There is a road from neighbourhood pressure to Islamophobia

The concept of neighborhood pressure has become a typical cliché of ordinary scientific activity. Those who know will know that the famous historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, the inventor of the concept of "paradigm", points to the concept of "ordinary science" (or "normal science") as a process that turns science into a vicious circle, continually confirming itself and approving its own illusions.

Ordinary scientific activity is carried out to confirm existing theories in the light of previously adopted concepts. Besides the concepts and theories, all the questions that will be asked of nature or of the object of science are also placed before us in advance. Meanwhile there is another "subject of science" working in the background of the scientist's mind. I do not agree with those who claim that this subject is a dark center, a focus of conspiracy. For the scientist to produce this illusion, it is not necessary for him to have received an assignment or financial support from somewhere (for instance from Soros, EU funds, here and there). It suffices that he remains within ordinary science. As one puts the chosen questions to the chosen object, the view of a chosen theory is continually reproduced.

Still, one must acknowledge and appreciate that the science developing around the concept of "neighborhood pressure" has become "ordinary" very quickly. There is nothing surprising in this, for several reasons. The first is that the concept was uttered by the foremost name of Turkish sociology, Prof. Şerif Mardin. Although Mardin voiced his concern and warning about the political abuse of this concept, he did not refrain from lending support to this abuse by remaining silent for a long time. The second is the fact that there stands ready a broad political mass eagerly awaiting the again previously chosen answer to this question put to science. Yes, the question is the guide to the answer, and the neighborhood pressure question, from the moment it is asked, duly performs the expected guiding service toward the desired place.

What has been said up to here concerns the ordinary or normal process of science. But at the point where science and politics are intertwined, one more function of the concept of neighborhood pressure, not limited to the history of science, stands out. That is the feeling of Islamophobia it gives rise to. All the stories told to prove neighborhood pressure increasingly pump up the fear of Islamization. The sum of the stories compiled about those who apply pressure is becoming the mythical foundations of the ideology of Islamophobia.

The picture drawn by the data presented through the mouths of the 401 persons interviewed in the research titled "Being Different in Turkey: The Othered along the Axis of Religion and Conservatism", directed by Prof. Binnaz Toprak, is, first and foremost, plainly a picture of "othered conservatives". In this picture an attempt was made to show "secularists pressured by conservatives", but what is seen at first glance has been only "conservatives who are vilified, feared and hated by secularists".

Of course it is not necessary to treat as "lies" the accounts presented by the research subjects as "lived events". The possibility that some people are truly experiencing or feeling certain pressures can never be ignored, and what is necessary must certainly be done. But a social scientist, especially in such fields of tension, let alone fields where open hatred and fear have come into play, need not believe everything one side says about the other. Moreover, the social world is one in which the saying "The sheikh does not fly, but his disciples make him fly" holds. That people become "witnesses to events that never happened or could never happen" under the influence of excessively aroused fears, admirations or various other feelings is in fact a far more widespread, ordinary human condition than supposed. It is the very way the mechanism of ideology works. Ideology rests on one side on collective illusions and on the other on legends that are "felt as if lived". It is easy for the first source of testimony for many narratives to turn out to be "a blind fisherman".

Look, as a close and current example, does not each of those who have chosen a side regarding whatever happened in 1915 tell everything as though it had happened to themselves?

How much the sum of the accounts in the research about "the solidarity of rising conservative capital or groups" resembles what was told about Jewish capital or the community solidarity of Jews in pre-war Germany!

From these stories about Jews, spread by word of mouth and all felt and conveyed as "lived events", a monstrous "Jewish peril", an ideology of anti-Semitism and Hitler's Nazism had emerged.

Let us set aside some concrete cases that may really have happened, but the great majority of the examples rest on an approach that sees even the mere existence of Islamist capital or communities as a pressure on themselves. In these examples the only thing conservatives can do so as not to make others feel pressure is to vanish from sight altogether.

This is the point they are trying to bring matters to. Yet those who continue to be excluded, humiliated and treated as a lower class by the headscarf ban and the coefficient practice that are still in force, officially and in practice, are not the neighborhood's "others" but its "this-siders".