The post-Islamist problematic: questions of religion and difference in everyday life

The term post-Islamism has been broadly applied to suggest that we are witnessing a new phase of Islamist politics in which the goal is not to make the state Islamic but to change the lived experiences of Islam. Whether post-Islamism applies to the Turkish case has been a matter of much debate. We approach post-Islamism in Turkey using a feminist geographic analytic that shifts our focus from formal politics to the embodied and the everyday. Drawing upon eight focus groups with men and women in Istanbul in 2013 and 2014, we analyze discussions of education reform, the possibility of religious politics and religious difference to demonstrate how the premises of post-Islamism depend upon the (often unsuccessful) papering over of multiplicity. We argue that everyday, embodied solutions to the questions of post-Islamism often undermine the very categories (state, society, religion and secularism) upon which the post-Islamic problematic is based.