different methodologies, namely participant observation, in-depth interviews, and conversational (follow-up) meetings with my interlocutors. All interlocutors were born within the borders of Turkey in various regions but resided in Istanbul at the time of our interactions. They ranged between the ages of 22 and 35, working across diverse sectors including education (teachers, students, and a PhD candidate), media (translation, content), corporate (consultancy), cultural industries (musicians, photographers, a sound engineer, and a tattoo artist), service industries (baristas and waiters), and tech (a software engineer). No interlocutor, except for one who remains completely anonymous in this article, regarded themselves as part of a vulnerable population in the framework of this research necessarily, but all favored being anonymized due to heightened anxieties during the election period and the politically sensitive nature of our conversations, including the conversations in more informal settings. Simultaneously, reflecting upon my own positionality, I found that people often opened up to me quickly about the current political climate and contemporary events. I suppose this openness partly stemmed from my background, as I was born and raised in Amsterdam and have a Turkish heritage. The Netherlands was frequently described by my interlocutors as a liberal society, and they seemed to assume that my moral views aligned with their own, though often accompanied by critique. These assumptions shaped the dynamics of this fieldwork, as I was seen as someone who could understand their concerns or share similar perspectives, a dynamic that also worked favorably in similar settings in Spronk’s (2014) research. Furthermore, the insights produced in the field were situated (Small 2009), emerging precisely through the relational dynamics in which my identity played a (co-)constitutive role. It was through these dynamics, shaped by the assumptions projected onto me, where particular articulations of the secular were made possible: articulations that may well have remained unspoken in other researcher–participant constellations.

Concerning the research design, I took inspiration from Fadil and Fernando, who described that “secularity too includes a range of ethical, social, physical, and sexual dispositions, hence the need to apprehend the secular via its sensorial, aesthetic, and embodied dispositions and not only its political ones” (Fadil and Fernando 2015, p. 64). Through prioritizing mundane acts of everyday life whilst considering Asad’s (2003) claim of studying secularism as everyday practices that discipline the subject’s experience, I had intended to rely on participant observation during social gatherings in selected bars, clubs, and/or other semi-improvised collective spaces where people in Istanbul come together to “mingle” and socialize, as well as follow-up walking interviews of selected participants. Due to the spontaneous nature of such impromptu gatherings, I deemed a critical ethnographic approach as most suitable to observe and understand how constellations of people in sites of nightlife come together and what such constellations produce regarding subject formation. Furthermore, my choice for an ethnographic approach was also informed by being able to circumvent the so-called attitudinal fallacy, accounting for discrepancies between self-reporting data and real-life action (Jerolmack and Khan 2014).

As the earthquake significantly disrupted the local nightlife scene, most venues temporarily closed voluntarily rather than through government mandate. While some events persisted, most establishments were either closed or empty.6 This development necessitated a shift in my research methodology from participant observation to interviews. Drawing on contacts established during my earlier research, I conducted eleven in-depth interviews in Turkish. The post-earthquake context proved particularly revealing, as informants were notably forthcoming about their government criticisms. These hour-and-a-half-long interviews explored pressing topics including the earthquake’s aftermath, its implications for upcoming elections, resulting political activism, and changes in leisure practices. After approximately two weeks, as nightlife gradually resumed, I was able to conduct follow-up observations and briefly return to ethnographic fieldwork with both previous and new contacts, using Cerulo’s (2014) concept of relational action to understand how people made sense of life after such a catastrophic event. All interviews were recorded with informed consent, and all interlocutors have been anonymized.

