The Music and Multiple Identities of Kurdish Alevis from Turkey in Germany

This dissertation investigates the experiences of Kurdish Alevis, currently living in Germany, who trace their background to locations within the boundaries of the Republic of Turkey. I argue that music has been a particularly important mode through which Kurdish Alevis in Germany have articulated collective histories and have fashioned narratives of belonging and multiple and sometimes contradictory identities. The subjects of my research are immigrants and refugees who are ethnically Kurdish and whose religion is Alevi, an Anatolian religion whose relations to both Sunni and Shi\u27a Islam are historically controversial. They speak Turkish along with Kurdish, in most cases are Turkish and German citizens living in and around Cologne, Germany, and have family members in Istanbul, Turkey. Kurdish Alevis struggled against being labeled with certain identities, such as Turkish and Muslim within the larger immigrant pool from Turkey. At the same time, many of them have striven for their collective identities, namely Kurdish and Alevi, primarily in the last two decades. Music has been an integral part of their efforts. I argue that, in the last two decades, a new transnational field has emerged for Kurdish Alevi immigrants and refugees in Germany and by extension in Turkey, opening spaces for realignment around various and fluctuating loyalties with respect to ethnic, political, and social modes of belonging. This work is an investigation of the music of this ethno-religious double minority group in their second and third homelands

Preaching to Social Media: Turkey’s Friday Khutbas and Their Effects on Twitter

The author analyzes through unsupervised machine learning the content of all Friday khutbas (sermons) read to millions of citizens in thousands of mosques in Turkey between 2015 and 2021. The author focuses on six nonreligious and recurrent topics that feature in the sermons, namely, business, family, nationalism, health, trust, and patience. The author demonstrates that the content of the sermons responds strongly to events of national and political importance. The author then links the Friday sermons with about 4.8 million tweets on these topics. The author finds generally strong associations between the topics of the sermons and of the subsequent tweets, controlling for the tweets posted before the sermons. There is also heterogeneity by topic. The link between sermons and tweets is strongest for nationalism, patience, and health and weakest for business. Overall, these results suggest that religious institutions in Turkey are influential in shaping the public’s social media content on salient issues. More generally, these results show that mass offline religious activity can have strong effects on online social media behavior

The impact of religious involvement on trust, volunteering, and perceived cooperativeness: evidence from two British panels

Does religious involvement make people more trusting and prosocial? Considering conflicting theories and mixed prior evidence, we subject this question to a stringent test using large-scale, representative data from the British Household Panel Survey (1991–2009, N ≈ 26,000) and the UK Household Longitudinal Study (2009–2021, N ≈ 80,000). We employ cross-lagged panel models with individual fixed effects to account for time-invariant confounders and reverse causality—two issues that have haunted earlier research. We find that frequency of religious service attendance on average has a positive impact on generalized trust, volunteering, and perceived cooperativeness. Other indicators of religious involvement have weaker effects. We also find variation across religious traditions: the effects of religious attendance are mostly positive for Anglicans and other Protestants, but weaker and mostly statistically insignificant for Catholics, Hindus, and the unaffiliated, and even negative for Muslims when the outcome is perceived cooperativeness. Our findings are robust to alternative model set-ups and hold up after accounting for neighbourhood religious composition, respondent and interviewer ethnicity, and other potential moderators and confounders. Altogether, our study shows that religious involvement can foster prosocial behaviours and attitudes, although in our study this effect is largely restricted to religious service attendance and majority religions

Commitment through Sacrifice: How longer Ramadan fasting strengthens religiosity and political Islam

Religions seem to defy the law-of-demand, which suggests that all else equal, an increase in the cost of an activity will induce individuals to decrease the resources they spend on that activity. Rather than weakening religious organizations, evidence shows that the sacrifices exacted by religious practices are positively associated with the success of those organizations. We present the first strong evidence that this association is neither spurious nor endogenous. We use a natural experiment that rests on a peculiar time-shifting feature of Ramadan that makes the fasting duration—our measure of sacrifice—vary not just by latitude but from year-to-year. We find that a half-hour increase in fasting time during the median Ramadan day increases the vote shares of Islamist political parties by 11 percent in Turkey’s parliamentary elections between 1973 and 2018, and results in one additional attendee per 1,000 inhabitants for voluntary Quran courses. We further investigate two mechanisms, screening and commitment, that could explain the effects we find. By testing their divergent implications, we infer that commitment is the mechanism triggered by sacrifice, which drives up the intensity of religious beliefs and participation that in turn bolster the success of religious organizations

The impact of partisanship and religiosity on conspiracy-theory beliefs in Turkey

Why do people believe in conspiracy theories? This paper responds to this ever-significant question by scrutinizing people's belief in conspiracy theories in Turkey. Building on Max Weber's theory of rationalization, it proposes that value-laden and instrumentally rational predispositions, namely religiosity and partisanship, predict people's beliefs in conspiracy theories. This current study tests this hypothesis by analyzing two nationwide surveys conducted during a period of significant changes in modern Turkish politics: January and July 2013. The findings confirm the hypothesis that people interpret conspiracy theories in line with their instrumental, rational interests and values

Call and Response: SEM President’s Roundtable 2016, “Ethnomusicological Responses to the Contemporary Dynamics of Migrants and Refugees”

The privilege of organizing the SEM President’s Roundtable in 2016 and 2017 provided an opportunity to call attention to a topic that has concerned my teaching and research since graduate school. For the first iteration of “Ethnomusicological Responses to the Contemporary Dynamics of Migrants and Refugees” I convened a panel of people whose perspectives I admire. I wanted to learn from them, and I did. As someone who has been involved with Middle Eastern and more specifically Arab music and culture within my own academic and regional community, I was making new efforts in the fall of 2016 toward engaged ethnomusicology in Virginia among my own newest neighbors, and organizing this SEM President’s Roundtable gave me courage and inspiration. Our “Call and Response” presents snapshots from five colleagues who are engaged with communities of migrants and refugees in Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and North America..

Religiosity and mental wellbeing among members of majority and minority religions: findings from Understanding Society, The UK Household Longitudinal Study

It is unclear if links between religiosity and mental health are found in contexts outside the US or are causal. We examined differences in mental wellbeing and associations between mental wellbeing and religiosity among the religiously unaffiliated, white and non-white Christians, Muslims of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and other ethnicities, and other minority ethnoreligious groups. We used four waves of Understanding Society, a UK longitudinal household panel (2009–2013, N=50922). We adjusted for potential confounders (including socioeconomic factors and personality) and for household fixed effects to account for household level unobserved confounding factors. Compared with those with no religious affiliation, Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims and members of other minority religions had worse wellbeing (as measured by Shortened Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (SWEMWBS) and General Health Questionnaire (GHQ)). Higher subjective importance of religion was associated with lower wellbeing according to GHQ; associations were not found with SWEMWBS. More frequent religious service attendance was associated with higher wellbeing; effect sizes were larger for those with religious affiliations. These associations were only partially attenuated by adjustment for potential confounding factors including household fixed effects. Religious service attendance and/or its secular alternatives may have a role in improving population-wide mental wellbeing