ABSTRACT
This chapter distinguishes three forms that the relationship between modernity and religions took in Turkey over past decades: mutual misrecognition, authoritarian modernity in search of democratization, paternalistic domestication and instrumentalization of Islam, to the detriment above all of religious and cultural minorities. Postsecular forms of life are contingent upon postsecular social practices, which in turn depend on the levels of reflectivity of modernity and religions. In Quadrant A in four quadrant model, the modernities reflectivity is low with respect to religions. In Turkey relationships between modernity and religion(s) have in the past been of different kinds. Levantinism and rooted cosmopolitanism are part and parcel of Turkish landscape. Nostalgia for cosmopolitan memory, for another world or for Levantinism, can be considered a myth; however, not in the usual enlightened sense of false. Levantinism stands for cultural mutation, mixed culture, a troubled sense of belonging and non-belonging, perpetual oscillation, liminality, but also cultural innovation.
