135 Marc David Baer. Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, x + 332 pages. Marc David Baer’s book is an ambitious work that focuses on the reign of the Ottoman sultan Mehmed IV (r. 1648-1687)—one of the least studied periods in Ottoman history. The monograph is not a traditional account of Mehmed IV’s reign, and attempts to develop an original understanding of the sultan and his era. As the title and introduction indicate, the work looks at the epoch of Mehmed IV from the vantage point of the interplay between religious conversion (of Southeast European Ottoman non-Muslims to Islam) and imperial expansion ideologically conceptualized as “holy war” (ghaza, jihad) and presents both conversion and conquest as intimately linked to the piety of the sultan and his innermost circle of associates. In the introduction, the author lays out the conceptual framework within which his major arguments are developed and organized. Baer examines “the religious transformation of people and places in early modern Ottoman Europe.” He posits that “a turn to piety or conversion of the self ” (in this case of Mehmed IV and his close circle) led to “the conversion of others and the transformation of sacred space” and that “conversion is best understood in the context of war, conquest, and changing power relations” (p. 6). Baer delineates several concentric rings of conversion, starting with the Sultan, his mother Hatice Turhan Sultan, grand vizier Fazıl Ahmed Pasha, and other members of the ruling elite who converted to the “reformist piety” of the influential Kadızadeli preacher Vani Mehmed Efendi in the 1660s, and moving outward to İstanbul and Ottoman Rumelia. It was this “conversion of the inner self ” of the sultan and the ruling elite that led to their pursuit of an active policy of Islamization of non-Muslims and non-Muslim space in İstanbul and Ottoman Southeastern Europe. The sultan’s conversion to piety also translated into the waging of relentless “holy war” in central Europe and the Mediterranean, and the conversion of sacred space in the newly conquered territories was another hallmark of Mehmed IV’s reign. According to Baer, the nature of the interplay between personal piety, conversion, and conquest makes Mehmed IV’s reign a “unique historical epoch.” Relying New Perspectives on Turkey, no. 48 (2013): 135-161. NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY BOOK REVIEWS NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY 136 Book Reviews on several contemporary histories and conquest chronicles composed by court historians, Baer paints an alternative image of the Mehmed IV as a pious, energetic, mobile ghazi ruler—the image of a conqueror and converter—which emerges in stark contrast to the sultan’s traditional image as a profligate hunter who was little concerned with affairs of state, and whose rule logically ended in disaster marked by the unsuccessful siege of Vienna and the ensuing war with the Holy League (1683-1699) and his abdication in 1687. Indeed, Baer argues that this traditional, negative image of the sultan stems from the memory of the debacle of Vienna in 1683 and for which Mehmed IV has mostly been remembered by later generations. For Baer, this image does not do justice to a sultan who was, for most of his reign, a remarkably active and successful ruler. The book consists of eleven chapters, an introduction, conclusion, and a postscript. The chapters follow a roughly chronological order with varying conceptual and thematic emphases. The first two chapters discuss Mehmed IV’s enthronement and the early years of his reign, including the period known as the “Sultanate of Women” in Ottoman historiography. Chapter 3 traces the historical development of the Kadızadeli movement as a “religious response amid crisis” that Baer sees as characteristic of the second half of the seventeenth century. Chapters 4–6 focus on different processes of conversion as conceptualized by the author; the conversion of sacred space in İstanbul following the Great Fire of 1660, the sultan’s personal conversion to Kadızadeli reformist piety under the direction of Vani Mehmed Efendi, and the suppression of the messianic movement of Shabbatai Tsevi which was achieved by the latter’s co-option through conversion to Islam. Chapters 7 and 8 deal with a number of military campaigns in which the empire was involved, most notably, the conquest of Candia and the campaigns against Poland and the Habsburgs. Baer claims that Mehmed IV played a central role in these and depicts him as a typical ghazi sultan. Chapter 9 re-conceptualizes Mehmed IV’s passion for hunting as an expression of royal manliness and highlights the sultan’s insistent and systematic promotion of conversion of Ottoman non-Muslims to Islam during hunting expeditions as well as at the palace in his capital Edirne. The concluding chapters discuss the failed siege of Vienna, Mehmed IV’s legacy and his posthumous reputation, with Baer emphasizing the transformation of the sultan’s image from “mobile conqueror” and “convert-maker” to that of a “profligate hunter” after his death. This is an ambitious work that strives to develop a number of novel arguments regarding seventeenth-century Ottoman history, Mehmed IV’s person and era, and the nature of and connections between Otto- 137 NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY man imperial expansion, conversion to Islam, and piety. I do, however, have a number of criticisms. To begin with, Baer’s conceptual framework is quite rigid and often pushes him into forcing his arguments to fit this framework—even when the supporting evidence is insufficient, inconclusive, dubious, or plainly non-existent. A major aspect of the book is Baer’s attempt to recast Mehmed IV as a pious and energetic sultan, a mobile conqueror and convert-maker, in contradistinction to his traditional negative image. The sources