Efforts to theorize pluralism have often explored the challenges posed by the public visibility of ethnic, linguistic, and sectarian differences to modernist imaginaries of a homogeneous national body. In this essay, I examine a context in which public expressions of communal differences re-inscribe the categories of the nation they were meant to contest. The situation reveals what I call a paradox of pluralism.

In much of the Muslim world, secularization has proceeded through the modernizing mechanisms of the region's various states. By contrast, social movements committed to the (re)introduction of religion into public and political life have frequently functioned through appeals to the popular will. Recent political events in Turkey present a dramatic contrast to this historically established antagonism between secularization and populist politics. In the spring of 2007 a series of mass demonstrations, rallied in the name of secularism and against the elected Islamist regime, were conducted in several of Turkey's major urban centers. The figure of the secularist crowd provides an image of secularism grounded not in the coercive apparatuses of the military and the modernizing bureaucracy but in an assertion of populism. This article explores the tentative formation of a secular populism. I argue that this particular conjuncture not only displays the persistent contradictions that subtend the relationship between secularism and populist politics but also reveals the tensions that sustain the field of democratic politics in Turkey.

The category of minority has been constitutive of the concept of the people in Turkey, distilling those who do not belong to the history and destiny of the nation from those who do. Minority, in this sense, is not simply a demographic classification, nor merely a matter of legal recognition. It carries the weight of a historical judgment, which scaffolds political community by delineating which populations, languages, and religions remain beyond the framework of collective obligation and responsibility. This essay examines comments delivered by a pro‐Kurdish political party and a largely Kurdish mothers‐of‐the‐disappeared group during Turkey's Gezi Park protests of 2013. These moments of public address participated in the broader spirit of state critique on display during those demonstrations. They were noteworthy, however, for recasting the Gezi events as a late occurrence in a longer history of state violence, prefigured by a century of dispossession experienced by those who have been classed as minorities or threatened with that designation. The essay asks how these invocations of history enabled interventions into imagined futures. The commentaries were not primarily aimed at repudiating the historical judgment of minority as discriminatory or contrary to law, but instead sought to delocalize the judgment vested in the category of minority, to see in that judgment an increasingly generalized economy of state violence, and to view it as prefiguring a political community to come.

Many Alevis in Turkey today view their community's traditions of ritual weeping as anachronistic in the modern world. In this article, I situate such sensibilities within a political context in which Turkish state agencies have vigorously regulated norms of public affect. I describe the efforts of one Alevi group to counter such sensibilities by cultivating a susceptibility to affective excitation in line with Shi‘i traditions of lamentation. The group's practices are exemplary of many Islamic revival movements, which aim simultaneously to spread a religious message and to transform the affective conditions in which that message might be received.

This essay examines the politics of reflexive discourse in the contemporary Muslim world, interrogating the social, affective, and material mediation of its expression. I focus on Turkey's Alevi community, for whom the encounter with modern reflexive media has proved deeply ambivalent. If available genres of public reflexive discourse enable Alevi participation in national public debate, such discursive media also sustain a disciplinary impetus, in which certain genres of argument and forms of subjectivity are valued as critical in contrast to others that are deemed to be insufficiently detached or excessively impassioned. The boundary between the critical and the uncritical, I argue, represents an ideological partition, a condition of social intelligibility, and an institutionally enforced limit to viable subjectivity. Interrogating this partitioning, I thematize a particular understanding of the politics of reflexive discourse, in which existing institutional architectures motivate the production of certain kinds of reflexive subjects at the expense of others, by disciplining affective potentials, moral sensibilities, and modes of historical consciousness. Résumé Le présent essai étudie la politique du discours réflexif dans le monde musulman contemporain, en interrogeant la médiation sociale, affective et matérielle de son expression. Il se concentre sur la communauté alévie de Turquie, dont la rencontre avec les médias réflexifs modernes s'avère profondément ambivalente. Bien que les genres de discours réflexif public disponibles permettent aux Alévis de participer au débat public national, ils sont aussi porteurs d'une dynamique disciplinaire en cela que certains genres d'arguments et certaines formes de subjectivités seraient préférables car estimés critiques là ou d'autres sont jugés trop peu détachés ou excessivement passionnées. La limite entre critique et non critique représente, selon l'auteur, une ligne de partage idéologique, une condition d'intelligibilité sociale et une limite imposée par les institutions à une subjectivité viable. En interrogeant ce cloisonnement, l'auteur explore une compréhension particulière de la politique du discours réflexif dans laquelle les architectures institutionnelles existantes motivent la production de certains types de sujets réflectifs au détriment des autres, en disciplinant les potentiels affectifs, les sensibilités morales et les modes de conscience historique.