Micah Hughes

Full Text Available: https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/concern/dissertations/5m60r258n

Conventional histories of modern Turkey mark the end of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of the Turkish Republic as a secularizing event in which Islam was either relegated to the realm of private belief or left to the management of bureaucratic state institutions like the Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet). However, at the very moment in which Turkish secularism was said to take effect as the dominant ideology of governance in the 1920s, Muslim modernist intellectuals at the first Ottoman-cum-Turkish university, the Dârülfünun, articulated a vision of Islam as a “social institution” ineradicable from modern life in the nation-state. In this dissertation, I trace how modernist and Kemalist intellectuals sought to reform Islam through the creation of “scientific institutions” for the study of religion such as the Faculty of Theology in the modern university. Furthermore, I analyze how traditional Islamic sciences were translated into the logics and languages of modern social science to serve as the basis for a “revolution in religion” to match the political transformations that brought forth the Republic of Turkey out of the Ottoman state. Modernist scholars claimed this revolution in religion would be accomplished through the transformation of traditionally trained Islamic scholars in law and theology into sociologists, philosophers, and historians of Islam. This dissertation concludes with a reflection on how these various strategies of incorporation and translation of social scientific methods gave way to a Republican Turkish tradition of “university theology” which displaced older Ottoman-Islamic institutions and modes of knowledge production.

The Pluralism in Muslim American Philanthropy 2022 Report shows that, on average, U.S. Muslims surveyed perceived themselves to have higher levels of characteristics such as tolerance, valuing diversity and racial inclusivity, religiosity, and motivation to donate to causes benefitting people with marginalized identities (described in the study as “donation motivation”) than U.S. non-Muslims perceived themselves to have. This report details the findings on pluralism and tolerance perception from a self-administered web survey conducted by SSRS for the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. The larger study, of which these findings are a part, surveys the opinions of Muslims and the general population regarding faith customs, donation practices and attitudes, volunteer work, remittances, and zakat. SSRS conducted its survey from January 25 through February 15, 2022 with 2,010 adult respondents (age 18 and over), including 1,024 Muslim and 960 general population respondents. SSRS reached eligible respondents via a nonprobability web panel sample.

This report evaluates an adaptive self-report scale regarding what motivates people in the United States to give to charitable causes or organizations by using a theoretical framework of perceived benefits. An exploratory factor analysis on charity motivation scales revealed that religion, in addition to basic socioeconomic demographics such as gender, age, education, race, income, marital status, and geographic location, significantly influence Americans’ motivation to give. The other notable factors were found to be political leaning, civic participation, political conservatism, and involvement in nonprofit service, as they all have an important effect on giving motivation. For this purpose, a representative sample of 1,733 U.S. adults (866 Muslims and 867 non-Muslims) from various ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic backgrounds were polled to discover more about their giving patterns and what motivates them to contribute. The findings, which mostly aligned with the Muslim American Giving Report 2021 (Siddiqui & Wasif, 2021), indicated Muslims and non-Muslims evidently have different motivations for contributing.

https://hdl.handle.net/1805/33563

Syllabus for RELI 233, Religion and Violence.

The first section of this class takes up the question of religion’s relationship to violence by investigating how the concept of violence has been narrated alongside and as a crucial part of the history of ‘religion’, ‘secularism’, and the formation of modern notions of the human subject. This section does not answer the question affirmatively or negatively, but seeks instead to ask why this question is important for us here, today. The second section of this course addresses notions of pain, sacrifice, witness, and spectacle in order to theorize more closely about religion, the body, and its various modes of interacting, experiencing, and observing what we might call, in a general sense, “violence.” The third section of this course isolates questions about martyrdom, colonialism, warfare, and torture. This section is both historical and contemporary in outlook and seeks to link historical forms of political and social violence (i.e. colonialism) to modern forms of war-making that frequently invoke religious symbols, themes, and discourses.  The final section of the course flips the script on the question, “does religion cause violence,” and instead explores how violence shapes religious experience, sensibilities, and attitudes. The most direct example of this is the week on “Incarceration,” which, as many have argued, is a form of violence that has drastically shaped religious practices in the contemporary world. The course ends by reflecting on the problem of white nationalism and religion after Charlottesville.

