The Directorate of Religious Affairs, Professionalization of Female Religious Authority, and the Politics of Gender and the Family in Turkey -- The Oxford Handbook of Religion in Turkey

Abstract Under Turkey’s conservative AKP government, the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) began to deploy state-employed preachers and other religious functionaries to provide Sunni Muslim citizens with religious advice and guidance on matters of marriage, parenting, and family life. While also serving Muslim men, the Diyanet’s Family and Religious Guidance Bureaus was an integral part of an initiative to serve the religious needs of women through female religious authorities who were previously sidelined by this state institution. Within the last two decades since these Islamic family offices were initiated, the Diyanet has hired an ever-increasing number of female preachers and other religious functionaries, as well as placed women in prestigious positions within its institutional hierarchy. While challenging the historical dominance of male religious authorities, women working for the Diyanet’s Family Bureaus often end up performing a balancing act between their religious authority, bureaucratic positions, and wishes to advocate for women’s rights within the confines of Sunni-Islamic jurisprudence and patriarchal Turkish society.