Charting the “Geography of the Heart”: The Diyanet’s Civilizational Vision and Its European Frontiers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent scholarship has studied the extensive transformation of Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) over the past two decades as embodying a form of religious populism that mobilizes civilizational antagonisms. Based on a directed qualitative content analysis of Friday sermons, official publications, online material, broadcasts, and public statements by Diyanet leaders, this article makes three contributions. First, while confirming that the Diyanet promotes the civilizational unity of the ummah and casts Turkey as the spiritual custodian of a transhistorical Islamic world, the analysis shows that anti-elitist framings characteristic of populism are barely present in its rhetoric. Second, the article provides a detailed examination of gönül coğrafyası (geography of the heart), a widely invoked yet understudied concept through which the Diyanet reimagines Ottoman-Islamic heritage as a sacred topography of civilizational belonging and responsibility. Third, it examines how Europe is situated both outside and within this imagined geography: at once a constitutive and menacing “other” marked by Islamophobia and cultural decay yet also a moral frontier inhabited by Muslim diasporas through whom Turkish Islam extends its reach. By drawing such symbolic boundaries, the Diyanet frames Islam as both religious patrimony and ethical alternative to Western modernity, portraying itself as a key actor in the re-sacralization of modern life across borders.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".