Mediatization Periods of Muslim Women's Discourse in Türkiye: From Print-Based Struggle to Digital Pedagogy

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Sarı H.

Bozok Üniversitesi İlahiyat Fakültesi Dergisi, sa.30, ss.82-99, 2026 (TRDizin)

Özet

This study examines how the public visibility and religious expression of Muslim women’s discourse production in Türkiye have been transformed through the proliferation of social media platforms, tracing this transformation across three distinct mediatization periods through a periodical-processual reading. The central research question concerns which structural axes have shaped the transformation of Muslim women’s religious-cultural guidance discourse in the digital age, and through which mediatization periods this transformation can be interpreted. In this context, three mediatization periods are identified: the Period of Print-Based Struggle, the Period of Professional-Literary Authorship, and the Period of Digital Pedagogy. Each period is coded along axes specific to its era -media repertoire, forms of institutional constraint, compensatory processes, bases of authority, target audience, and discursive register- and is also rendered concrete through a symbolic figure representative of its time. The study’s theoretical framework draws on José Casanova’s deprivatization of religion, Heidi Campbell’s digital religion, Habermas and Fraser on the public sphere and counter-publics, Goffman’s dramaturgy, and Hervieu-Léger’s chain of memory. The scope of the study is limited to forms of religious-cultural guidance; other typologies, such as political thought leadership, institutional female preaching, and spiritual entrepreneurship, have been excluded from the study. Confined to the typology of religious-cultural guidance, the findings point to four core patterns. First, institutional constraint has changed form across periods, tracing a trajectory from prosecution and conviction to the suppression of professional practice rights, to the suspension of educational rights, and finally shifting from state-enforced legal prohibitions toward fluid market- and algorithm-driven forms of discipline. Second, religious authority has been reconstructed not from within traditional Islamic hierarchies but through a hybrid legitimacy that combines classical Islamic formation with modern professional expertise. Third, Muslim women’s discourse production in the digital periods has operated within a visibility repertoire that remains circumscribed by gendered roles such as motherhood and pedagogical guidance. Fourth, the discursive register has shifted from the legal-political language of the print-based periods toward the cultural-pedagogical idiom of the digital periods. The study argues that as Muslim women’s public voice frees itself from classical constraints, it encounters a multilayered structure in which more fluid disciplinary mechanisms -algorithmic visibility, audience expectation, and market rationality- are beginning to take hold.