Living the clash within: secular/conservative divide of immigrant Turkish parents on the identity formations of British Turks

Abstract

This article addresses the identity constructions of British Turks in the context of the inherent fragmentation of Turkish immigrant parents situated within the historically complex secular or conservative divisions of Turkish politics. British Turks raised in the UK maintain identities defined within the parameters of the either/or epistemology forced by their Turkish immigrant parents, who are either in harmony with Turkish moral values and Islamic lifestyles or adopting a modern secular approach to life embedded in secular principles of Kemalism. Accordingly, we see the manifestations of polarity between religious/conservative versus secular principles of Turkish immigrant parents who, in a strictly practical sense, interfere in British Turks’ identity constructions. Illustrated through the empirical findings, a fault line appears in the impact of conservative/secular ideologies of Turkish immigrant parents on their British-born children due to the latter’s encounter with versions of Britishness and British ways of life. On both fronts, we see that British Turks understand the limits of the certainty of parental ideologies and values and therefore embrace more fragmented and pluralized selves as if the former were the necessary source of the latter .