scholarly journals The 'Islamic Women's' Movement Transition from the private Domain to the Public Sphere

ICR Journal ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-132
Author(s):  
Omer Caha
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Women's Movement ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
The Public ◽  
Modern Education ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Right ◽  
Private Domain ◽  
Traditional Roles

This article emphasises the development of the Muslim women’s movement in Turkey. It traces the historical roots of this movement as well as its evolution towards two different understandings of women. It is clearly seen that there exist two main approaches to the role of women among Islamic groups: while the traditional Islamic understanding strives to maintain women’s traditional roles notwithstanding that it advocates the right to benefit from modern education, another understanding challenges this and tries to ensure women’s existence on a ‘womanly’ base in the public life. The author attempts also to depict the story of how Muslim women have attempted to be articulated in the public sphere, their 50-year struggle to achieve that goal, as well as the discourses, values and symbols that have generally been centred on the ‘headscarf debates’.  

Compressed Identity

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 13-35
Author(s):  
H. Şule Albayrak
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Civil Service ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
The Self ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
The Public ◽  
Economic Issues ◽  
Turkish State ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Depth Interviews

For decades the authoritarian secularist policies of the Turkish state, by imposing a headscarf ban at universities and in the civil service, excluded practising Muslim women from the public sphere until the reforms following 2010. However, Muslim women had continued to seek ways to increase their knowledge and improve their intellectual levels, not only as individuals, but also by establishing civil associations. As a result, a group of intellectual women has emerged who are not only educated in political, social, and economic issues, but who are also determined to attain their socio-economic and political rights. Those new actors in the Turkish public sphere are, however, concerned with being labeled as either “feminist,” “fundamentalist” or “Islamist.” This article therefore analyzes the distance between the self-identifications of intellectual Muslim women and certain classifications imposed on them. Semi-structured in-depth interviews with thirteen Turkish intellectual Muslim women were carried out which reveal that they reject and critique overly facile labels due to their negative connotations while offering more complex insights into their perspectives on Muslim women, authority, and identity.

The Priority of Public Reasons and Religious Forms of Life in Constitutional Democracies

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 45
Author(s):  
Cristina Lafont
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Public Deliberation ◽  
The Public ◽  
Difficult Question ◽  
Political Deliberation ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Right ◽  
Mutual Accountability

In this essay I address the difficult question of how citizens with conflicting religious and secular views can fulfill the democratic obligation of justifying the imposition of coercive policies to others with reasons that they can also accept. After discussing the difficulties of proposals that either exclude religious beliefs from public deliberation or include them without any restrictions, I argue instead for a policy of mutual accountability that imposes the same deliberative rights and obligations on all democratic citizens. The main advantage of this proposal is that it recognizes the right of all democratic citizens to adopt their own cognitive stance (whether religious or secular) in political deliberation in the public sphere without giving up on the democratic obligation to provide reasons acceptable to everyone to justify coercive policies with which all citizens must comply.

The gender dimension of the 2020 Belarusian protest: Does female engagement contribute to the establishment of gender equality?

2021 ◽  
pp. 2336825X2110291
Author(s):  
Vasil Navumau ◽  
Olga Matveieva
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Gender Equality ◽  
Presidential Elections ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Depth Interviews

One of the distinctive traits of the Belarusian ‘revolution-in-the-making’, sparked by alleged falsifications during the presidential elections and brutal repressions of protest afterwards, has been a highly visible gender dimension. This article is devoted to the analysis of this gender-related consequences of protest activism in Belarus. Within this research, the authors analyse the role of the female movement in the Belarusian uprising and examine, and to which extent this involvement expands the public sphere and contributes to the changes in gender-related policies. To do this, the authors conducted seven semi-structured in-depth interviews with the gender experts and activists – four before and four after the protests.

scholarly journals Contested Numbers: Census Controversies and the Press in 1960s Nigeria

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Gerardo Serra ◽  
Morten Jerven
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
The State ◽  
Population Census ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Press ◽  
Distribution Of Resources ◽  
The Public Sphere

Abstract This article reconstructs the controversies following the release of the figures from Nigeria's 1963 population census. As the basis for the allocation of seats in the federal parliament and for the distribution of resources, the census is a valuable entry point into postcolonial Nigeria's political culture. After presenting an overview of how the Africanist literature has conceptualized the politics of population counting, the article analyses the role of the press in constructing the meaning and implications of the 1963 count. In contrast with the literature's emphasis on identification, categorization, and enumeration, our focus is on how the census results informed a broader range of visual and textual narratives. It is argued that analysing the multiple ways in which demographic sources shape debates about trust, identity, and the state in the public sphere results in a richer understanding of the politics of counting people and narrows the gap between demographic and cultural history.

