Abstract:

This article sheds light on the literary medialization of religious experience in Turkish novels. To achieve this, literary strategies are unveiled which render the otherwise unsayable experience into an object of communication. While the religious, and particularly the mystical experience, has always intrigued literary authors of any geography, for authors of Turkey the whole complex of mystical culture and practice holds a particular significance. The outlawed Sufi orders and their master, the Sufi sheikh, provide a perfect setting for the discussion of both the political situation and the spiritual dis/orientation of the population of Turkey. Beyond that, the figure of the sheikh can be perceived as a media which allows, provokes, and communicates religious experience, not unlike other media such as religious texts or music. The article is inspired by Charles Taylor who argues that religious utterances not only have to make use of a pre-existing vocabulary in order to become comprehensible to the believers but that the very vocabulary, and the set of accepted imaginations, pre-form the religious experience.The textual focus of the analysis builds on Bab-ı Esrar (The Dervish Gate), by Ahmet Ümit (2008). Novels by Halide Edip Adıvar, The Clown and his Daughter (1935), and Refik Halit Karay, Kadınlar Tekkesi (1956), complement the textual analysis. The historical distance between the publication of the three novels allows us to track media-technological, societal and political change throughout the decades; this is done through comparison of the way each author medializes religious experience, and of how the relation between the Sufi master and his, mostly female, adept(s) is represented.The article demonstrates that the Sufi sheikh has continued to function as an attractive, somehow uncanny and Janus-faced, literary figure in the fiction of Turkey. So he, the charismatic male character, not only guides his adepts along the spiritual path in a fictive world, but he epitomizes the complex relation between the religious heritage of Turkey and the not-always so secularized non-fictive present.

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