For millions of viewers across Turkey, the films of Kemal Sunal are less a body of cinema than a shared memory – broadcast and rebroadcast so many times that whole generations can recite the punchlines before they land. Yet behind the slapstick and the famously guileless grin lies a recurring social argument, one that becomes clearest in how these films portray religion and the people who wear its outward signs. Look closely at the religious figures who populate Sunal’s films, and a consistent pattern emerges that has made his work a lasting subject of cultural debate.
A Shifting Image across Turkish Cinema
The religious figure has never been a fixed character in Turkish film. The “men of religion” seen in the earliest decades of the Republic differed sharply from the clerical types that grew dense in the films of the 1980s, where Sunal so often took the lead. Across the wider history of Turkish cinema, the clergyman has tended to appear in three broad modes – excluded, narrowed, and eventually accepted – and the Sunal films sit squarely within the “narrowed” register, where the religious figure is reduced to a thin, instrumental type rather than drawn as a full human being.
The films of the early “theatre players” period had already cast religion in a largely negative light, bundling it together with the old social and political order the new Republic was eager to leave behind. From there, a durable convention took hold: the man of religion as a sly, swindling figure who exploits ordinary people in the name of faith (Karakaya, 2008: 163). What Sunal’s films of the 1980s did was carry this convention into a new economic key.
The “Pious Merchant” and the Critique of a Crooked Order
The films of this later period were busy critiquing the economic and social policies of their day, and into that critique they slipped a particular figure: the pious merchant who has made his peace with a corrupt system and found a comfortable place inside it (Karakaya, 2008: 161). The religious characters in Yoksul (1986), Deli Deli Küpeli (1986), and Kiracı (1987) are textbook examples of this “pious merchant” type – outwardly devout, inwardly devoted to the till.
The logic of these films is reassuringly simple, and deliberately so. The wicked, the corner-cutters, and the con men may look powerful in everyday life, but at the first sign of genuine resistance they crumble; the message pressed on the audience, again and again, is that schemers are doomed to lose against the well-meaning and the honest, however modest those honest people may be (Sunal, 2008: 106). Sunal himself, in whatever role he plays, is the hero who topples them.
The Recurring Traits of the Religious Character
Examined across the films, these religious characters share a set of nearly unchanging behaviours. The first and most striking is that their priority is always the material over the spiritual. They are written as money-hungry, cunning, sharp-eyed schemers who do not hesitate to lace their dealings with deceit – characters who lie, cheat, and defraud without compunction. Standing opposite Sunal, they are forever the greedy, crafty hacı (pilgrim) or hoca (religious teacher) trying to swindle him.
What ties the type together visually is the deliberate use of religious symbolism. These figures carry the outward markers of piety and appear to live as faith demands, all while pursuing distinctly unholy ends. They turn up as the devout trader, the difficult and devout landlord, the property-rich man, the pious relative who refuses to marry off his daughter because the bride price falls short, or the village sheikh and the local hodja. The films take pains to show drinking pilgrims and religious figures reaching for fraud without a flicker of hesitation – and to show that these characters, already comfortably well-off, are forever scheming to pile fortune upon fortune, never satisfied with what they have.
A Type, not a Verdict on Faith
It is worth being precise about what these films are and are not doing, because the point is easy to mistake. The target of the satire is hypocrisy dressed in religious clothing – the instrumental use of faith for money, status, or power – rather than belief itself. This is also not a phenomenon unique to Sunal. The mocked or debased religious figure was a general tendency in the Turkish cinema of the period, not the invention of any single actor or director. Sunal’s enormous popularity simply made him the most visible vessel for a convention that ran far wider than his filmography.
That visibility is exactly why his work keeps resurfacing in cultural arguments. To some viewers, these films are gentle, even naive, stories standing against feudal exploitation and predatory capitalism; to others, the persistent pairing of devotion with dishonesty reads as something more pointed. Both readings have been argued at length, and the disagreement says as much about Turkey’s wider conversation around religion, modernity, and representation as it does about the films themselves.
What is harder to dispute is the consistency of the pattern. From the early Republic’s screen clerics to the pious merchants of the 1980s, Turkish cinema returned over and over to the figure who hides self-interest behind the signs of faith – and in Kemal Sunal’s hands, that figure found its most widely watched, most often repeated form.
References
Karakaya, H. (2008). Türk Sinemasında Din Adamı Tiplemesi [The Clergyman Type in Turkish Cinema]. Unpublished Master’s Thesis, Fırat University, Institute of Social Sciences, Department of Philosophy and Religious Sciences, Elâzığ.
Sunal, K. (1998/2008). TV ve Sinemada Kemal Sunal Güldürüsü [The Kemal Sunal Comedy on TV and in Cinema]. Master’s Thesis, Marmara University, Institute of Social Sciences, Department of Radio, TV and Cinema, İstanbul.
Türk Dil Kurumu (TDK). (2020). sozluk.gov.tr [Turkish Language Association Dictionary].
Ünser, O. (2003). “Din ve Sinema” [Religion and Cinema]. Antrakt, Issue 72, September.
Üzdü, H. (2016). Türk Sinemasında Din ve Modernleşme (1960–1975): Din Sosyolojisi Açısından Bir İnceleme [Religion and Modernization in Turkish Cinema (1960–1975): A Study from the Perspective of the Sociology of Religion]. Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, Süleyman Demirel University, Institute of Social Sciences, Department of Philosophy and Religious Sciences, Isparta.
Üzdü, H. (2016). “Modernleşme Sürecinde Türk Sineması ve Din” [Turkish Cinema and Religion in the Process of Modernization]. Uluslararası Sosyal Araştırmalar Dergisi [International Journal of Social Research], Vol. 9, Issue 42, February 2016, pp. 1164–1172.
Velioğlu, Ö. (2004). 70’li Yıllar Türk Sineması Köy Filmlerine Türklerin İslamiyet Öncesi Dini İnançlarının ve İslamiyet İnancının Yansımaları [Reflections of Turks’ Pre-Islamic Religious Beliefs and Islamic Belief in the Village Films of 1970s Turkish Cinema]. Master’s Thesis, Kocaeli University, Institute of Social Sciences, Department of Communication Sciences, Kocaeli.