that Baer has utilized to reconstruct this positive image of the sultan are several chronicles, authored exclusively by contemporary court historians (most notably, the chronicle of Abdurrahman Abdi Pasha). Needless to say, the job of a court historian is to extol the virtues of the ruler-patron and his closest circle of associates, as Baer himself admits at one point (p. 139). Nevertheless, for the most part, he seems to take these contemporary court chronicles and books of conquest (fethnames) at face value. One can hardly take seriously Mehmed IV’s court historians’ depictions of him as a ghazi warrior who, while not present on campaign, “wrote anxious letters” and offered “moral support” to the grand vizier who led the conquest of Candia. If sultans normally did not participate in sea campaigns, Mehmed IV did not excel on land either. During the three decades of his mature reign, he left the domains of his empire only once (the first Polish campaign in 1672), and even then was not directly involved in military operations but accompanied the troops, hunting along the way. On several other occasions, he would ceremoniously accompany the troops on campaign up to a point within the borders of the empire—Hacıoğlu Pazarı (Dobrich), Belgrade, or İsakçı (Isaccea)—leaving the troops to continue on their way while he would either wait for a time or return directly to Thrace, not having engaged in battle or in any other half-challenging endeavor. Of course, contemporary court historians would present such actions by their patron as the epitome of sultanic bravery and warrior spirit. Not surprisingly, they also depict Mehmed IV’s passion for hunting as a glorious manifestation of manliness. Mehmed IV, just like countless rulers and other leader personas, was an avid hunter who engaged in stupendously expensive hunting trips, where he, assisted by thousands of drovers and lieutenants, would kill animals that were driven in front of him for the purpose. In other words, the works of Mehmed IV’s court historians are an excellent source for the study of the idealized image of the sultan, but cannot be read at face value by modern scholars, as Baer attempts to do. They can be seen as “alternative histories,” written with the clear ambition of image-making for a ruler in an imagined age of renewal. They NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY 138 Book Reviews tell us a lot about how Mehmed IV wanted to be seen and remembered. In terms of their aim, they resemble the historiographic projects of Idris-i Bitlisi and Celalzade Mustafa regarding Selim I and Süleyman I, respectively. However, Mehmed IV was not a Selim I or a Süleyman I. His achievement did not match the image constructed by his court historians. The only durable major conquest of his very long reign was the conquest of Candia—the completion of a project started before his reign and carried out by one of the ablest grand viziers in Ottoman history (relying faithfully on contemporary court histories, Baer relegates the Köprülü grand viziers to the status of second-rate players). The sultan clearly preferred hunting to military campaigns. The siege of Vienna was a disaster. Kadızadeli piety did not become mainstream and receded after Mehmed IV’s death. Thus, these “alternative histories” were forgotten—and not surprisingly so. The other major aspect of the book I would like to critique relates to conversion to Islam. Baer argues that Mehmed IV and his closest circle of associates were especially invested in proselytizing activities in the spirit of reformist Kadızadeli piety. However, the theoretical argument that Baer develops concerning the intimate link between piety, proselytism, and conversion is very much influenced by Judeo-Christian (and especially Christian) notions of proselytism and conversion. Baer finds evidence for the sultan’s proselytism and convert-making in cases when people (mostly rural Balkan Christians) flocked to Edirne or the sultan’s hunting camp to convert and in the numerous petitions for the new clothes prospective converts would receive. In both cases, Baer argues that the sultan was instrumental in converting these people and also hints that they may have been coerced to convert as a result of the sultan’s proselytizing zeal (pp. 193-194). While there is evidence that Mehmed IV was present at some conversion ceremonies (especially around 16791680 and 1686), there is no solid evidence that he was instrumental in attracting converts to Islam in these cases, and even less evidence that he did so by force. As noted by other scholars, these converts were probably motivated to convert in the presence of the sultan or another Ottoman dignitary in the hope that this would bring them prestige and possibly additional social and monetary advantages. Thus although Baer constructs an image of Mehmed IV as a convert-maker to fit his overall conceptual framework of a tight interrelationship between personal piety, conversion and conquest, asserting is not the same as proving. In the case of the petitions for new converts’ clothes (kisve bahası arzuhalleri), this practice had started well before Mehmed IV (probably under Ahmed I) and continued into the 1730s, long after Mehmed IV’s death and the 139 Nikolay Antov University of Arkansas Jenny White. Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013, xv + 241 pages. Today’s Turkey is puzzling, both for an insider and outsider. Notions such as democracy, conservatism, and liberalism are harder to define in conventional terms. Growing ideological tensions and new cultural hybrids produce a vivid political climate and unconventional narratives on the one hand, and angry and alienated groups on the other. In Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks, anthropologist Jenny White addresses the puzzle at the core of Turkish politics. With rare insight and sharpness, she explains the divisions over national identity, secularism and Islam that seem to have turned Turkish political and cultural life into a minefield. Her main argument is that behind the conspicuous polarization of society into Kemalists and Islamists lies the question of what NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY heyday of the Kadızadeli movement. Baer’s discussion of conversion to Islam tries to convince the reader that there was some kind of mass conversion policy in the Ottoman Empire during the age of Mehmed IV. However, Baer does not present any conclusive evidence that Mehmed IV was a “convert-maker” on a mass scale (being the pro-active agent of conversion), and no conclusive evidence has been presented (in this or other works in the field) of any empire-wide policies encouraging conversion to Islam from among the dhimmi population of the empire. As for conversion of space, Baer gives numerous examples, starting with the transformation of Eminönü in İstanbul and the conversion of churches into mosques in territories that were conquered by force. He is on more solid ground here, although this conversion does not depart much from well-established tradition in the Islamic world (probably with the exception of the transformation of Eminönü, where he correctly hints at the connection between religious conservatism and political crisis). All in all, the book presents a number of interesting ideas and novel arguments, though these should be approached with caution, as many of them are not backed by any solid evidence, but have been developed to fit the rigid conceptual framework outlined at the beginning of the volume. NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY 140 Book Reviews is sacred and inviolable for the nation. Different nationalist narratives compete for the hegemonic position, with repercussions in social and cultural realms. White’s ethnography reveals the historical roots, emotional loads, and emerging subjectivities these narratives display. As an ethnography of contemporary “Turkish culture,” the book might seem unusually broad and dislocated; nevertheless, it manages to present rich detailed and careful analyzed panorama of the major contours of the profound transformation in Turkey. Rather than arriving at premature conclusions, White’s work opens up new discussions and research questions, and this is what makes it a compelling example of ethnography accessible to readers both inside and outside of academia. White’s analysis focuses mostly on the post-1980 Turkey, or the “Third Republic.” In this new phase, a “revolution” occurred, particularly due to the regression of the Kemalist ideology to a narrower position and the rise of a strong alternative in the pious movement. She argues that, with the loosening of the Kemalist bind over identities, citizenship, and Turkishness, a new bottom-up way of doing politics has arisen, emanating particularly from within Islamic circles, and paving the way to a future that is quite unpredictable. However, she also demonstrates quite aptly the extent to which blood-based notions of Turkishness have been ingrained in state institutions, public discourses, and people’s sense of national belonging since the establishment of the republic. The “revolutionary” shaking of the ground after 1980 has pushed some parts of the society towards a harder nationalist line, and anxieties over a pure and authentic sense of identity have flourished more than ever. These developments, she claims, result in both Kemalists and Islamists sustaining a nationalist discourse that legitimizes its ideology—just as in the First and Second Republics—through appeals to women’s identities and bodies. The book has three major themes. The first (in the second chapter) is concerned with “Muslim nationalism.” White provides a brief history of state construction processes, and then analyzes Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) governance as a unique formation with its own organization, distinct style, and media. A compelling argument she makes here is that the AKP has changed the terms of being Turkish and Muslim. As she explains, “The separation of religion from culture and the personalization of Islamic identity . . . has shaped a new understanding of the nation based not on bloodlines and Muslim heritage but on Turkish culture/civilization and Muslim faith” (p. 49). In following Ziya Gökalp’s belief in Turkish superiority and in representing Islam as a quality of personhood, the new pious movement 141 NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY has crafted, what White calls “Muslim nationalism.” This nationalism revives an idealized image of Ottoman governance as tolerant, strong, and open for multiple ethnicities and denominations, and facilitates the AKP’s neoliberal maneuvers and “democratic outlook.” A second major theme of the book (in the third, fourth, fifth and sixth chapters) is the rise of racist nationalism and reconfiguration of the social space in terms of purity and authenticity. In the classical anthropological literature (including Mary Douglas, Edmund Leach, and Victor Turner) taboo is discussed as a potent entity that emerges at the mixture of categories that are meant to be distinct. Taboo is both fearful and attractive, particularly because it points at instabilities and potentialities suppressed under the status quo. White embeds her analysis of the current transformations in Turkey in similar terms. She explains that previously segregated groups, secularists and Islamists, now occupy the same public sphere, increasing the chances of encounter, convergence and conflict. As a result, people have become more concerned about how to reckon with “cultural mixing.” Some observable ways are: 1) a stronger discourse of “internal and external threats” that have been ingrained through institutions such as schools and military, emergent Kemalist