This book evaluates the Turkish nation-building process from the Ottoman Empire to today, considering the role of Islam in this process. It gives insight into what has changed and not changed in this process. The book explains to readers that the Islamisation of the country is not a coincidence. Rather, Islamism has been grown symbiotically with the secular Republican regime through the organizational power of Islamic sects and with the assistance of the West. How we live as a nation today is not a revolution of Islamists, as some scholars have remarked. Rather, it is a continuation of the Turkish nation-building process with further Islamisation.
Rasim OEzgur Doenmez is professor of international relations at Abant Izzet Baysal University. Ali Yaman is professor of international relations at Abant Izzet Baysal University.
Acknowledgement Introduction Chapter 1: The Relationship between Nation-Building, Islam, and Islamism in Turkey, Rasim OEzgur Doenmez Chapter 2: Religion in the Dialectic of Turkish Nation-Building and the Case of Justice and Development Party, Buke Koyuncu Chapter 3: Nation-Building and the Religion-State Relations in Turkey: The Presidency of Religious Affairs, Ali Yaman Chapter 4: Laiklik and Nation-Building: How State-Religion-Society Relations Changed in Turkey under the Justice and the Development Party, Edgar Sar Chapter 5: Nation-Building and Gender Regime in Turkey, Senem Kurt Topuz Chapter 6: Why Afet Inan Had to Measure Skulls, Beatrice Hendrich Chapter 7: Towards an Islamic Patriarchal Society in Turkey?: Changing Gender Roles in the Secondary School Social Studies Textbooks, Gul Arikan Akdag Chapter 8: (Re)Construction of Turkish National Identity in Urban Space: Transformation Ofistanbul's Panorama Under Jdp Rule, Seren Selvi Korkmaz Conclusion About the authors
This welcome volume alerts to the presence of nation-building in contemporary Turkey that it juxtaposes to earlier Kemalist nation-building practices. With historical, contemporary, and comparative perspectives, the individual chapters make for a particular dense description of the ways in which the AKP under the leadership of Tayyip Erdogan has embarked on a remaking of Turkish state and society along the lines of newly interpreted Ottoman and Islamic pasts. Emerging "New Turkey" entails not only changes in the structure and function of the political system, but a remaking of memories, discourses, bodies, and spaces. The resulting complex picture provides for ample new comparisons with other countries that have recently undergone overhauls of their political systems and cultures and that have likewise embarked on renewed nation-building. It thus, more fundamentally, points to the continued presence of nationalism in the contemporary world. -- Markus Dressler, Leipzig University