4. Analysis

4.1. Secular Proximities and Assemblages

A warm December evening could deceive one into thinking that the Istiklal Caddesi, the city’s historic shopping street, was busier than usual, but in reality, it was in its usual state of flux. The street, a magnet for supposedly up to millions of visitors daily, remained alive at all hours: shops are open 24/7, making it possible to indulge in baklava at 3 a.m., if one could maneuver through the perpetual crowds. But as night fell, the picturesque side streets of Beyoğlu shifted. The lingering scent of burning tobacco remained, yet the atmosphere changed: music from cars and shops grew louder, the eskici selling second-hand goods from his truck disappeared and was replaced by the amca selling snacks, like roasted chestnuts and corn from the cob. Following the scent, I found myself at a set of stairs that marked the intersection of three districts in Beyoğlu. Directly across stood a row of bars and cafés, including the well-known NOH Radio club and bar. Inside, the space was quiet; the real gathering was outside. People clustered on the stairs, drinking from the cans of beer and bottles of sugary volim they had picked up from the tekel around the corner. Above, banners from the municipality warned against drug use in the area that nobody really seemed to pay any attention to.

My three companions and I settled in front of the NOH Radio stairs. We had prepared our goodie bag—a black plastic bag from the tekel—stocked with extra cans of beer and a few packs of cigarettes. As we made ourselves comfortable, a nearby group of Turkish-speaking individuals took notice of us. Their curiosity seemed to center on one of my friends. After catching fragments of Turkish in our conversation, they turned to her and asked where she was from. Upon hearing that she was, in fact, Turkish, their astonishment was immediate. She did not, in their view, look Turkish. The shock seemed to grow larger when another friend of mine joined the conversation in Turkish. Once again, their reaction was almost theatrical, with expressions of disbelief, exclaiming that his appearance resembled, apparently, that of “Harry Potter”. The attention remained fixed on us, even extending to the one among us who was not Turkish. Unable to fully engage due to language barriers, she had retreated into scrolling through her phone, yet this did not lessen their curiosity. Questions arose about her origins (perhaps she was from the Netherlands?) and how we had come to know her.

Positioned between my friends, I reached intermittently for cigarettes from their packets, watching the interaction unfold. It had become increasingly apparent to me that I did not provoke the same level of intrigue or animated questioning by the group as the others. Despite being an equal part of the group, my presence did not elicit the same urgency of classification. A quiet anticipation settled in—how long until their attention turned to me? When would they ask the question that had already shaped the conversation: Where are you from?

These moments of classificatory uncertainty, which happened rather frequently throughout my fieldwork, reveal a complex temporality of how, in this case, my body is read and positioned. While it took over half an hour before the question of my specific origin arose, my brown body occupied what Fanon might call a “zone of non-being” (Ahmed 2015)—neither fully present nor absent, invoking associations with an orientalist past while simultaneously being suspended in a moment of potential reclassification, “reflecting the proximity of alleged distant histories and places” (M’charek 2013, p. 434). The presence of certain objects—shared cigarettes, bottles of Efes—and the bodies around me created a network that could potentially facilitate my successful attainment of secular proximity. Yet this very possibility highlighted how secular distinctions operate through provisional, contextual assemblages rather than fixed positions.

The temporal dimensions of these encounters have proven to be crucial. My silence and delayed questioning within the group revealed how bodies become imbued with emotional associations and historical meanings even before any direct interaction takes place (ibid.). The eventual revelation of my background, being born and raised in the Netherlands, had almost immediately triggered a shift in social dynamics, illustrating how these classifications are neither stable nor predetermined but remain in flux, shaped by processes of recognition and realignment. My body occupied a liminal position: neither fully Turkish nor fully foreign, suspended in a state of “not yet” and “not quite”. This suspension is not merely momentary but forms part of a recurring pattern that effectively racializes bodies through temporal displacement.

It is these fluid moments of classification and reclassification that Puar (2007) describes as a perpetual motion of assemblages, where secular and religious identifications do not exist as fixed categories but emerge through complex processes of movement and becoming. The framework of desired proximity illuminates part of this dynamic, positioning western Europe as the ideal reference point, where proximity to or divergence from normative standards of whiteness and Christianness become central markers (Westerduin 2023, p. 46). Embodiment becomes immanent to interactions and materializations in experienced reality (Tolia-Kelly and Crang 2010), finding its recursive and continuing expression in taxonomizing legacies of “historical, economic, and imperial legacies that create categories of objects and [(non-)]people as needed, desired, valuable, or disposable” (Atanasoski and Vora 2019, p. 25). This continuous genealogy explicating differences between humans remains ever present (e.g., Braidotti 1994; Lentin 2008; Goldberg 2006). Within this context, the proximity to a past—with its hints of religiosity or a past that one wants to distance oneself from—becomes explicit in a constellation of space reserved for that which is secular.

