Religious communities rarely survive major political ruptures unchanged. They endure by carrying an old moral world into new institutions. The Süleymancılar are among the clearest examples of this process in modern Turkey. They emerged from the Naqshbandi tradition, but they cannot be understood simply as another Sufi order gathered around a sheik and a lodge. Their distinctive achievement was to make religious education the...
The State, Religious Communities, Sufi Orders, and the Second Kemalism
Socio-political developments that have profoundly unsettled life in Turkey show no sign of abating. On the one hand, the secular-Kemalist Republican People’s Party (CHP) is being targeted; on the other, certain Islamic groups are being subjected to political, financial, and psychological operations. Last week, an operation targeting the Süleymancılar, one of Turkey’s largest Islamic communities,...
