This chapter analyses the Diyanet’s Friday sermons delivered in the last two decades between January 2001 and July 2020. Attending Friday prayers is obligatory for Muslim adult males and, according to surveys, about 60 per cent of males attend Friday prayers. The state has always seen this as an adult education and indoctrination tool to propagate its religious doxa, the Diyanet Islam. To trace the change in the content and perspective of the sermons from pre-AKP times to the AKP 3.0 period, and also to investigate the worldview that is disseminated through these sermons, I have looked at topics and themes on ‘Love of Homeland’, ‘Turkish Nationalism, National Unity and Solidarity’, ‘Reconstructing History: From Nationalism to Islamist Populism’, ‘Disappearance of Atatürk’s Personality Cult’, ‘Conspiracies, Victimhood, and the Crusader West’, ‘Militarism and Sacrificing Life for Allah, Islam and Ummah’, andthe ‘Turkish Army’s Jihad’, Each of these are analysed in a separate section in this chapter. Each section starts with the last decade of Diyanet 1.0 (2001–2010); it then moves on to the Diyanet 2.0 period (2010–2020). The analysis shows that Diyanet Islam has significantly moved towards an Islamist, populist, Ottomanist with a restorative nostalgia and more intense resentment, ummatist, anti-Westernist, jihadist, conspiratorialist, and more militarist direction.

The chapter presents the vaizeler’s engagement in inviting women to participate in the mosque’s public realm. This invitation (davet in Turkish) consists of a call of the vaizeler that dates back to the origins of Islam, a period reported as a “golden age” for women’s participation within the religious community. The Diyanet’s projects sought to invite women to mosques and to forge a “new religious woman” who is representing these old, traditional models in a modern way. In everyday life, inviting women to mosques requires the vaize to be aware of the communities’ heterogeneous attendance. Their sessions are places in which women share concerns with both the group and the preachers. Far from any wishful thinking about women’s resistance, victimization, or fears of “false consciousness,” the engagement of women in the Diyanet’s sessions embodies the concept of a “good Muslim woman” behaving piously in everyday life.

The chapter presents the religious guidance and moral support (irşad in Turkish) that the Diyanet preachers provide to women and families. In line with a redefinition of religious services as a pastoral care designed to enlighten the believer on any aspects of life, the irşad’s activities have been deeply reshaped. This has occurred through old and new institutions that have been put in place. The chapter refers to the fatwa services provided in local mufti offices, as a phone service and via online platform, and to the Family Guidance and Consultation Bureaus established in 2002 with the aim to provide religious counseling to women and families. It also emphasizes how religious officers’ activities are conducted outside the mosques, in prisons, hospitals, orphanages, and women’s shelters. The expansion of the Diyanet’s moral mission is thus characterized by a pervasive moral support that goes beyond the mosques to penetrate and reshape the spaces of the secular.

In Chapter 4, attention is paid to the professionalization of female preaching. This phenomenon is regulated by national competitions, standardized, and thus challenges the traditional female preachers belonging to religious communities. Women preachers (vaizeler) working for the Diyanet define themselves as theologians engaged in enlightening women about “true” religion (doğru din), far from any superstition and false beliefs. While performing their everyday activities, the vaizeler combine their role of civil servant withe one of religious scholar. Their “academic” interpretation of Islam is based on basic principles and thus easily shared by a larger audience, avoiding sectarian belonging. The feminization of the Diyanet through the emergence of a pious female bureaucrat working alongside male colleagues laid the groundwork for a blossoming of projects and publications directed at women and families.

The concluding section relates the questions and hypotheses advanced throughout the entire study to the fieldwork. It states that all the hypotheses advanced, each in its own way, contribute to explain the Diyanet’s decision to support its own feminization. In the early 2000s, a state amnesty allowed the reinstatement of those women who had been excluded from public sectors because of the head scarf ban. However, such a reconfiguration of the political opportunities structure led to a broader effect: the emergence of a pious female bureaucrat who calls into question the role of devout Muslim women within both religious circles and Turkish society. The general conclusion is that the vaize institution testifies to an accomplished reinstatement of a generation of women within the state bureaucracy. Moreover, the emergence of a pious female bureaucrat redefines the boundaries of the Turkish state vis-à-vis religion.

In this chapter, the debates over secularism, laicism, and secularization are presented. The oppositional ideas of an “official” and an “unofficial” religion, which date back to the Ottoman Empire, are pointed out in relationship to Turkish secularism (laiklik). In its assertive nature, the latter is not a static concept; it evolved from a state “mission” associated with modernization and westernization of society to an “instrument” by which the state could make use of religion as cement to promote national unity. Within this changing environment, the Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), a state institution charged with religious affairs, evolved as well. In the last forty years, its bureaucratic structure of an agency in charge of the management of mosques and the employment of religious officers has been reshaped as the bearer of a modern interpretation of Islam. The chapter provides a concluding section devoted to the crucial role that the Diyanet has played over the past decade.

The chapter investigates how assertive laicism made women one of the battlefields in the conflict between religion and the state. However, to depict them as passive recipients of a conflict does not paint the whole picture. The increase in female schooling during the 1960s induced many conservative families to let their daughters study in religious vocational schools (Imam-Hatip). In 1976, the Imam-Hatip opened classes for female students and de facto accelerated a process of feminization of religious education. Many of these female students enrolled in the faculties of theology at universities, where the head scarf ban was introduced in the 1980s. The relationship between female religious education and the reinforcement of the head scarf ban is here carefully examined. Many of these “pious and educated” Muslim women joined Islamist movements and parties claiming the right of education and work. They experienced the reinstatement of the head scarf ban in universities and its reinforcement after the February 28, 1997, coup. Since the AKP’s rise to power in 2002 and the appointment of Ali Bardakoğlu as the Diyanet president in 2003, new political opportunities fostered the decision to include women within the Diyanet’s state bureaucracy.

In this chapter the actors and factors contributing to the Diyanet’s gender policy in the 2000s are presented. What emerges are figures of pious female bureaucrats connecting the state with the religious realm, which bears witness to an accomplished reintegration within the state bureaucracy of a generation of women who voiced their exclusion from the public sphere. Moreover, the ethnographic fieldwork casts light on three main aspects of vaizeler’s activities: the nature of vaizeler’s invitation (that is, how the preachers reach women and invite them to participate in the religious public realm); the way the vaizeler promote both a conscious believing and a daily performance of religious practices; and how the religious guidance and moral support of women and families contribute to enlarge the notion of religious services. Diyanet’s policies toward women, and in particular the feminization of religious services, are the lens through which the intertwined relationships between women, religion, and the state in Turkey are reassessed.

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.