publics, and ultranationalist narratives which crystallize in discussions of missionaries and the headscarf; 2) the “symbol wars” between Kemalists and Islamists that constantly sacralize and desacralize their conventional forms to reach a broader audience while remaining distinct, and; 3) social and spatial enclaves built around distinct lifestyles. The mastery of White’s ethnography is that it can touch on such different realms in such rich detail. White does an excellent job of explicating how people’s reckonings with cultural mixing are built around anxieties of national and sexual impurity. In essence, aversion to mixing stems from the loss of the “sacred”; understood here as a homogeneous and monolithic Turkish identity. This means “losing the integrity of the family/nation, the authority of the father/state, one’s honor before the community, and the dignity and pride of the nation before the world” (p. 100). This loss of purity and authenticity threatens to open the wounds of a long history of violence and repression, reveal the fragile grounds of national identity and citizenship, and challenge the assumed superiority of the dominant group. Thus, it is middle/upper class Kemalists in particular that understand loss of purity as “decivilization” and “reversion to a rural, low class a la Turca culture” (p. 63). Despite their differences, White shows that both Kemalist and Muslim nationalists converge in resacralizing traditional gender norms and end up alienating women from their national- NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY 142 Book Reviews ist projects. In the book, three conversations with “Islamic women” with different social backgrounds vividly display this detachment. A third major theme (in the fifth and seventh chapters) is the transformation of selfhood and emergence of “solidarity groups.” White explains that cultural mixing brings moral challenge at the personal level; “loss of a national self ” leads to “angry individualism,” “loss of interpersonal trust,” and the need to find similarities (pp. 104-6). She argues that Turkish people constantly negotiate their individual choices and need for belonging, forming “solidarity groups” as a refuge from recent moral unsettlement and social alienation. Snippets from two individuals’ lives reveal that a mix of dynamics shape these negotiations, including life experiences, self-reflection, reading, media, and the everyday demands of the family, community and the state (p. 167). At the heart of this book is White’s optimism regarding the new ethical subjectivities and bottom-up identity construction processes. The strongest agents of this post-1980 era, she finds, are pious women and youth. Through solidarity groups, pious people practice religiosity with a focus on “intimacy, loyalty, interpersonal transparency and affection and mutual support” (p. 126), as well as “conscience and desire” (p. 165). Women, she finds, “are moving less toward religiously defined self-perfection, ritual, and doctrine, or even service for the sake of religion, but rather, toward a better understanding of what justice and life mean to them and where this self-realization can take them” (p. 170). However, this ethnography leaves open-ended questions regarding the kinds of political subjectivities these self-fashioning processes will produce and how they will play part in the futures of Muslim nationalism. For White, it is yet to be seen to what extent pious selves will bring forth a more inclusive civic nationalism or establish liberal laws based on individual human rights (p. 192). Yet the warning we find in the book is that solidarity groups are not devoid of power differentials; they too reproduce segregations and disciplinary discourses based on what they consider to be sacred, particularly along the blurry lines of “more pious” and “less pious” (p. 128). Victor Turner construes a stage of liminality as a place for reflecting on the “basic blocs of a culture.” According to White, Turks are experiencing the mixing and destabilization of national identity with an increased confusion, anxiety, sense of threat and sense of siege. For her, “Competing narratives of Turkishness have diverged to such an extent that a sense of threat has become palpable, tripping the impulse to strike out or self-immolate” (p. 79). She observes that basic categories that make up Turkish national identity—“blood, culture, language, Mus- 143 Esin Düzel University of California, San Diego Joost Jongerden and Jelle Verheij, eds. Social Relations in Ottoman Diyarbekir, 1870-1915. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012, x+369 pages. Recently, a developing literature has challenged generalizations in Ottoman history and emphasized the need for micro-analyses. Joost Jongerden and Jelle Verheij’s edited volume on late Ottoman Diyarbekir (Diyarbakır) is an important contribution to this recent tendency. Each article in the book concerns itself with a different aspect of this politically, culturally and socially important province on the empire’s periphery, though they share a common emphasis on the experiences of local people, not just as objects, but also as subjects. Jongerden and Verheij’s introduction presents the main historiographical standpoint behind the book; the ideas of “poly-centricity” and “poly-activity” (p. 3) as a challenge to the hierarchy between the central state and the provinces. Such a point of departure understands local activities or actors not as simple results of the aims or acts of the central state, but as an integral part of them. Therefore, in this study, the local and the center are generally regarded as “two sides of the same coin” (p. 4). The introduction is followed by “Confusion in the Cauldron,” a chapter by Suavi Aydın and Jelle Verheij. A detailed analysis of the geography and socio-economic situation is required in studies focusing on