A similar friction surfaced again, on the same stairs, a few weeks later during an exchange that framed Istanbul itself as a space of layered enclosures. A man who had introduced himself as a successful professional in the corporate sector, standing beside me and visibly pleased to hear I was from Amsterdam, turned to me with a smile and said without hesitation, “Europe is a good place.” Following up on his statement, I continued to explain that I actually thoroughly enjoyed my time in Istanbul, to which he replied that “Istanbul is like a melon, it takes very long to go through that hard exterior, and that process can take a long time. But once you are in, you are met with a very sweet, moist core.” The analogy startled me, and before I could respond, he continued, “I am in a different universe, I am outside the melon. All these different cages… you need to feed the people alcohol to get them out of their cage. Only then do they talk, only then they are honest. The people here, you know, we are the crème de la crème. People here appreciate being educated, not being stuck in their cages of Imam Hatip okulu (schools).”

Imam Hatip schools are, as Pak (2004, p. 326) explains, state institutions intended to cultivate religious expertise, producing future functionaries of Islamic establishment. In this particular exchange, my respondent mapped a set of proximities: those near and those far, those within the melon and those still trapped outside its hardened rind. For this individual, the east, Anatolia, and the Imam Hatip school were rendered as sites of confinement, cages from which one must escape, and to escape was to approximate the modern, the European, the free. This specific articulation of proximities did not simply delineate space; it reflected how racialized formations can be experienced, making certain affiliations desirable and others suspect in their personal narrative. In “A Phenomenology of Whiteness” (Ahmed 2007), Ahmed explains the experience of being “not white” as a feeling of exclusion from the spaces one occupies, where the body can be singled out, evoking feelings of being associated with something one does not wish to be. The metaphor of the melon illustrates how some groups are positioned within a temporal state of being “not yet modern”, a state that paradoxically becomes enduring. The term “cages” suggests a condition that, ideally, should lead to freedom over time, but in this metaphor, it also traps certain populations in a state of delayed development, seemingly lagging ever behind. This notion of temporality becomes explicit when the “crème de la crème” is referenced, implying that while some individuals may be able to transition to modernity, others remain perpetually associated with the time of the “other”.

4.2. The Race–Religion Constellation as Temporalities

Weheliye’s (2014) further theorization of what he calls “racializing assemblages” offers a framework for understanding how these temporal positionings operate not merely as social classifications but “articulate[d] into assemblages of the human (viscus/flesh) borne of political violence” (p. 16) which he simply refers to as “the flesh”. The assemblages, through their perpetual articulation of bodies, forces, materialities, and desires, actively transform how bodies are rendered legible or illegible within modernity. Furthermore, the flesh represents not simply a physical corporeality but a site where power materializes, where humanity becomes hierarchized through racialization processes that exceed simple categorization. Plájás’s notion of temporality points to subjects being marked as temporally out of sync, “considered to lag behind temporally as if they were living in earlier times” (Plájás 2021, p. 70), where lagging is not a passive condition but an active process of being placed within a different temporal order, where proximity to Anatolia or the countryside signifies not just spatial but temporal regression. The interlocutors’ efforts to position themselves in relation to temporalized others do not simply signal a binary logic of opposition but rather unfold within what Puar (2007) describes as “threatening mobility” or a dynamic interplay of proximity and distance, in which bodies navigate and are shaped by shifting constellations of race, religion, and modernity.

