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Houston, C. and Senay, B XXXXXXXXXXCreating Ethical Subjects? The Role of the Turkish State in Integrating
Muslims in Australia. In Muslim Integration: Pluralism and Multiculturalism in New Zealand and Australia. M. Voyce
& E. Kolig (eds.) Lexington Books.
Creating Ethical Subjects?
The Role of the Turkish State in Integrating Muslims in Australia
Christopher Houston and Banu Åženay
The murder of the Charlie Hebdu cartoonists by Islamist Muslims in January last year was a significant
event, both for its massive media coverage, and for the intense explosion of u
an affect in Paris in
the days after. It was significant, too, for the urgency of a range of debates the killings set off in the
media concerning freedom of speech, racism, Muslim radicalization, multiculturalism and
democracy, although if the truth be told these topics have been well rehearsed in the public sphere
over the last few years. For anthropologists in particular, adherents of the discipline that in the
modern university has most given itself over to the enterprise of precisely describing the experiences
of others in particular fields of action, the events in Paris (and other like them) raised questions
about what their response should be to the assertions of politicians and their agents of security
concerning the public danger of radicalized Muslims. After all, anthropology has been characterized
y the task of translation, which can be described in relation to religion (for example) as the attempt
to ‘translate a type of religious experience remote from my own into such terms of my consciousness
as may best enable the nature of that which is so translated to appear for what it is in itself’.1 How
should anthropologists (and other scholars) translate the perceptions of either the Charlie Hebdo
cartoonists, who drew a picture of a kneeling and naked Muhammad with a star in his rectum, or of
the Muslim te
orists that assassinated them?
Less dramatically, interpretation of the violent attack also segued into a recent interest in ethics and
morality in anthropology and other disciplines.2 Fassin calls this an ‘ethical turn’, characterized by its
1 J Macquarie, Twentieth Century Religious Thought: The Frontiers of Philosophy and Theology XXXXXXXXXX, Charles
Scribner & Sons, London, 1988, p. 212.
2 See, for example, J Zigon, ‘Moral Breakdown and the Ethical Demand: A Theoretical Framework for an
Anthropology of Moralities’, Anthropological Theory, vol. 7, no. 2, 2007, pp. 131–150; J Faubion, ‘From the
Ethical to the Themitical (and Back Again): Groundwork for an Anthropology of Ethics’, in M Lambek (ed.),
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critique of sociological models that are accused of conflating the social with the moral, in which
morality as a system of shared values, sentiments and procedures of judgment is presented as
congruent with society (or with its discursive and disciplinary domains).3 By contrast, Laidlaw argues
that a renewed focus on ethics should begin by describing ethnographically the possibility of human
freedom. Laidlaw critiques the foundational arguments of Durkheim to prosecute his argument.4 But
the work of Bourdieu in Muslim Algeria is a more relevant social theory that presents the practical
matter of living in a society with others as a simultaneous inculcation of schemes of perception and
appreciation as well as of characteristic dispositions of affect and feeling that ground moral
judgements.5 In short, should social and legal studies assume human behavior and morality to be
definitively conditioned by social structures and inculcated modes of perception? Or, in relation to
the web of socio-cultural relations and asymmetrical political economies in which people are placed,
should it posit their relative ethical autonomy?
For those working with Muslim minorities in the West or in Muslim-majority countries themselves
these debates have become especially urgent, given the widely-asserted proposition that Muslim
societies or institutions do not allow their members any autonomy vis-Ã -vis Islamic history, social
egulations, practices or imaginaries, particularly in relation to religious law or to Islamic scriptures.
Interestingly, this presumption seems to be shared both by those who make reductive and
sometimes Islamophobic claims about Muslims’ lack of a religious and moral sense (and hence
about Islam’s incompatibility with freedom), and by those who invoke Islam as justification for
authoritarianism and violence. Arguing against such assertions, a number of scholars have set
themselves the task of providing more nuanced accounts of ethical self-fashioning by Muslims,
exploring the positioning of ethics in everyday life alongside the exercise of actors’ critical reflexivity
Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action, Fordham University Press, New York, 2010, pp. 84–101; M
Lambek, ‘Introduction’, in M Lambek (ed.), Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action, Fordham
University Press, New York, 2010, pp. 1–38.
3 D Fassin, ‘The Ethical Turn in Anthropology: Promises and Uncertainties’, Hau, Journal of Ethnographic Theory,
vol. 4, no. 1, 2014, pp. 429–435.
4 J Laidlaw, ‘For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom’, Journal of Royal Anthropology Institute, vol. 8, no. 2,
2002, p. 315.
5 As Bourdieu writes in Masculine Domination, ‘early up
inging tends to inculcate ways of bearing the body …
This apprenticeship is all the more effective because it remains essentially tacit … male and female identities
are laid down in the form of permanent stances, gaits and postures which are the realization, or rather the
naturalization of an ethic’. P Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, Stanford University Press, Redwood City, 2001, p.
27. For Bourdieu, dispositional capacities enable appropriate moral actions and the ‘unquestioned moral
eproduction of a single primary moral-value’, both of which co
espond with the objective social structures
that produce them. Zigon, op.cit., p. 255.
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– their ability and effort to decide between possible actions. To give just one example, in her study
of the revival of the ney (the Sufi flute) in Istanbul, Şenay traces how learners’ ethical dispositions or
capacities are modified through their engaging in a musical practice rather than by their following of
general societal rules.6
This paper situates itself within these debates concerning relations between Muslims’ ethical self-
fashioning and
oader social institutions, taking as a case-study the activities of an apparently
unlikely force dedicated to the ethical formation and integration of Muslims in Australian society,
the consular institutions of the Turkish Republic. The Turkish State sponsors and controls Turkish
mosques in Australia, with their imams being paid bureaucrats of the Ministry of Religious Affairs.
The Consulate also employs a Religious Attaché, whose role is to educate and monitor Turkish
Australians in their religious duties and commitments. The transnational management of the Turkish
mosques and religious clerics in the diaspora by the Turkish state is an exception when compared to
their more autonomous development by other Muslim immigrant communities in Australia. This
paper investigates ways that the Turkish Republic seeks to configure its ‘Muslim civil society’ a
oad
in the Australian context, seeking to inculcate in believers (as it does in Turkey) a distinctive ‘Turkish’
way of being Muslim that conforms to Turkish nationalism and laicism.
But what arguments are made for asserting that the integration of Muslims in particular into
Australian society is problematic, as are their ethics? After all, acts of criminal violence, whether by
Muslims or anyone else, can be policed without embarking upon some thoroughgoing policy of
securitization or population management. The anxiety surely derives from the association of Islam
with enmity to the West made by many academics and journalists, articulated in turn to generalized
claims concerning Islam’s democratic deficit, which implicates the morality of Muslims, too, as
deficient. Clearly, any strategy designed to integrate Muslims into Western societies depends upon
the analytic model chosen to explain the origins and emergence of extremist Islam. Accordingly,
efore analysing the work of the Turkish state in Australia, the first half of this paper critically
6 B Şenay, ‘Masterful Words: Musicianship and Ethics in Learning the Ney’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute, vol. 21, no. 3, 2015, pp. 524–541. Mahmood XXXXXXXXXXand Hirschkind XXXXXXXXXXdescribe similar ethical
modifications amongst those committed to ‘piety movements’ in Egypt. S Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The
Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2005; C Hirschkind, The Ethical
Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics, Columbia University Press, New York, 2006.
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assesses constructions in recent literature of the root causes of Islamism. It identifies two dominant
perspectives. The first analyses radical Islam as