a locality, a task which this chapter seeks to fulfill. To better understand the changes in Diyarbekir in the nineteenth century, the reader is offered a brief introduction to the province’s preceding history, mainly covering the administrative autonomy of the Kurdish beyliks until the reforms of the Tanzimat era. The authors introduce the changing administrative boundaries of the province, its tribal geography, and its main ethnoreligious groups. The authors have also benefited from the accounts of travelers—one of the best ways to portray the social, economic and cul- NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY limness, secularity and Westernness” (p. 69)—remain unchanged, yet people draw different narratives out of this pool. Though readers of this work may not immediately solve all Turkey’s puzzles, they will surely find enough material to meditate and speculate about its possible futures. NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY 144 Book Reviews tural atmosphere of a region. Having set the scene before the reforms, the authors discuss the process of centralization by focusing on key actors, such as governors and notables. Relations between the notables of Diyarbekir played a crucial role during the dramatic events at the turn of the twentieth century, and a careful analysis of these relations offers an opportunity to avoid generalizations. In “Elite Encounters of a Violent Kind,” Jongerden invalidates a general opinion about the Hamidian Regiments (Hamidiye Alayları) through a close reading of the account of the leader of the Milli tribe, İbrahim Paşa of Viranşehir. Jongerden argues that, for the province of Diyarbekir, the annihilation of the regiments was detrimental to the Armenian and the Christian population in the city, underlining the shelter offered to the Armenians by İbrahim Paşa during the events of 1894-6. Such an argument does not trivialize the role of regiments elsewhere in the massacres of 1894-6; rather it challenges an overemphasis on their role which conceals other factors. Jongerden himself emphasizes the role of Ziya Gökalp in the development of anti-Armenian feelings in the city, not properly discussed until now. Additionally, Jongerden’s analysis of the strict control over the governance of Diyarbekir of notables like the Pirinççizades (to whom Gökalp was related) also legitimatizes his argument about their role in the violence against the city’s Christians. Although the violence that took place in 1894-6 is discussed in the wider literature, there remains a dearth of studies which examine both Armenian/Western and Ottoman sources simultaneously. Verheij seeks to fill this lacuna through a critical approach to the existing literature. He criticizes Armenian/Western studies on the issue for not evaluating the motivations of the Muslims behind the acts of violence. He then uses both the reports of the consuls in Diyarbakır and Ottoman sources, though noting that Ottoman documents related to the Hamidian period should be analyzed carefully as their language often makes it difficult to narrate events. He concludes that, in the case of Diyarbekir, the widely acknowledged thesis that the 1894-6 events were organized by Abdülhamid II seems doubtful. By drawing attention to the governor of Diyarbekir, Mehmed Enis Pasha, a supporter of the Young Turks and a member of the Muslim elite who was clearly opposed to the Sultan, Verheij suggests the possibility of Young Turk involvement in the disturbances of 1895 in the province. However, he also acknowledges that the role of Muslim notables should be investigated and that the role of the Young Turks cannot be generalized. Along the same lines, Janet Klein’s chapter on the Hamidian Regiments takes the issue beyond ethnic dynamics, opposing the idea that 145 NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY the regiments’ main role was to control the Armenian revolutionary movement. This was of course one of the motivations, but not the sole one. For Klein, together with School for Tribes (Aşiret Mektebi), the regiments were also a Kurdish policy, making the dynamics of the regiments much more complex. Discussing the hierarchy among the Hamidian tribes, she describes their internecine rivalry for both authoritative power and resources; a rivalry she also relates to the changing global conjuncture. The expansion of the pastoral economy and commercialization brought a new dynamic to the tribal zone. Focusing on the rivalry between Mustafa Pasha of Miran and Aghayê Sor, a powerful local agha, she argues that sheep were a significant commodity from which the power of the Miran tribe stemmed. Thus, for them, being a part of the regiments meant protection by the state from non-Hamidian tribes and groups. When Mustafa became a powerful Hamidian leader, he was privileged over the Aghayê Sor, who was not part of the regiments. Although archival documents, consul reports and journals help reconstruct the chronology of events, they cannot sufficiently reveal the voices of the ordinary people. From this period, petitions remain the best tool for comprehending the voices, demands, and strategies of the common people. Nilay Özok-Gündoğan’s chapter aims to reveal the voices of the peasants of Diyarbekir at the turn of the century. She makes use of the petitions to understand how the common people of Diyarbekir adapted to the developments of the era and what kind of strategies they developed to attract the attention of the ruling elite. Two important contemporary events shaped the language of the petitions she analyzes; the promulgation of the Land Code (Arazi Kanunnâmesi) in 1858 and the re-proclamation of the constitution in 1908. A huge proportion of peasants had become dispossessed because of the registration of their lands in the name of large landowners, who took advantage of the Land Code. Özok-Gündoğan shows how the dispossessed