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Chapter 16 On Coming to Grips with Turkish Oil Wrestling: Conceptualising Muscular Islam and Islamic Martial Arts Birgit Krawietz 1 Introduction This programmatic essay reflects on how to frame modern Turkish oil wrestling from a wider Islamic studies perspective.1 In contrast to the homogenising and for many decades utterly nation-bound narrative of republican Turkey im- posed on the sport, this article points to a broader scope of influences. Fol- lowing the late Shahab Ahmed (2016) conceptually, this proposal uses Islam in the sense of a perplexing yet inclusive cultural multiplicity. In order to grasp the complex and elusive topic, this contribution uses extremely broad strokes: (i) To start with, it suggests that the—deficient and hitherto underdevel- oped—conceptions of “Muscular Islam” (Section 1) and “Islamic martial arts” (Section 2) might become analytically more productive in the fu- ture. It roughly relates both, in historical perspective, to institutionalised slavery and military chivalry (furūsiyya) (section 3) in (not only, but no- tably) the Mamlūk and Ottoman Empires, with a side glance also to the Persian realm and pre-Islamic times. (ii) It identifies heritage wrestling as the most popular and the main ex- tant remnant of the Islamic furūsiyya tradition, with the Turkish city of 1 The research on oil wrestling in Edirne was initially part of a project at the Zentrum Moderner Orient (zmo) in Berlin, see https://www.zmo.de/forschung/projekte_2008_2013/bromber_ contest_sports_e.html, accessed 14 September 2017. Here, I draw on my hitherto unpublished conference presentations: “Hegemoniale Männlichkeit und Martial Arts in der Islamischen Welt,” given at the workshop Körper und Moral: Ordnungsvorstellungen in mehrheitlich musli- mischen Ländern, an event shared by the Asien-Afrika-Institut of the University of Hamburg and the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Hamburg on 22–23 July 2011; I am indebted to its or- ganisers, Monika Arnez and Katja Niethammer. The second is my paper “Muscular Islam with Shamanistic Features: The Many Layers of Turkish Oil Wrestling,” given at the conference The Aesthetics of Crossing: Experiencing the Beyond in Abrahamic Traditions, which took place on 19–21 March 2015; I thank the organisers of this conference in Uetrecht, Simon O’Meara and Christian Lange. I am further grateful to Katrin Bromber, Bettina Gräf, and Alina Kokoschka for taking a critical look at earlier versions of this essay. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:�0.��63/978900438689�_0�7 <UN> 328 Krawietz Edirne as a modern national centre of this type of martial art and Muscu- lar Islam. On closer inspection, the physical practice of oil wrestling and its established festival structure abounds, with an enormous variety of cultural registers (Section 4). This vast reservoir for identity construction cannot be reduced to merely a Turkish national, narrowly defined Islamic or nostalgic (Neo-)Ottoman activity. (iii) Side glances to recent developments in Turkey can help to relativise and fine-tune the suggested conceptions. The idea of physically assembling heritage sports, together with their imagined trans-Asian background, resonates with the “Turkish history thesis.” This is played out not only in Edirne but has started to take place also in the global city of Istanbul, although within a much different and wider framework, as shall be indi- cated (Section 5). 2 “Muscular Christianity” and “Muscular Judaism” as Challenges to Oil Wrestling The heritage sport of oil wrestling (yağlı güreş) is a particular form of freestyle wrestling performed on unmown grass, with the protagonists and their trou- sers completely drenched in olive oil, turning victory over the opponent into an extremely slippery and demanding task. It is quite popular, especially in the western half of Turkey, was chosen as the national style of traditional wrestling in Turkey, and is officially labelled as “the sport of the ancestors” (ata sporu). In 2010, it was accorded by unesco the status of “Intangible Cultural Heritage”; it is practised within a series of outdoor festivals, the most important of which is staged annually on the outskirts of Edirne, a city in northwestern Turkey, close to the borders of Greece and Bulgaria. Instead of calling the Kırkpınar oil wrestling festival of Edirne an “invented tradition,” an expression that in- sinuates feigning, it might be more helpful to subsume it under the rubric of “neo-traditional or ‘modified’ wrestling practices [that] have reached some degree of sportification [but] they do not seem to be among the ‘sufficiently’ disciplined ones precisely because they were never fully disconnected from their festive context” (Bromber et al. 2014, 1). Hence, it is not advisable to as- sume for such types of athletic enterprise sharp dichotomies between “tradi- tional” and “modern” sports with the consequence of “understanding the latter as the sole expression of the ‘modern’.” Therefore, “these ‘modified’ forms exist simultaneously and relate to ‘traditional’ as well as Olympic-style wrestling” (Bromber et al. 2014, 1–14; for the aspect of sportification, Krawietz 2010). Some <UN>.

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