Women’s interpretations of fetva: Guiding daily life and governing the private through Alo fetva

Abstract

This study analyses women’s practice of delivering fetva in the Alo Fetva telephone line serviced by the Directorate of Religious Affairs. It is based on an ethnographic research conducted in the room where female preachers (vaizes) and religious experts respond to fetva seekers’ questions. Focusing both on fetva narratives and the subjects who deliver them, the study addresses fetvas given by the Directorate’s women civil servants both as an ethical practice that proposes what is “good” and “right” and as a “governmental technique” by which sovereign power enters people’s homes and intervenes in their private lives. The responses to the questions about daily life and family problems constitute the backbone of the study. The thesis lays out how religious discourse is constituted and how ethical, political and religious matters get intertwined in a traditional practice performed in a secular institution. The study focuses on the vaizes, their pedagogies, motivations, emotions and the way they perceive and make sense of the work they do. Discussing their position as mediators between the Directorate and people, the study shows the sources of vaizes’ authority and the ways they reason in the space of interpretation allotted to them. It argues that in that space of interpretation, vaizes strive to protect the rights of the women who seek fetvas and assume and pursue Diyanet’s and, by extension, the government’s discourse on women and the family. The thesis maintains that the work performed by vaizes cannot be reduced to one mode of operation or the other.