peasants of Diyarbekir adapted the language of the Second Constitutional Era to demand their rights. In this context, she argues, the peasants’ frequent use of petitions as a way to demand solutions to their problems enables us to regard them as political actors in the revolutionary atmosphere of 1908. Nineteenth-century Diyarbekir was a mix of different ethnic and religious groups, some of whom have not been sufficiently researched. Emrullah Akgündüz’s chapter examines important primary sources related to Diyarbekir’s Syriac Christians. Through an analysis of the provincial salnames (yearbooks) and the Mardin Collection (a collection of over 150 texts found in the Kırklar Church in Mardin) (p. 219), the author builds a picture of the Syriac Christian population and their economic, NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY 146 Book Reviews political and cultural life. He also discusses a shortcoming of Ottoman resources: as the Ottoman categorization often regarded Syriac communities as part of the Armenian millet, it is difficult to follow them. Furthermore, when Syriacs sought recognition of their rights as a separate millet, their relations with the Armenians deteriorated. Nevertheless, as the author argues, studies of Syriac Christians are still in their infancy, and more research is needed to shed light on their history. David Gaunt’s chapter argues that there was a close relationship between the Kurds, Syriacs and Assyrians in late Ottoman Diyarbekir. Gaunt states that this was initially balanced, but altered in favor of the Kurds in the last years of the Ottoman Empire. One sign of the initial balance is the fact that the Kurdish tribal confederation included Christian sub-divisions. Another is that, in some villages located in the east of Diyarbekir, the Assyrians adopted the Kurdish language. Additionally, there was an economic relation between the two groups. Nevertheless, with the increase in the power of the Kurdish emirates in the nineteenth century, there occurred a downturn in relations, tipping the balance against the Christian communities. The Syriacs and Assyrians then either collaborated with the state authorities or the Kurdish tribes. Lastly, the outbreak of World War I brought a decisive breakdown in KurdishAssyrian relations. The turn of the twentieth century witnessed catastrophic events in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Uğur Umut Üngör’s chapter consists of three sections. The first scrutinizes whether “statesponsored mass violence” is top-down or is also shaped by local dimensions. He points out that studies of mass violence often neglect the relationship between central decisions and local outcomes. He aims to fill by focusing on Diyarbekir, demonstrating that the competition and tensions among notable families exacerbated the violence in the province. In the second section, Üngör provides an account of the destruction of the Armenians of Diyarbekir while his third section is about mass violence against Kurds. The author introduces these two phases of mass violence to strengthen his point that, during the years between 1913 and 1950, the east of Turkey, and particularly Diyarbekir, was subjected to a set of “nationalist population policies” intended to homogenize the region and integrate it into the Turkish nation-state. The author makes use of Ottoman archives, especially the cipher telegrams of the Interior Ministry to support his arguments. Overall, this collection provides a noteworthy variety of perspectives on Diyarbekir in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from Ottoman sources, British parliamentary documents, consul reports, the 147 Gülseren Duman Boğaziçi University Brian Silverstein. Islam and Modernity in Turkey. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011, 278 pages. Brian Silverstein is a social-cultural anthropologist, but his study of a Naqshibandi religious community in İstanbul in Islam and Modernity in Turkey accomplishes far more than the typical ethnography. He grapples with the question of how Sunni Islamic institutions underwent reform in the late Ottoman Empire and came to be embedded in the state in the republican era. In the process of describing this transition in detail, he shows how the elites of the Sunni Islamic communities of the empire experienced a transition in how they thought about the role and nature of Islam. Chapter one establishes the historical foundations of the relationship between secularity and Islam during the late Ottoman period. Silvertstein convincingly demonstrates that understanding the nature of religion in this era is not possible without consideration of either the broader field of political power or the global intellectual transformations through which religion became defined as an individual matter, not one defined by community. In this way, Silverstein is able to demonstrate that the oft-heralded contemporary “trend” in the emergence of Islamic publics and the secularization of religion have much deeper theological, historical, and philosophical roots. The parameters of Silverstein’s study very clearly address questions of current concern in Turkey, especially revisionist musings on the meaning and purpose of Atatürk’s secularization policies and their relationship to late Ottoman reforms. He intervenes in the debate over whether late Ottoman and republican reforms were intended to crush Islam or protect the status of Sunni Islam through state intervention from multiple renditions of what should have been a unified and indivisible orthodoxy. Silverstein shows that Islamist intellectuals played a significant role in pushing for reforms of Islamic NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY documents of Christian communities (like church archives) and oral history. All the contributors undertake significant micro-studies of the subject to challenge historical