Nazlı Özkan

This book explores how most activists and citizens persist in seeing secularism as the guarantor of religious equality, despite ongoing marginalization of religious minorities by secular governments. Anthropological discussions emphasize that instead of ending religious discrimination, secular governments often perpetuate religious inequalities. However, very few public voices attribute religious discrimination to secularism. I bridge this gap between public and anthropological articulations of secularism by ethnographically tracing the news media visibility of the Alevi religious minority in secular Turkey. I demonstrate that the news media—rather than the law—is the primary arena for perpetuating the ideal of secularism as guarding equality. Politicians and journalists reproduce this ideal by controlling the media visibility of religious violence. Alevis frequently face massacres, casting doubt on the protective function of Turkish secularism. Instead of highligting structural discrimination, news media explains anti-Alevi violence as resulting from provocation: only a few instigators perpetrate such attacks to disrupt the secular fellowship between Alevis and the majority Sunnis. Based on an 18-month fieldwork with journalists and archival research, I explore how the provocation narrative portrays secularism as protecting religious equality. I trace its journey from the 1940s emergence, through Cold War and neoliberal-multiculturalist consolidation, to today’s populist authoritarianism.