“Fraternal” Other: Negotiating Ethnic and Religious Identities at a Muslim Sacred Site in Northern Cyprus

Abstract

This article shows how everyday religious practices inform the processes of social identification, complicate presumed ethno-religious categories, and mediate local cultural differences in face of political and cultural hegemonic practices. In the context of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, a de facto state recognized only by Turkey, Turkish Cypriots and Turks are considered to share an ethnicity and religion. This “overlap” has been employed to justify Turkey’s military intervention and its political, economic, and cultural domination over the island. Yet the cultural diversities and “perceived” differences between and among these groups are exacerbated by power dynamics, nationalist agendas, and mutual biases. The article explains subtle discussions around “genuine” Turkish and Muslim identities, as well as the enforced coexistence and constructed brotherhood of Cypriots and Turks on the island. The competing accounts of the “correct” interpretation of Islam at a Muslim tekke reflect intragroup power asymmetries and the conflict between institutionalized Sunni-Orthodox and “heterodox” local Islam. The article focuses on two overlooked issues in the scholarship on Northern Cyprus—the relations between Turkish Cypriots and settlers from Turkey, and the role of religion in the political processes—as well as on literature on shared sacred sites and an analysis of competitive intracommunal interactions.

Hyphenated Identities: Voices from the Watchtower During the Cypriot Civil War

“…By way of illustration, in the 1946 Census of the British colonial administration of Cyprus, one can observe an ethno-religious dichotomy between “Greek Orthodox” and “Moslem Turkish” citizens (Figure 2), whereas by 1960, when the Republic of Cyprus was granted its independence (Dodd 2010), the dichotomy was enacted in ethno-racial terms, differentiating between “Greeks” and “Turks” (Figure 3). In effect, this shift in census-based categorizations indicates how religion was substituted as a source of identification with an ethno-national and socially constructed (Şahin 2011) perception of Greece and Turkey as the motherlands of individuals who, during the Ottoman era, respectively clung to their Orthodox and Muslim identities (Harmanşah 2021, 4).

Figure 2. Ethno-religious distinction between “Greek Orthodox” and “Moslem Turkish” citizens Source: Census of Population and Agriculture 1946 , by British Government of Cyprus, 1949,

Figure 3. Ethno-racial distinction between “Greeks” and “Turks” Source: Census of Population and Agriculture 1960 , by Republic of Cyprus, 1960,

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