The study "revealed" that under the Justice and Development Party (AK Party), Anatolian cities have become less tolerant towards the secular lifestyle and that many secular people felt obliged to pretend to be "religious" in order to secure jobs in public offices or bids in public tenders. Going on a pilgrimage, the study says, is a common method of pseudo-religiosity adopted by the secularists. The study was criticized by the "there is no peer pressure" camp on the grounds that it was supported by Soros' OSI [Jewish conspiracy claim] that the interviews for the study were conducted by three academically inept journalists [methodological deficiency claim], that the results were intentionally misrepresented by the head of the study, Professor Binnaz Toprak, who is well known for her anti-religious position [academic bias claim -- that is their claim, not mine] and that there is a deliberately created mismatch between the findings and the results derived from them [internal inconsistency claim].
The weakness of the study is also the weakness of the critiques: This was not a study on the actual situation in Anatolian cities; this was a study on the "contextual perceptions of the secularist circles in Anatolia." The questions were asked, intentionally, to the secularist-minded opponents of the AK Party, and the study aimed to depict the change in their perceptions about life. The results, though, were interpreted by the media as if they depicted the actual reality. Academics conducted studies in the past on religious subjects and revealed that religiously observant people felt ignored, denigrated, oppressed and discriminated against. Nobody jumped to the conclusion that this was the actual case in the country.
This is a reflection of the identity search Turkey is going through: As the country has been going through an immense change for the last 100 years, none of the identities feel secure and established. Unsettled identities feel insecure, and they apply a selective perception mechanism to detect threats to their existence.
I remember the days I was a student at Bosporus University's political science and international relations department, where Toprak was teaching then. I felt insecure about my mustache and had to shave it so as not to feel "detected" as a "religious, backward Anatolian villager." We had, of course, inherited an accumulation of stories about the bad fate of the "mustached" and added to them new ones from our own experience.
I am looking back now, and I know for sure that much of these stories were selective readings of the actual reality. I don't claim that there was no discrimination, but I claim that had Toprak and her three journalist friends interviewed us at that time, what they would hear from us wouldn't be any different from what they heard from their "insecure subjects."
Let me be more frank. While shaving our mustaches, we were not afraid of being "detected"; we were actually happy about not being "detected." The fact that shaving our mustaches off made us "invisible" satisfied us more than the religious-traditional satisfaction an Anatolian mustache would give us. In short, we wanted "them" to discriminate against "us," and "we" were happily "cheating" them.
Toprak said in a recent TV interview that she was very astonished about the findings of the study. I was very astonished to hear that comment. Listening to the kind of subjects her friends interviewed, I was 100 percent sure that the results would be even worse than what Toprak found. These people, in the end, were the people who had been afraid that if the AK Party came to power, Turkey would turn into an Islamic republic like Iran. They claimed in 2002 that in time the AK Party would force secularist girls to veil themselves. The result of the "Peer Pressure Study" is, in my reading, that most of the fears of this particular secularist group were unfounded.
That is not to claim that there is no peer pressure in Turkey. Peer pressure -- as the creator of the term, Professor Şerif Mardin, explains -- is an indispensable and inescapable mechanism society uses to "make" its members. Through peer pressure society creates the norms of normalcy. The claim that there is peer pressure on the secular segments of society is peer pressure on the religious segments of the same society. Thus we "become" what we are.
