Lovers of the Rose: Islamic Affect and the Politics of Commemoration in Turkish Museal Display

This chapter explores Turkish museal display as an arena for memory-cultural Islamisation, extending beyond the walls of museums. It probes museums as spaces for exhibiting nationalism, and the burgeoning interest in religion and affect within a new museology. It discusses how Turkish expositions have appropriated aspects of such a new museology in restorative-commemorative expositions of the Ottoman past, under the auspices of the AKP government. The establishment and re-organisation of museums has co-occurred with (and extended into) a performative ritualisation of public space and education. The Ottoman-Islamic past hence is re-constructed, re-imagined, and re-spatialised, not only as a national-cultural heritage, but as ethics of citizenship. Such tendencies are developed in an analysis of the revitalisation, reinterpretation, and exposition of hilye-i sṃerif calligraphy. This Ottoman-Islamic genre, commemorating and visually conjuring the love (asṃk) for Prophet Muhammad, has emerged as a quasi-national, state-patronised, Turkish-Islamic art form, exhibited in museal-cum-ritual and affective display.