By Jeremy F. Walton
The Immanent Frame - June 10, 2013
Taksim Meydanı. Partition Square. Although it has taken on potent
new resonances in recent days, the name of Istanbul’s throbbing central
plaza commemorates a now-forgotten history, the function of the site
during the Ottoman period as a point of “partition” and distribution of
water lines from the north of the city to other districts. Already long
the favored site of demonstrations in Istanbul, Taksim is now the scene
of the largest anti-government protests in Turkish Republican history.
And the name of the square speaks volumes—what better word than
“partition” to describe the increasingly politicized cleavages that have
defined Turkish public life over the past decade, finally achieving
international reverberation with the current protests? A host of
trenchant, difficult questions, both analytical and political, accompany
and orient the ongoing demonstrations in Taksim and elsewhere
throughout the country. How rigid and inexorable are the partitions that
demonstrators and government spokespeople alike identify as the cause
of this outpouring of populist indignation? Above all, what should we
make of the near-inescapable insistence that one particular partition,
an irreconcilable antimony between secularism and Islam, is the
tectonic arrangement responsible for the upswell of political tremors in
Turkey?
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