The NGOization of Space: Dilemmas of Social Change, Planning Policy, and the Israeli Public Sphere

10.1068/d459t ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 745-758 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haim Yacobi
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Critical Reading ◽  
Production Of Space ◽  
The Public ◽  
Planning Policy ◽  
Strategic Goals ◽  
The Public Sphere

This paper offers a critical analysis of the role of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that deal with planning policy in general and in Israel in particular. The inherent dilemmas of the different NGOs' tactics and strategies in reshaping the public sphere are examined, based on a critical reading of Habermas's conceptualization of the public sphere. The main objective of this paper is to investigate to what extent, and under which conditions, the NGOization of space—that is, the growing number of nongovernmental actors that deal with the production of space both politically and tangibly—has been able to achieve strategic goals which may lead towards social change.

scholarly journals Desiring the Secular: Capital, Cohesion, and the Fantasy of Secularization

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 410
Author(s):  
Ian A. Morrison
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Proper Place ◽  
The Public ◽  
Religious Difference ◽  
Religious Subject ◽  
Global North ◽  
The Public Sphere

Towards the end of the twentieth century, religion re-emerged as a topic of pressing concern in a number of the most self-consciously secularized states of the global north. From disputes over the wearing of headscarves in schools to debates over accommodations for religious practices in the public sphere, religion, particularly the ‘foreign’ religiosity of migrants and other minority religious subjects, appeared on the scene as a phenomenon whose proper place and role in society required both urgent and careful deliberation. This article argues that in order to account for the affective potency produced by the immanence of the figure of the ‘foreign’ religious subject, it is necessary to understand secularization as fantasy. It is within the fantasy of secularization that the secular emerges as an object of desire—as something that, if attained, appears as a solution to the problem of ‘foreign’ religiosity—and figures of inassimilable religiosity assume the role of scapegoats for the failure to resolve these concerns. In this sense, within this fantasy scene, the secular promises to provide ‘us’ with something that we are lacking. However, this promise has been undermined by the apparent persistence of religious difference. As such, as a result of their continued religiosity, ‘they’ appear to be taking something from ‘us’.

Ambiguities and Clichés in the Debate about Public Intellectuals

2007 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 295-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara A. Misztal
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
New Left ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Public Intellectuals ◽  
The Public ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
The Public Sphere

This paper's purpose is to exam Turner's (2006a) thesis that Britain neither produced its own public intellectuals nor a distinctive sociology. It aims to outline difficulties with the logic of Turner's argument rather than to discuss any particular public intellectual in Britain. The paper argues that Turner's claim about the comparative insignificance of public intellectuals in Britain reinforces the myth of British exceptionalism and overlooks the significance of the contribution to the public sphere by intellectuals from other disciplines than sociology. It discusses Turner's assumption that intellectual innovation requires massive disruptive and violent change and suggests that such an assertion is not necessarily supported by studies of the conditions of the production of knowledge. Finally, the paper argues that Turner's anguish at the absence of public intellectuals among sociologists in Britain is symptomatic of New Left thinking that models the idea of the intellectual on Gramsci. In conclusion, the paper asserts that Turner's idea of the intellectual fails to note the tension at the heart of the role of public intellectual–the tension between specialist and non-specialist functions.

Secular–Religious Competition and the Exclusion of Islam from the Public Sphere: Islamic Welfare in Western Europe

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 433-456 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthias Kortmann
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Equal Treatment ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Service Delivery ◽  
Religious Competition ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Islamic Organizations

AbstractThis paper deals in a qualitative discourse analysis with the role of Islamic organizations in welfare delivery in Germany and the Netherlands. Referring to Jonathan Fox's “secular–religious competition perspective”, the paper argues that similar trends of exclusion of Islamic organizations from public social service delivery can be explained with discourses on Islam in these two countries. The analysis, first, shows that in the national competitions between religious and secular ideologies on the public role of religion, different views are dominant (i.e., the support for the Christian majority in Germany and equal treatment of all religions in the Netherlands) which can be traced back to the respective regimes of religious governance. However, and second, when it comes to Islam in particular, in the Netherlands, the perspective of restricting all religions from public sphere prevails which leads to the rather exclusivist view on Islamic welfare that dominates in Germany, too.

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