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Islam, Kurds and the Turkish Nation State, by Christopher Houston. New York: Berg, 2001. ix + 199 pages. Bibl. to p. 209. Index to p. 216. $23 paper.
This book examines the interaction between the state and Islam, and Kurdish identity claims in Turkey. Although the study does not have a clear thesis, it poses a central question: can Islam and Islamic political consciousness truly unite Muslim Turks and Kurds? The author develops his answer to this question in the book's three sections.
The first section looks at political Islam. Dealing with the volatile and exciting period of the 1990s, the author aptly maps the contours of the Islamic movement, capturing its diversity by utilizing everyday life as an entry point to explore the way in which Islamic groups shape the public sphere in Turkey. In its disaggregation of the Islamic movement in Turkey, this section is the best part of the book. It offers a detailed description of the growing pluralism of the Islamic movement, examining carnival, bourgeois, and liberal Islamism.
The author does an excellent job in demonstrating the way in which shared Islamic idioms and practices are interpreted and put into practice in new Islamicized restaurants, coffee-shops, hotels and public parks. In a way, these new Muslims (explored in the writings of Nilufer Gole) create their own new Islamicized spaces. Houston focuses more on the Islamicized spaces than on the new Muslim actors who are engaging in bottom-up transformation of the society that is sensitive to local and national history.
The second part of the...