When rolling up your sleeves reveals your history: The new male face of public Islam in Turkey and the use of “clip-objects” as tokens of faith

Carriers of multiple meanings, objects are often presented as markers of ideological confrontations. They also exert a theatrical and decorative power in staging gender categories. In the current context of the public visibility of Islam, the AKP’s accession to power in 2002, its ideological transformation during the 2000s, and the current president’s attempts to act as the spokesperson for the Muslim world throughout the Middle East all seem to have played a role in opening up the public space to Islamic presence, not only in Turkey but also in Europe. This new visibility has helped to define the contours of a public Islam that values individualism and contemporaneity over tradition. While the AKP, with its neo-liberal identity, has successfully “connected” conservative Islamic milieus with global dynamics, it has marshalled its anti-Western attitudes to foreground its conservative and populist stance. Therefore, any history of public Islam in Turkey can be understood as a systematically head-on confrontation with Western-style modernization. The “modernity” born of Kemalism is being overshadowed by the AKP’s conservative brand of “modernity,” which is still groping for a sense of social and culture legitimacy. Though less visible than conservative women, men have also changed their image during this transformative period, a transformation nonetheless concealed by the masculinist and cosmopolitan dynamics of the Turkish urban space. These men have become dependent on specific cultural objects, which they use to mark and stabilize their conservative body-schema. Defined here as having a “clip function,” this strategy not only “protects” them from the image of a hyper-westernized man, but also differentiates them from traditional Islamic models, by allowing them to exist as a new and differentiated political actor.