Charting the “Geography of the Heart”: The Diyanet’s Civilizational Vision and Its European Frontiers

Recent scholarship has studied the extensive transformation of Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) over the past two decades as embodying a form of religious populism that mobilizes civilizational antagonisms. Based on a directed qualitative content analysis of Friday sermons, official publications, online material, broadcasts, and public statements by Diyanet leaders, this article makes three contributions. First, while confirming that the Diyanet promotes the civilizational unity of the ummah and casts Turkey as the spiritual custodian of a transhistorical Islamic world, the analysis shows that anti-elitist framings characteristic of populism are barely present in its rhetoric. Second, the article provides a detailed examination of gönül coğrafyası (geography of the heart), a widely invoked yet understudied concept through which the Diyanet reimagines Ottoman-Islamic heritage as a sacred topography of civilizational belonging and responsibility. Third, it examines how Europe is situated both outside and within this imagined geography: at once a constitutive and menacing “other” marked by Islamophobia and cultural decay yet also a moral frontier inhabited by Muslim diasporas through whom Turkish Islam extends its reach. By drawing such symbolic boundaries, the Diyanet frames Islam as both religious patrimony and ethical alternative to Western modernity, portraying itself as a key actor in the re-sacralization of modern life across borders.