Course Description & Objectives: In the first half of the twentieth century, scholars in the humanities and the social sciences boldly proclaimed that secularism had won. The world was becoming disenchanted and organized religion was on its way out; it was only a matter of time before secular, 'rational' principles would govern modern society. However, over the course of this century and through multiple world wars, the rise of fundamentalism, extremism, and state violence have placed this secularization narrative in question. Despite the fact that, in America at least, public association with organized religion in the form church attendance has decreased, the role of religion in politics has arguably increased in significance. How are we to understand this? This course seeks to provide a genealogy of and critical engagement with the concepts of religion, fundamentalism, and nationalism as they emerged globally in the twentieth-century. This course is divided into three parts. Part One is an examination of important concepts. Students will read about difficulties in defining terms like " religion " and " modernity, " the complicated relationship between religion and secularism, and religious and secular nationalisms. Part Two addresses the question of fundamentalism, its emergence historically, and its relationship to religious violence theoretically. Part Three delves into specific case studies concerning religion and politics historically and in the present. Examples include the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL/Daesh), contemporary Hindu nationalism in India, Christian nationalism, and others. The objectives of this course are threefold: (1) Introduce students to key concepts and develop conversational competency in issues related to religion and politics beyond binary understandings of their relationship (2) Historicize the relationship between religion, fundamentalism, and nationalism in the twentieth-century, and (3) Familiarize students with the complex aims and goals of religious movements and actors in the present.

WOCMES 2018 - Perspectives on Modern Sufism panel (presented in abstentia)

The paper addresses the changing institutional and discursive location of Sufism in twentieth-century Turkey. This paper argue that despite increasing criticism of the role of Sufi orders (tarikatlar) in Ottoman and Turkish society which eventually culminated in the closure of the orders and the seizure of their property in 1925, Turkish intellectuals and scholars like Mehmet Fuat Köprülü (1890-1966) had already achieved a conceptual relocation of Sufism by integrating Sufi literature into Turkish literature, thus establishing it as a constitutive element of "national culture".

The integration of Sufi concepts with new literary forms such as the novel, the academic monograph, and the university lecture made possible new reading practices beyond the realm of educating Sufi adepts into the Sufi path, therefore making possible the “enculturation” of Sufism as an literary element of Ottoman-Islamic history and Turkish history. This paper proposes to track this transformation in Mehmet Fuat Köprülü’s works: Türk Edebiyatında İlk Mutasavvıflar (1918) and Türk Edebiyat Tarihi (1920). His studies of literature generally and Sufi poetry (namely Yunus Emre and Ahmet Yasawi) specifically set a precedent for how later scholars of Turkish literature would approach Ottoman-Islamic textual production as an element of Turkish culture to be developed, institutionalized, and patronized in the Republic of Turkey.

By way of conclusion, this paper will ask how Sufism’s discursive reformulation and institutional relocation as an element of literary history relates to broader issues concerning the transformation of the concept of religion in Turkey’s twentieth-century context.

American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, Boston, 2017:
Theology and Continental Philosophy Unit
Panel: Islamic Futures in Dialogue with Continental Thought

This paper takes up the question of continental philosophy’s relationship to Sufism as a distinct feature of religious modernism in 20th century Turkey. Through an engagement with the work of Nurettin Topçu (1909-1975), a student of Henri Bergson, this paper addresses the global effects of Bergsonism and its relevance to Muslim modernists who were thinking through problems of tradition and change in the face of socio-political upheaval. Unlike many of his modernist contemporaries, who saw Sufism as a pacifying, anxiety-inducing force, Topçu’s Bergson-inspired spiritualism found in Sufism a creative language to combat perceived stagnation of social and religious life. Consequently, this paper claims that 20th century Muslim interactions with continental thought were not anomalous or derivative, but were a vital and continual presence in modernist circles.