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What is going on in Turkey?
Hosted by:
May 18, 2018 - May 19, 2018
Members' Lunch with Professor Ihsan Yilmaz, Research Chair of Islamic Studies and Intercultural Dialogue at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University.
The Turkish Republic’s founding elite, the Kemalists, believed a modern nation had to be secular and ethnically, linguistically and religion-culturally homogeneous. They embarked on creating a modern state composed of secularist Sunni Turks. This project was discriminatory against Kurds, Alevis, non-Muslims, practising Muslims and leftists who were stigmatized and even punished by the Kemalist hegemony.
Now, after its third term in power, the increasingly authoritarian Justice and Development Party (AKP) has initiated a similar project it calls “the pious generation.” The AKP’s rhetoric (and sometimes actions) is comprised of radical Islamist, Salafist and Jihadist elements. Similar to the Kemalist project, it too discriminates against and punishes its perceived "others", sometimes treated as enemies, traitors and infidels.
Join us to hear the inside story of what's going on in Turkey.
Professor Ihsan Yilmaz is one of the Muslim world's leading social scientists. His research focuses on Islam-state-society relations in Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt and Central Asia, along with research into political participation and legal pluralism in Muslim minority communities, particularly in the UK and Australia.
Professor Yilmaz’s much-cited book Muslim Laws, Politics and Society in Modern Nation States: Dynamic Legal Pluralism in England, Turkey and Pakistan (Routledge 2005, reprinted 2016) has been a pathbreaker in the study of unofficial Islamic legal pluralism in secular nation-states. He has been invited by eminent thinks tanks, universities and governmental bodies in many parts of the world as key note speaker, guest lecturer or expert witness.
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