ABSTRACT
Jean-Paul Sartre tells a story somewhere about a man sitting on a park bench, half-way up a hill. The man looks over the scene, at the ducks swimming in the pond, the dog straining at the leash, the strolling lovers. Dilruba’s ambience is created, then, by the site’s invocation of, and gesturing towards, three different discursive formations: Ottomanism, Islamism and Anatolianism. The symbols constituting the discourse of Turkish-Ottomanism are prone to appropriation by Islamist reinterpretation, and vice versa. Zeynep, the woman who as a girl attended the Mahmud Efendi Koran course, has in the last few years slowly withdrawn from the Islamic movement and stopped reading its women's magazines. Islamist believers in Kuzguncuk, then, in attempting to create a local community polemically situated in opposition to elite sovereignty in the cultural field, find themselves in an ambiguous position vis-a-vis Turkish nationalism.