Gökariksel (2009) reminds us that “the religious and the secular [are] mutually and contextually constituted” (p. 658), yet to see this solely as an identity-based process would risk what Mahmood (2015, p. 9) critiques as the production of “essential, civilizationally weighted differences”. This is not merely a friction between fixed positions but a site of temporal entanglement, where secular and religious formations emerge as co-constitutive yet differentially positioned within modernity’s unfolding. Rather than a binary, these forces operate as assemblages, where affect, embodiment, and temporal inscription shape how subjects are made legible. This is evident in how my presence was often read through multiple, sometimes contradictory, registers: brownness could simultaneously signify some sort of “backwardness” or a proximity to modern secularity, depending on the temporal coordinates assigned to race, class, education, and cultural practice in a given moment, dependent on assemblages or relationality (M’charek 2013).

More concretely, the race–religion constellation (Topolski 2018) allows one to make sense of these shifting positionalities, conceptualizing race and religion as historically co-constituted categories of difference. Topolski (2020) as well as Westerduin (2020) argue that this must also be understood together with secularism and secularity, for secularism itself is not neutral but constructed in opposition, or in relation to, a religious other (Amir-Moazami 2022). This relation is not simply about belief or practice but also about the spatial and temporal ordering of subjects within a racialized framework of modernity and backwardness. It is within this constellation that the secular is not merely a negation of the religious but a claim to temporal priority, i.e., a claim to occupy the present and to dictate the terms of historical movement.7

This entanglement is particularly evident in how some interlocutors negotiate their relation to the state and supposed religious individuals. One interlocutor, who prefers to remain completely anonymous, reflected upon the presidential elections that were around the corner:

“It is (…) crazy! Literally, I am scared nowadays to go from Kadıköy to Üsküdar by myself at night. But instead of worrying about this, Kılıçdaroğlu [the opposing presidential candidate] said during a speech the other day… He said that we need to protect women that wear hijabs more! After all the things we are going through!”

Beyza, a translator, recalled the following:

“I also feel more like a minority, because [Erdogan’s] style is always like us and them. Like, us, religious ones, with the kitap, the Quran, Allah—and them. And he can’t stop himself from cursing at people actually… he’s using really vulgar words. Even today, in his speech, he used such nasty words. And even if we’re not his supporters, we’re his fucking citizens, he can’t talk to us like that. Can you imagine? We are now at this point, and he is fucking us, and they are saying, ‘yes, do it more.’”

Here, the experience of minoritization is not merely one of religious difference but of temporal displacement: to be positioned as secular in Turkey is to be placed in a time out of joint with the state, in opposition to a religious subjectivity that is temporally anchored to power. This racialization of the religious other extends beyond the national scale, as Beyza continues:

“They’re really stupidly into Arab culture, because the religion is closer to that. And the other part, they really use hate because of Syrians [in Turkey]. But also, I’m getting really angry about it—it’s not their fucking fault! How can you get angry with a whole race, because some people had some problems in their country and they had to come to our country and they couldn’t manage to go to Europe, because they use us as a tampon.”

Religious conservatism here is not only marked as spatially proximate to “Arab culture” but as temporally regressive. Yet, even within this critique, a tension emerges: while Beyza contests the racialization of Syrian refugees, she simultaneously reproduces a framework in which religious attachment signifies a temporal drag. This similarly echoes Asad’s (2003; from Scheer et al. 2019) notion of how the secular’s intersection with pain is often an “affective experience of pain, [which] becomes the highpoint of subjective authenticity, while the pain of others becomes inflected with doubt, because it can never be finally known and hence confirmed as a public reality” (p. 8).

The temporalizing force of how race and religion intersect and operate becomes starkly visible in the aftermath of the 2023 earthquake, where the initial moment of grief quickly gave way to an articulation of temporal culpability. As student Ayşegül expresses:

“Of course, you feel bad, but they were also the ones voting for the party that caused the whole afet [disaster]. It is the same people that judge our lifestyles, they keep on coming up with reasons and excuses to make our lives harder. Why can I not just be an atheist and you are just religious? Stop putting your dindarlik [religiosity] onto us! And now I feel conflicted, because of course I want to help them, but on the other hand they brought it on to themselves. It is the reason why I say that I am Türkiyeli [from Turkey] instead of Turkish. I am so done with this country, why are they still supporting the iktidar that killed them?”

