TURKEY: Modernity and Islam This book argues for another way of studying Islam in Turkey by proceeding from a diagnosis of the status of the Turkish present MEHRAJ DIN SmallerDefaultLarger Title: Islam and Modernity in Turkey, Author: Brian Silverstein Publisher: Palgrave and Macmillan, 2011 The author of the book makes two arguments as the core of this book: Islam has been transformed into a religion on the liberal model in Turkey, that is, as a phenomenon having primarily to do with personal choice and private belief. What are the processes through which this has taken place? Secondly, the vast majority of observant, conservative Muslims in Turkey—as described by themselves and others—do not see or experience this arrangement (Islam as a religion) as illegitimate. Why not? This book is structured around answering both these questions. In doing so, the author examines the relationship between contemporary Islamic practices in Turkey, the legacies of institutional change in the late Ottoman Empire and early Republic, and more recent transformations at the juncture of culture, power, and the economy. This book argues for another way of studying Islam in Turkey by proceeding from a diagnosis of the status of the Turkish present. This work situates descriptions of practices in the present against the background of histories of the institutions in and through which such practices unfold. It is thus an ethnography of these practices and an essay in that critical history of the present that Michel Foucault, following Nietzsche, called genealogy: “a form of history which can account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects, etc. without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs its empty sameness throughout the course of history”. The book explores several levels of phenomena, at several different sites: Ottoman institutional reforms and the debates surrounding them; late Ottoman Sufis and their bureaucratization; contemporary Sufi devotional practices and discursive traditions in Turkey; an Islam-oriented radio station; research foundations and think tanks; legislation regarding public and private spheres; and debates about the EU (European Union), religion, and secularism. This book is a well written and academic piece highlighting the tensions and challenges in Turkey. This ground-breaking book sheds new light on issues of commensurability and difference in culture, religion, and history, and reformulates our understanding of Islam, secularism, and public life in Turkey, the Muslim world, and Europe. It will prove a helping hand for all those scholars and students who are serious to know more about contemporary ideological ruptures Turkey is entangled since the evolution of modernity and its ideological influx into post-Kemalist Turkish nation.
Posted on: Thu, 07 Nov 2013 07:34:03 +0000
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