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This article shows how everyday religious practices inform the processes of social identification, complicate presumed ethno-religious categories, and mediate local cultural differences in face of political and cultural hegemonic practices. In the context of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, a de facto state recognized only by Turkey, Turkish Cypriots and Turks are considered to share an ethnicity and religion. This "overlap" has been employed to justify Turkey's military intervention and its political, economic, and cultural domination over the island. Yet the cultural diversities and "perceived" differences between and among these groups are exacerbated by power dynamics, nationalist agendas, and mutual biases. The article explains subtle discussions around "genuine" Turkish and Muslim identities, as well as the enforced coexistence and constructed brotherhood of Cypriots and Turks on the island. The competing accounts of the "correct" interpretation of Islam at a Muslim tekke reflect intragroup power asymmetries and the conflict between institutionalized Sunni-Orthodox and "heterodox" local Islam. The article focuses on two overlooked issues in the scholarship on Northern Cyprus—the relations between Turkish Cypriots and settlers from Turkey, and the role of religion in the political processes—as well as on literature on shared sacred sites and an analysis of competitive intracommunal interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we show how judgments of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) have provided nationalists with an unexpected opportunity to promote a nationalist discourse that is seemingly in line with human rights while fundamentally at odds with the counter-majoritarian core of human rights. We start our analysis with two judgments in which the Court accepted the arguments of liberal democratic states to infringe fundamental rights of persons belonging to (immigrant) Muslim minorities in the name of "requirements of living together" or "social integration": SAS v France (2014) and Osmanoglu and Kocabas v Switzerland (2017). Strikingly, the justifications by the states for these infringements point to concerns about perceived threats to national identity and culture. We show how nationalist politicians in countries with minority populations, including those in East Central Europe, have used justifications in terms of national self-protection, tacitly or explicitly, to pursue old anti–human rights agendas. The case law discussed here enabled them to present these justifications as ECtHR proof, notwithstanding the underlying nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the Turkish Language Olympiads as a political-performative strategy that the Muslim nationalists used to communicate their ideology. I argue that to understand the rise of Muslim nationalism, we also need to understand how emotional appeal is created through spectacles like the Turkish Olympiads. The spectacle was effective in boosting people's sense of national pride and self-confidence by resolving two important tensions of Kemalist nationalism. First, it addressed the tension between Westernization and nationalization. Depicting an image of Turkish national culture that is appreciated and imitated by foreigners, it contested the imitative, Westernist character of Kemalist nationalism. Second, recasting the outside world as friendly to Turks, even Turkophile, it challenged Kemalist nationalism's emphasis on external threats. Turkish-speaking and -acting foreigners communicated a message of nationalist self-empowerment and confidence, calling into question people's sense of fear and distrust of the outside world. How Muslim nationalism was promoted, particularly the performative-symbolic strategies that were used, are important to understand because of their emotional resonance and potential for mass mobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]