Book Description
"Since the early 2000s, the Turkey's Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) has considerably increased the number of women employed as religious officers. The book sheds light on the significance of this policy and retraces the broader political framework in which the process has been taking shape. Drawing on extensive ethnographic observations of the activities conducted by Diyanet women preachers in Istanbul mosques, the work breaks new ground on two fronts: on the one side, it elucidates how women access to Diyanet bureaucracy has resulted in a slow but unavoidable transformation of gender roles within Islamic institutions. The emergence of a pious, modern and highly educated woman determined to gain visibility in the (religious) public realm informs about state's attempt to standardize a multifaceted female religious participation. On the other side, the book illuminates on a broader reformulation of the religious services for women and families as a pervasive moral support which penetrates and reshapes the spaces of the secular. In this vein, the work scrutinizes the feminization of the Diyanet as a prism through which the continuous evolutions of Turkish secularism are investigated"--
