What is the role of Islam as a lived, embodied faith in shaping individual subjectivities, collective identities, and political practices across different spatial scales? This lecture will critically examine the vernacularization of Islam—how global Islamic discourses are translated, localized, and adapted within specific socio-political contexts. Taking Turkey as a central case study, the lecture will analyze how Islam is strategically mobilized both in domestic governance and foreign policy, with particular attention to the AKP’s civilizational rhetoric and the reimagining of Turkey as a center of a global ummah. The lecture will illuminate how different state and non-state actors engage Islamic traditions to articulate morality, justice, and identity in a post-secular and globalized world. The event also highlights the importance of academic scholarship in disentangling complex debates around Islam, governance, and global order.

Speaker:

M.Hakan Yavuz is a professor of political science at the University of Utah. His current projects focus on transnational Islamic networks in Central Asia and Turkey; the role of Islam in state-building and nationalism; and ethno-religious conflict management. Prof Yavuz has published many books including: Erdoğan: The Making of an Autocrat (Edinburg University Press, 2022); Nostalgia for the Empire: The Politics of Neo-Ottomanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020); Toward an Islamic Enlightenment: The Gülen Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Secularism and Muslim Democracy in Turkey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Islamic Political Identity in Turkey (Oxford University Press, 2003; 2005)(3rd print). Prof Yavuz has received several fellowships, some of which are the MacArthur Fellowship, University of California Fellowship, and Rockefeller Fellowship, and most recently was a Tanner Humanities Center Fellowin 2014.