Islamophobia in Turkey: In the scale of satirical magazines

Caricatures, which are presenting the ideological structure adroitly hidden under humor to its readers by using the superiority, incongruity or relieving methods, is a rich research field in terms of briefly and dramatically reflecting the projections of the struggle between the opposition and the dominant discourses in a society.We can define the humor broadcasting as a 'curtain of dream' where the entire social changes, conflicts, political and ideological struggles reflect on. It was born under the influence of westernization movement fed from the positivist paradigm. During its adventure in our country, it has been an advocate of enlightenment worldview which is "describing the religious thought as a primitive idea in the evolution of people and society". In this study, from this point of view, the answers are trying to be found about how Islam and Muslim People are detected and why they are reflected to this 'curtain of dream'. The presence and the causes of fear or hate against the Islam in Turkey are questioned too. In the study, in our country, starting from the first magazines to present which are selected by random sampling method and all the series of the top three comics published in 2014 are browsed through content analysis. Total numbers of browsed caricatures are approximately 35.500 in 321 magazines. The caricatures containing religious symbols are analyzed by semiotic analysis method, in the context of the historical background starting from the era Islam met the western civilization to the colonization era, and starting from the wars of the secular age to the clash of civilizations. The findings show that stereotypes used in caricatures are carrying a self-orientalist character very similar to the Islamophobic narrative in the west. And also these findings show that almost in all the caricatures, the images related to Islam, mainly 'mocking religion' and 'highlighting the religion in political criticism', are associated to harassment, terror, sexual perversion, reaction and fraud. Keywords: Semiotics, Islamophobia, Humor, Caricature, Secularism