"This study thus highlights an interesting case of nationalist appropriation and delineation of cultural heritage. The secularist project of separating religious elements from this cultural heritage was accomplished by shifting the focus of certain symbols from religious to cultural. The saints have thus continued to be relevant to society, but in new forms. The analysis of how these forms change, then, indicates much about changes in the communities in which they are remembered."
"By comparing pre-modern hagiographic and scholarly representations made of these saints with twentieth-century monographs, literary works, artistic media and commemorative ceremonies which portray their lives, and assessing the changes in light of historical trends, this study shows how the saints have come to be transformed into Turkish humanist mystics, and how this has led to debates about their character and relevance."
"The memories of medieval Sufi saints had an important influence on Turkish society and culture during the Ottoman Empire, but when the empire came to its demise in the early twentieth century and its central lands were taken over by the modernist, nationalist, secularist Republic of Turkey, the new secularist project involved closing down all of the Sufi orders, with the rationale that they were backward, superstitious and anti-modern. Yet the saints in whose names these orders had been founded were important elements in whatever cultural heritage the Turkish nation was to look back upon, so new forms arose in which the saints could be conceived. Nationalist writers began to focus on the Turkish ethnicity of these saints, and also--in the case of certain saints like Mevlana Jalal al-Din Rumi, Haji Bektash Veli and Yunus Emre--on certain universalist themes found in their poetry, discourse and legends, such as love, peace, brotherhood and tolerance between religious communities. These saints have now come to be considered the great Turkish humanists, and this interpretation has fit the nationalist ideal of constructing a Turkish cultural heritage with universal relevance so well that it has become the dominant way of representing these saints, and one promoted by state institutions like the Ministry of Culture."
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