generalizations and shed more light on neglected subjects. NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY 148 Book Reviews institutions in order to modernize Islam and protect it. His next step is somewhat more difficult to manage: that the republic was established on Islamic principles and that, though many Muslims see reforms such as the abolition of the caliphate as an attack on Islam, in fact the features of this office were incorporated into the state itself (p. 59). Of course, we have to remind ourselves that Silverstein bases his work on debates among intellectuals not ordinary Muslims who experienced this transition, most likely with little knowledge or understanding of what was being decided upon in the Grand National Assembly. In the second chapter, he addresses the role of Sufi orders as they experienced the transition from the empire to republic. By page 68, he begins to focus on the Nakshibandi order, and we learn how the order experienced the increased rationalizing, bureaucratizing, and disciplining effects of state power during the late empire. He considers particular regulations, such as the contentious issue of the succession of a sheik, in detail. Though the transition to the republic changed the purpose of the state’s involvement in Islamic orders considerably, he reminds us that Sufi orders were not attacked in the early republican period. Of course, the Sheikh Said rebellion changed this climate, and all orders were thereafter abolished. Yet rather than leap to the conclusion that the closing of orders should be understood as an example of how the state imposed secularist policies to attack Islam, Silverstein uses historical evidence to show how many Sufis themselves had begun to question the role of orders, and to consider that they created an impediment to the relationship between God and individual practitioner. Elites were therefore questioning the role of the group in structuring religious practice, regarding orders as a deviation from the meaning and purpose of Islam as a private experience. This marks the end of Part I of the book, which is composed of three parts. Part II is more ethnographic. It is about the people who participate in the Iskender Pasha order in İstanbul today, but it also traces the parallel histories of the order and Turkey’s political history. Given the fact that the previous chapter ended with a discussion of how Sufis had begun to consider their own practices in orders as spiritually suspect, one wonders why they now continue, especially given the fact that they were closed by the republican regime. Silverstein addresses this question by saying, “Participating in these Sufi orders is a way for people to become the kinds of Muslim selves they want (or believe they are supposed) to become and gives the techniques for understanding, defining, and reproducing a certain kind of ethnical self (p. 99).” In other words, a functionalist explanation—that orders merely serve to create networks of 149 Kimberly Hart SUNY Buffalo State NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY power—misses the mark of why people participate in them. That said, in his discussion of the political history of the twentieth century, he does make explicit links between this order and political parties and leaders. In particular, this community, the branch of which he studied in İstanbul, has significant ties to the ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP). By Part III, Silverstein marshals his forces to argue that these political-religious connections help create a liberal basis from which the AKP attempts to reconfigure state institutions in the name of civil rights and multiculturalism. He argues that these transformations not only create a more pluralistic spiritual domain of contemporary life, but make Turkey a viable candidate for inclusion in the European Union (EU). Silverstein thereby demonstrates how the late Ottomans were in step with European orientations towards questions of secularity. For him, the republican-era adoption of Ottoman efforts at secularization (not outright rejection of religion but its placement in private life) are thus a European way of thinking about the place of spirituality and its relationship to the state in society. Silverstein makes important connections between the contemporary activities of a religious community and deeper notions of political liberalism in the Turkish republic today. His work makes profound claims about political philosophy and intellectual life among contemporary Turkish Muslim scholars. These insights help to clarify how Turkey’s constructions of Sunni Islam are different from those in the “Arab Middle East” and among minority Muslims in Western Europe and North America. Sunni Islam, therefore, takes a unique form in Turkey. It is useful to note that the work is an ethnographic study of intellectuals and ideas and not an account of the everyday life of a religious association, though we do learn some details about spiritual life in the community. This original research shatters the typical conceptual divide between Islam and secularism, so common in research on the subject. Instead, we learn of the profound historical foundations of these domains and how intellectuals in Turkey have managed these constructions from the late Ottoman period onward. For this reason, the bland title is unfortunate. It deserves something better, which gives readers an inkling of the book’s philosophical gravitas and historical breadth and depth. NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY 150 Book Reviews Simten Coşar and Gamze Yücesan-Özdemir, eds. Silent Violence: Neoliberalism, Islamist Politics and the AKP Years in Turkey. Ottawa: Red Quill Books, 2012, 332 pages. The essays collected in Simten Coşar and Gamze Yücesan-Özdemir’s Silent Violence aim to take the analysis of the phenomenon