The description of the earthquake goes beyond simply marking a rupture; it enacts a temporal reckoning, positioning the victims as occupying a past that is presumed to have already been overcome. Their ongoing political affiliation seems to be interpreted as a moment of failure to progress, suggesting they have not moved forward as expected or hoped. This moment underscores how the race–religion constellation functions not only as a spatial logic but also as a temporal one: it organizes perceptions of belonging and exclusion through the framework of progress and backwardness, asking not just who belongs but when they belong. Who is permitted to inhabit the time of modernity, and who remains tied to a past that must be left behind? This crisis moment reveals not only the fault lines of social differentiation but also the unevenness in the distribution of historical time itself. The earthquake, in its devastation, does not merely expose vulnerability; it lays bare the very conditions under which some lives are rendered grievable and others are not Butler (2016). Through this temporal lens, the race–religion constellation becomes a mechanism by which the very legitimacy of existence is determined: it is not only where one belongs but when one is allowed to exist as fully human in the temporal order of modernity.

4.3. Affective Politics of Belonging

Ayşegül recalled her experience at Mecra, the only gay bar on the Asian side of Istanbul she frequents. As we spoke, she reflected on an encounter that stood out to her: two men had entered the bar a few weeks ago, their presence immediately noticeable for reasons beyond just their unfamiliarity to her. The contrast between their appearance (“full beards, shirts buttoned to the top, hands clean”) and the usual crowd at Mecra was striking to her. This moment of rupture, as Ayşegül described it, revealed an unspoken mapping of who belongs and who does not, a choreography of bodies that is both affective and deeply inscribed in historical sedimentations. Ayşegül registered this disruption through aesthetics, the embodied:

“You know, the way they dress, they [had] such an Islamic presence. I found it so interesting that they came into a mekan [space/venue] where people drink alcohol. You know, they cannot pick a place like that, where people feel comfortable. And everyone is more comfortable when they’ve had a few beers, so they should’ve felt way more uncomfortable, haha! I did appreciate their courage to do something like that, in between all lubunyalılar [‘queers’].”

Ayşegül’s description draws attention to the processes through which belonging is assembled. Coming to understand such constellations in flux, continually reconstituted by the entanglements of race, religion, gender, and sexuality, her encounter materialized the way in which the secular and the supposed “Islamic” are not merely categories but affective forces, organizing the very textures of space, determining which bodies move with ease and which encounter friction. The friction in this case is not only interpersonal but structural, inscribed into the historical genealogy of secular modernity and its racialized others.

In Ayşegül’s assertion of not belonging to an imagined past, with its tangled associations of religion and politics, she actively fractures the proximity to what she deems undesirable. This insistence on “not belonging” is not a fleeting rejection but a sustained, strategic articulation of distance from the “East’s” cultural and religious codes. In this light, Ayşegül’s rejection functions as what Mendes (2020) came to describe as symbolic suicide: a means to safeguard her place in spaces like Mecra and the broader Istanbul nightlife scene. Mendes’s operationalization of symbolic suicide denotes that entry into legibility often requires an effacement—a severing of what marks one as other. She explains the following:

“the figurative killing of their Blackness becomes a preliminary act for Black Muslim women who seek to enter into the mournability that neo-imperial logics allow us to imagine as being open to the Muslim woman who is becoming good. Following the demise of the Black self through this symbolic severance or suicide, women’s Muslimness must eventually also be smothered in accordance with the dictates of assimilation which demand her full possession and refusal of Islam.”

(Mendes 2020, p. 129.)

Ayşegül’s refusal can be understood as part of a conscious and ongoing negotiation of identity, in which she navigates her positioning within normative frameworks of desirability. Rather than a singular act of symbolic rejection, this process appears as a continual effort to manage proximity to particular social, cultural, and moral imaginaries. It involves repeated acts of self-making, wherein identity is articulated in relation to markers of secularity and progressiveness. In this context, religious affiliation—particularly associations with Islam—is not outright rejected but becomes a site of tension that she seeks to negotiate or disidentify from in specific ways (see also Farris 2017). This dynamic is later illuminated in her own words:

“Of course, you feel bad, but they were also the ones voting for the party that caused the whole afet [disaster]. It is the same people that judge our lifestyles, they keep on coming up with reasons and excuses to make our lives harder. Why can I not just be an atheist and you are just religious? Stop putting your dindarlik [religiosity] onto us! And now I feel conflicted, because of course I want to help them, but on the other hand they brought it on to themselves. It is the reason why I say that I am Türkiyeli [from Turkey] instead of Turkish. I am so done with this country, why are they still supporting the iktidar that killed them?”

