The Relationship Between Religion and Politics in Contemporary Turkish Novel: The Case of 'Kar' Novel

Abstract

This article focuses on the relationship between religion and politics in contemporary Turkish novel, based on Orhan Pamuk's novel Kar. The study aims to understand and explain paradigms of religion-politics relations in Kar, which approaches Turkey's recent religious and political debates with a literary fiction, and reflects how religious and political cultures are reflected in Turkey in this frame. In the novel, a new development momentum after 1980, and with the right, conservative and Islamist circles that motivated politics more actively during the 1990s, the modernization that has not undergone in Turkey in a way, in fact, within the framework of the approach of the writer, the values of provincial representatives in Turkey conflicts have been brought forward. In a post-modern perspective, the Kar shared important photographs of religion and politics at this stage of the modernization struggle between Islamist-secular, Eastern-Western conflicts. Finally, religion in the novel was dominated ideologically by the instrumentalist of poverty and deprivation, rather than the character of preventing change according to its place. Politics is described as more Jacobean and secular, and also as provincial in relation to modernization there.