The sociology of Ramadan

Despite all the spontaneous processes of secularization and all the forced efforts at secularization in the modern period, religion in Turkey, in all its forms, beliefs and practices, continues to shape social life. The survival of religion in the face of the uncompromising effort, made especially during the Republican period, to cleanse political and social life of religion has been expressed through the power of resistance of certain institutions. The resistance of Ramazan, which goes beyond and transcends individual human actions, is a subject worth examining in its own right.

The secularists, in fact, never aimed at creating a secular society in the true sense of the word. On the contrary, they were putting forth an alternative religious practice in which secularism would operate like a religion, with its own beliefs, rituals, symbolism and prophets.

The Kaaba would belong to the Arab, Çankaya would be ours. What would be fundamental was not revelation descended from heaven, but the inspirations and guidance of a leadership whose source was human science. Anyone who pays attention can easily notice the religious tone in many people's declaration, "I am secular." The famous British anthropologist Ernest Gellner expresses this situation as follows: "In Turkey, an alternative secularist fundamentalism emerged against (so-called) Islamic fundamentalism." For all his critical stance, Gellner's own preference for Turkey would of course have been the latter.

In response to the alarm bells that some people are ringing these days about young people drifting from religiosity to atheism or deism, it is worth recalling under what kinds of pressure on belief our generations have in fact been raised for nearly a hundred years. Under a thoroughly fundamentalist secularist outlook, Turkey has produced no small number of atheists and deists. Despite the growing presence, after a certain point, of the Imam-Hatip schools, the religion classes in schools and civil Islamic educational activities, our formal education still runs a curriculum full of superstitions irreconcilable with Islamic beliefs and with historical and scientific facts.

People who have passed through this education must first clear their minds of a host of superstitions, and of the paradigm that produces those superstitions, in order to think soundly, which, if not impossible, is a very difficult task.

One factor that eases the task is that this religion has a deep-rooted presence that cannot easily be pulled out of minds. Its presence in minds is largely ensured by its practices, which have become a culture that cannot be given up: the prayer, the Friday prayer, zakat, the call to prayer, and of course Ramazan and all the practices that come with it. Independently of the participation of individual persons, these perform their sociological function as habitus that build patterns of thought and behavior in society.

From time to time there are declines and rises in participation in these practices. Clearly, during periods of strict secularization policies there were declines, but there was no disappearance.

Determining these levels of participation through sociological field research has always been of interest.

In fact, the sociological study titled "Belief and Religiosity in Turkey in Numbers," carried out today by Dr. Zübeyir Nişancı with a project team consisting of Dr. Önder Küçükural, Muhammed H. Alboğa, Hatice Nuriler, Hatice Kübra Baktemur and Yusuf Akbulut, offers precisely a picture in which we can see the current effect of these resisting habitus.

We saw a similar picture last year in the research published by KONDA titled "TR100_2022 If Turkey Were 100 People." That picture also revealed the change over a ten-year period by comparing the results of two separate studies conducted in 2011 and 2021. At first glance there is a continuity between that study and the one prepared by Nişancı under Mahya Publications. Indeed, when combined with KONDA's data, it gives us more room to repeat what we said on that occasion: when these data are combined, there is more ground for concluding that truly no change has occurred. Indeed, in the same research the number of atheists and the number of those who describe themselves as believers appear to have increased by the same amount. Those who perform the prayer regularly rose from 42 percent in 2008 to 44 percent in 2021, but at the same time the number of those who never prayed had risen from 17 percent to 24 percent.

In Nişancı's research, the proportion of those who pray regularly is 39 percent, rising to 59 percent together with those who pray occasionally, while the total proportion of those who rarely pray and those who never pray was found to be 41 percent. Does the small difference visible against KONDA's research point to a trend? It cannot be known.

Women again pray more than men, by a margin of two percent, while among young people under 25 the frequency of prayer is markedly lower, in the twenties percent.

A sociology of Ramazan undoubtedly includes the frequency of prayer as well. There is no doubt that these rates rise in Ramazan, but the research has no record of this.

As for fasting, according to the research 75 percent of participants stated that they fast "often" or "always" in the month of Ramazan. By contrast, the proportion of participants who stated that they "never" fast or fast "rarely" is 16 percent. Nine percent said they fast "occasionally" in the month of Ramazan.

On fasting too, women, as with prayer, show a difference of three percent over men. Women say 77 percent "often" or "always" fast, while among men this proportion is seen to be 74 percent.

According to the research, age groups do not show a serious difference in fasting rates. The very slight difference that exists is in favor of the young. That is, young people, who pray less than the elderly, fast more than the elderly. The research attributes this to illnesses that emerge at certain ages and prevent fasting, but the Ramazan element stands out through its function of keeping young people's ties with religion working.

The research reveals a significant inverse proportion between rising education level and frequency of fasting. The finding that those with master's degrees are the ones who fast least among the whole population: will it be explained by the content of education, by rising levels of prosperity, or by other characteristics of this stratum? This perhaps goes beyond the limits of a study that merely lays out the data. The functions of education need to be considered separately.

According to the research, regional differences in fasting rates also show a situation parallel to the conventional wisdom in society. Again, a significant increase in fasting frequency is noticeable as one goes from West to East. But even in Western Anatolia, where it is lowest, the rates of "always" and "often" fasting do not fall below fifty percent.

Every piece of research done with good data collected according to the rules offers a photograph of a moment and a cross-section of society. By its nature, social reality is not locked into the frame and the moment of the photograph; it flows on.

The existing photographs give a quite meaningful image through which we can better understand the Ramazan we are in, its resistance and its sociological function.