The Relationship Between Religion and Politics in Contemporary Turkish Novel: The Case of ‘Kar’ Novel

This article focuses on the relationship between religion and politics in contemporary Turkish novel, based on Orhan Pamuk’s novelKar. The study aims to understand and explain paradigms of religion-politics relations in Kar, which approaches Turkey’s recent religious and political debates with a literary fiction, and reflects how religious and political cultures are reflected in Turkey in this frame. In the novel, a new development momentum after 1980, and with the right, conservative and Islamist circles that motivated politics more actively during the 1990s, the modernization that has not undergone in Turkey in a way, in fact, within the framework of the approach of the writer, the values of provincial representatives in Turkey conflicts have been brought forward. In a postmodern perspective, the Kar shared important photographs of religion and politics at this stage of the modernization struggle between Islamist-secular, Eastern-Western conflicts. Finally, religion in the novel was dominated ideologically by the instrumentalist of poverty and deprivation, rather than the character of preventing change according to its place. Politics is described as more Jacobean and secular, and also as provincial in relation to modernization there. Summary: There is no doubt that literature in the process of transition from the empire to the republic; the novel, especially as a Western product played an important role in the consciousness level of modern Turkey. This literary influence, rather than pursuing a certain line, took place within two centuries of adventurous journey, generally in harmony with the periodical historical, social and political conditions of the Turkish society. In this context, the Turkish novel was seen as a means of producing different powers and ideologies, especially at the points reached by the modernization in the last half century, while at the beginning adopting a legitimizing attitude to make politics more intense. But with it, as an important element of the cultural system, religion has always been one of the main themes in the journey of the novel. The article deals with the study of religion-politics relations in the contemporary Turkish novel in terms of sociology of religion. As an example of the study, Orhan Pamuk was chosen as the Snow novel, which made its first publication in 2002 and took the subject of tense religious-political relations matched by the 1980s conditions in Turkey with a broad cultural background. The aim of the study is to understand and explain the approach of the contemporary Turkish novel to