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Reviewed by:
  • Islam in Modern Turkey by Kim Shively
  • Susan Gunasti (bio)
Islam in Modern Turkey, by Kim Shively. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021. 216 pages. $29.95 paper.

The lived experience, history, and politics of Islam from the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923 to the present is the subject of Kim Shively's Islam in Modern Turkey. She covers multiple topics in her examination of the subject, and the book's strength is its gathering together of these topics in one accessible resource. The topics of the role of Islam in the formation of the republic, Turkish institutions of Sunni Islam, Alevis, popular religious orders and organizations, Islamic political parties, the changing landscape of religious education, and neoliberalism are all covered in the work. The study is based on the author's fieldwork going back to the 1990s, right around the time that Islamic political parties experienced a reordering that would catapult Recep Tayyip Erdogan to political preeminence. The period covered in the work is consequential, and the transformations are numerous. Shively's ability to provide brevity and clarity to this picture is a strength of the book, as are the delightful vignettes she opens most of the chapters with.

One could quibble with Shively about which topics she chose to include and which to ones exclude. The inclusion of a chapter on Alevis is a significant and necessary part of any discussion and represents an inclusive approach to the topic that appreciates the diversity of the lived experiences of Muslims in Turkey. Taking all of the chapters together—each of which covers a different topic—this book presents a broad picture of Islam in Turkey.

Shively's work does a good job documenting the various transformations in religious education and institutions in Turkey. One outcome of the rise of religious education institutions is the proliferation of Turkish-language scholarship in Islamic Studies. Scholarly training in the West has de-emphasized the need to study Turkish in order to access this scholarship, and Shively's engagement with this scholarship is welcome. Yet she does not engage with one of the most important scholars working on the topic of Islam in modern Turkey. Think what one may about his scholarship, but İsmail Kara's work is too consequential to ignore on this topic.1 Moreover, there is a great [End Page 486] deal of scholarship being produced in Turkish that one would expect to see extensively addressed in a work on Islam in modern Turkey, such as the Cold War, but these studies receive no attention in this book.

This work is not a comprehensive and exhaustive treatment of Islam in Turkey, as the title might seem to suggest. It is an introduction to several topics, including to Islam and to modern Turkey. It is suited for the reader who may know a lot about one topic but little about the another; for example, an undergraduate student who has studied Islam in geographic contexts other than Turkey or the student who has studied Turkey but not Islam would benefit from reading this work. It is not a reference work for the advanced scholar, but this is likely due to the constraints of the series. The work is part of the New Edinburgh Islamic Surveys, which "introduces key areas within Islamic Studies."

Islam in Modern Turkey does a good job of introducing the reader to one of the most dynamic and poorly understood contexts of Islam in the modern period. The final chapter of the work, "The Latest Chapter," signals the ongoing nature of this process. Shively's work is a comprehensive, introductory approach to the topic that is a first step toward writing a more exhaustive history of Islam in Turkey.

Susan Gunasti

Dr. Susan Gunasti is Associate Professor of Religion at Ohio Wesleyan University.

Footnotes

1. For example, see Kara's two-volume series Cumhuriyet Türkiyesi 'nde bir mesele olarak İslam [The Problem of Islam in Republican Turkey] (Istanbul: Dergah, 2008, 2019).

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