Transcript: Imagining Turkey introductory episode

Sertaç Sehlikoğlu: Welcome to the Imagining Turkey podcast series, co-organized by Hazal Aydın, Meryem Zişan Köker, and myself Sertaç Sehlikoğlu. It is part of Takhayyul Project, funded by the European Research Council, and hosted at the UCL's Institute for Global Prosperity.

This podcast is one of the most exciting outcomes of our ongoing ERC-funded Takhayyul project at the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity. My name is Sertaç Sehlikoğlu, and I’ll be your host throughout this podcast series, where we discuss various topics at the intersections of populist, nationalist, and religious movements, formations of various forms of political imaginations in, around, and about Turkey. Thus, in this series, we will be hosting renowned scholars, artists, public intellectuals, and activists.

In this introductory episode, I would like to briefly talk about the scholarly intentions of the Takhayyul project, why we think it is necessary to have a closer look at imagination as an analytical tool, and finally, why we want to focus on Turkey in particular.

Takhayyul Project in fact starts with a basic premise, that imagination, fantasies, and dreams are often at the heart of political formations. And Islamic populist politics is no exception to that. It is designed to tap into the imaginaries of the followers of Islamist movements, follow the links that connect them to each other, and develop a heuristic theoretical framework, that will enable us to understand workings of intangible elements that drive people to politics and political formations. We are standing at a juncture, where, even almost one hundred years after the collapse of last Islamic Empire, the dream of reviving Islamic empires, still haunts and even fuels political aspirations across what historians call Islamdom, the homes of three major Islamic Empires, namely the ottomans, the safavids, and the Mughals. These political conversations across what is now referred to as the Balkan-to-Bengal complex are communicated through various means, including emotional attachments to charismatic leaders, politics based on impossible aspirations and resentments and disappointments and political rage that seem to effect and interlink the populist Islamic movements in these three INTERconnected regions. 

At this critical juncture, as social scientists, we must force the limits of our thinking, our scholarship, our methodologies, our conceptual frameworks, to expand our understanding of the IMAGINARIES in the formation of Islamic political milieus. What we offer IS to theorise the link between the imaginary and politics in a way that will not be haunted by the rational-irrational dichotomy and be tuned to the particularities of the social contexts, by engaging with the scholarships formed in those VERY geographies. In this vein, this project follows the concept takhayyul that binds multiple Islamic imaginaries.

Takhayyul is a concept of political theory of the Classical Islamic Scholarship, first coined in mid 8 hundreds to refer to the imaginary reflection of the unseen truth.

Takhayyul had been studied as the realm that a truthful movement should tap into for a positive social change. Takhayyul is to expand one’s imaginative capacities by connecting with a vision that is both prophetic and realistic, both spiritual and earthly, both religious and secular, both real, and imaginative.

I treat takhayyul as a heuristic concept and put it into a scholarly and theoretical conversation with Western theories of political imagination, to both avoid and cure the Eurocentric shortcomings in analysis of Islamist politics. 

And, as the project has been unfolding in over 11 countries, it became apparent that Turkey is playing a significant role in this inter-connective populist forms of political islam. Turkey, recently changed its name to Turkiye, has been actively investing into intimate connections and imaginary references that appeal to larger publics, and they have been successful in turning them into a political currency within Turkey as well as with neighbouring countries such as Lebanon, Egypt, North Macedonia, Kosovo or Bosnia Herzegovina. 

Therefore, in Imagining Turkey series, we will mainly focus on Turkey due to its significance in the formation of contemporary political imaginaries, how imaginative references are constructed and instrumentalized in relation to local and global politics. 

Turkey’s various enterprise across and beyond post-Ottoman geographies in media projects, period dramas, cultural centers, the construction sector, and many more fields is not simply a means of getting financial gain but part of a broader political engagement with post-Ottoman geographies. Therefore, we will focus on Turkey to understand imagination’s role in the formation of the political subjectivities of large populations both within and outside its borders. 

The central concern of this bi-monthly podcast series is to offer unfamiliar ways of looking at the political transformation Turkey has been going through at the national and international level. Imagination, as an analytical angle deserves our attention as a political and social force that informs and connects masses, crosses borders, and manifests new socialities. 

You have listened to the Imagining Turkey Podcast series, hosted at the UCL’s Institute for Global Prosperity, funded by the European Research Council.