6 - Achieving Public Piety through the Vaizeler’s Sessions

Summary

The chapter focuses on the vaizeler’s daily predication either as sermons or religious seminars. The Diyanet regularly provides preachers with suggestions about the sermons' content and structure. However, during the religious sessions, they are often confronted with women’s personal concerns so that their preaching resembles more dialogues with the communities than monologues. Vaizeler’s predications consist in enlightening women about religious knowledge and encouraging them to perform religious practices (ibadet in Turkish) in their everyday lives. To this end, preachers warn women to refuse secularism in all its forms and to perform a conscious piety, whose strength lies in being completely plunged into modernity. Piety and religious agency largely emerge from the vaizeler’s sessions, in which a new religious identity for Muslim women is divulgated. Women not only are engaged in learning about religious knowledge and practices but also in finding the group’s and the preacher’s support in dealing with personal and family problems.