From the wrath of Allah to divine judgment: Natural disasters in the Islamist press in Turkey

Abstract

This study is designed to analyze the discursive strategies through which the Islamist dailies (re)construct meaning of natural disasters in Turkey, including two massive earthquakes and a drought. The news narratives and columns were gathered from five Islamist dailies and were textually analyzed. The earthquake in 1999 was represented as a warning against those who did not obey the divine rules, while the earthquake in 1976 and the drought in 2007 were divine judgment. During the drought the national-local governments were Islamist. This has caused a significant (re)turn in the discourses of the dailies. The Islamist press did not represent the drought as an event rooted in cause-effect relation in the social/political sphere, while the 1999 earthquake was represented as a divine 'answer' to the dominant political actors. Although all the Islamist dailies employ a religious frame of reference to explain the natural disasters, the representation strategies vary. Two major factors are vital in diversification of Islamic/Islamist discourses: (1) historical, periodical, and political factors; and (2) heterogeneous-look structure of Islamist press, irrespective of periodical variables. One function of the discursive strategies is to disguise mismanagement which was the principle agent of the loss lives of thousands of people