ABSTRACT
Turkey is the first candidate state to the EU with an overwhelmingly Muslim population. Turkey’s candidacy crystallizes the competing projects on Europe as well as the cultural and civilizational limits of suggested European secularization and modernization models. This accession process appears as the most interactive one: while compelling Turkey to adopt the EU’s legislative, administrative and political institutions, policies and norms, the viability of full membership is strongly bound by the EU’s capacity to revisit its traditional assumptions about religion, secularism and the Judeo-Christian foundations of European democracy (Hurd 2010). Although religious affairs remain outside of the EU competency, the Islamic factor seems to be the most polemical issue and any reflection about the impacts of the accession on Islam in Turkey requires an analysis of the ways in which actors in the religious field (Bourdieu 1971) behave within Turkey’s EU integration process. This chapter analyzes the transformation of the governance of public Islam in Turkey from the perspective of the Presidency of Religious Affairs (PRA) institutionalizing its official version, which is yet strongly recast by the permeation of Islamist movements.1
