Abstract
This chapter discusses The Imam’s take on the compatibility of Islam and modernity. It polarizes pure belief (authentic religion) and traditional Islam by contrasting a modern and a traditional cleric. It discusses how the dichotomy of the traditional and the modern plays out in the film and the paradoxes of Islamism as a modern political ideology. Drawing on Derrida, it analyses the parallax relationship between moderate and radical Islams and discusses the former as a ‘globalatinized phenomenon’, in Derrida’s terminology.
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Notes
- 1.
Director: İsmail Güneş, Production: 2005, Release: 2005, Festival Screenings: None.
- 2.
Mustafa Cihat is a Turkish singer whose life trajectory somewhat parallels that of the film’s protagonist. Like Emre, he graduated from a vocational religious school but then chose a very different career path, in his case by forming a rock band.
- 3.
Following the 1980 coup, the new constitution introduced a ban on civil servants wearing a veil in state institutions. It was enforced among various occupational groups, including teachers, doctors who worked in public hospitals, lawyers and judges, but was lifted in 2013 by the Justice and Development Party.
- 4.
Trees are endowed with symbolic meaning in a number of ancient myths and religions (e.g. Turkic myths, Hinduism and Judaism). The concept of wishing trees can be traced back to shamanistic cultural traditions.
- 5.
The word ‘eren’, which is unique to Sufism, translates as ‘friend of God’.
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Thwaites Diken, E. (2018). The Imam (The İmam). In: The Spectacle of Politics and Religion in the Contemporary Turkish Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71700-5_6
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