Exiles of the spiritual: secularization and the marginalization of oneiric imaginaries among Turkish Cypriots

This paper focuses on the conflict between a Naqshbandi-Sufi sheikh and Turkish Cypriot secularists in the middle of the twentieth century to historically trace the formations of a Muslim and secular social identity on the periphery of the Balkans-to-Bengal complex. The conflict particularly concerned a millenarian dream where the sheikh reportedly envisioned a major catastrophe would strike Cyprus and that he was tasked with leading Cypriot Muslims away to Syria. By providing a detailed historical account of this conflict, as well as of its aftermath by using contemporary ethnographic material from a Turkish Cypriot village, I show how the ‘structure of the conjuncture’ in Cyprus in mid-twentieth century produced a secular and Muslim social identity by exiling ‘the spiritual’ (manevi) to the margins of salient local political imaginaries and everyday Islamic praxes.