Though Istanbul came to a standstill post-earthquake, marked by mourning and silence on weekends, the city gradually returned to familiar patterns: tea servers running between tables, cats reclaiming their spaces in café windows, the terraces filling once more with smoke. And as the city’s routine resumed, so too did the ongoing articulations of its social structures. The rejections of interlocutors not only mirror this pattern but, alongside her symbolic suicide, it becomes a way for her to navigate and position herself within these broader social dynamics. During an interview, Ayşegül mentioned her “luck” in being Alevi—a position seemingly associated with a greater flexibility for navigation. Breaking ties with an imagined East is not simply geographical but functions as part of how one orients themselves towards a proximity to secularity and belonging. This severance, however, is not a one-time event: it is a continual process, a daily practice that requires constant reiteration. In this context, proximity to the other further East is not just a question of spatial distance but of ontological positioning, a racialized, embodied negotiation of what it means to be “good”. Refusing association, then, becomes a persistent act of becoming that must be enacted with every new encounter, as all interlocutors actively shape and reshape their belonging to constantly negotiate politicized identities.

5. Conclusions

Rather than approaching secular embodiment as an open question, this inquiry approaches the secular body in Turkey not merely a discernible formation but also a site where racializing practices and temporal differentiations are enacted. It is in the affective and material circulations of nightlife—where gestures, gazes, and comportments are read and classified—that the secular operates as an embodied regime of power. Hereby, the secular is not simply a normative structure imposed from above but a dynamic field of embodied practices, where classifications of bodies unfold through proximities and distances—toward European whiteness, away from Anatolian “backwardness”. These classifications should not be considered stable, but they shift and reconfigure in response to its articulations of race, religion, secularity, and modernity.

Furthermore, this inquiry sought to extend critical secular studies by foregrounding the specificity of Turkey’s historical trajectory—situated at the edges of European coloniality yet shaped by the legacies of Ottoman imperial governance. In this context, racialization does not neatly map onto Western logic but emerges through distinct yet resonant formations, structured by the contingencies of national belonging and the aspirations of modern progress. In other words, the AKP’s governance has not simply disrupted secular embodiment but instead holds potential for new configurations of power, where the secular and the religious become entangled in novel ways, producing racialized temporalization. The secular body, therefore, is not merely a remnant of Kemalist reform but an ongoing site of struggle, where desires for modernity and anxieties of backwardness are inscribed affectively and in embodied ways. Furthermore, taking secular subjectification and its negotiations as a vantage point of analysis rather than assuming its coherence, this inquiry sought to demonstrate how the race–religion–secular nexus operates through everyday practices. Hereby, secular distinctions are not considered merely markers of identity: they are mechanisms of temporal ordering, producing hierarchies of belonging where some bodies are cast as lagging behind in the linearity of progress. The pursuit of secular proximity, which is expressed in the gestures and utterances of my interlocutors, should be understood not as an individual choice but as participation in a classificatory system that structures legibility in everyday practices.

As this study is grounded in ethnography that was conducted in merely two parts of one metropolitan city, it is necessarily limited in both geographic scope and scale. This study, therefore, does not claim to speak for Turkey in its entirety, nor does it seek to universalize the experiences and discourses encountered. Rather, it offers a partial but meaningful account of how secularism is negotiated in a particular context and through particular relational configurations. Future research might build on this work by engaging with other regions, rural or urban, and through other positional lenses to further explore how secular and moral sensibilities are lived, contested, and reconfigured across Turkeys diverse landscape.