of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) beyond popular dichotomies, such as democracy versus authoritarianism, laicism versus anti-laicism, and civilian versus military rule. The editors analyze the conservative characteristics of the AKP with reference not only to Islam but also to neoliberal economic policies. Moreover, they argue that this juxtaposition of Islamist and capitalist principles challenges the long established tension between Islam and the modern, indicating a thorough transformation of economic, political, and ideological structures through the instruments of political power the editor’s term “silent violence” (pp. 9-10). The editors thus read the AKP years as the coexistence of a “violent” neoliberalism and the “silence” of Islam (p. 295). The contributors to the volume focus on different aspects of Turkey’s economic, political, and ideological structure within the framework of neoliberal capitalism. They all underline that the combination of neoliberal economics and Islamic politics is a long-term state policy that does not pertain only to the AKP. This analysis clearly reveals the historical continuity between neoliberal economic policies, the Turkish-Islamic synthesis of the 1980 military coup and the AKP government. It suggests that the AKP government is only the latest ring in a long chain of neo-conservative/neo-liberal politico-economic tradition, showing no essential difference from the Motherland Party (Anavatan Partisi, ANAP) of the 1980s. This analysis of the AKP as not unique within the framework of the historical and structural neoliberal transformation process is an original contribution to the literature. The first part of the book scrutinizes the changes in Turkey’s state structure, societal conditions, and legal regime as a consequence of neoliberal economic transformation. Galip Yalman’s chapter focuses on the separation of the economy from politics under neoliberal hegemony, which technicizes the economy and dissociates the state from the class struggle. Yalman asserts that the neoliberal transformation of Turkey in the post-1980 period (including the AKP years) has put an end to class-based politics and led to the rise of identity politics (pp. 23-30). In this context, law has played a crucial role in the transformation of statesociety relations under neoliberal hegemony. Ali Murat Özdemir deals with the changes in the legal system in the AKP years, stating that the 151 NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY legal reforms of the AKP correspond to the post-Washington consensus, which aims to create and protect institutions to support the marketbased allocation of resources (p. 44). Özdemir focuses on the changing structure of the Constitutional Court (Anayasa Mahkemesi), the constitutional situation of labor rights and social security reform, concluding that the separation of political decision-making from economics has empowered the market against society (p. 65). Simten Coşar’s chapter examines the affiliation between neoliberalism and the Turkish-Islamic synthesis. She asserts that the neoliberal transformation of Turkey has occurred on a dual axis: on the one hand, there has been an increasing discourse of individual rights and liberties with reference to economic liberalism; on the other, society has been invoked through a conservative socio-cultural discourse (p. 88). Coşar then highlights the intertwined nature of the neoliberal and conservative characteristics of AKP policies. In the section’s last chapter, Berna Yılmaz critically examines the assumption of the organic connection between embourgeoisement and democratization through the changing political position of the Islamic bourgeoisie. The second part of the book problematizes the perspectives of social policy, citizenship, and gender in the process of neoliberal transformation. Gamze Yücesan-Özdemir sheds light on the influence of neoliberalism, Islamism, and conservatism on the social policy regime of the AKP. She asserts that the introduction of neoliberalism confronted Turkish society with a combination of informal working conditions, a lack of social security, and de-unionization, rendering it dependent upon social assistance (p. 126). The laboring classes have thus increasingly found themselves in precarious work and at the mercy of social assistance based on Islamist philanthropy as concrete social rights have decreased and the social policy regime has been reduced to conservative benevolence. Yücesan-Özdemir asserts that AKP social policy is, in fact, based on the prioritization of the market over society, reducing society’s rights and wages while increasing the market’s profits (p. 148). In her chapter on the citizenship regime of the AKP, Nalan Soyarık-Şentürk states that the identity politics which emerged in the 1990s challenged the previous conceptualization of republican citizenship. However, although the human rights aspect of citizenship was underlined in this period, the realm of social rights was neglected. The detachment of citizenship from social rights has been followed not by the recognition of minority rights but by a new type of Turkish nationalism that has arisen on the basis of Islam (p. 174). Similarly, the gender aspect of the neoliberal transformation indicates an affiliation between neoliberal workfare NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY 152 Book Reviews and the conservative family. In the following chapter, Metin Yeğenoğlu and Simten Coşar analyze the new patriarchy under the reign of neoliberal conservatism, in which the family has become the natural unit of a woman’s existence both economically (with neoliberal motives) and socially (with conservative motives) (p. 188). The last part of the study examines the relation between the neoliberal transformation of Turkey under the AKP government and the world capitalist system. Birgül Demirtaş evaluates the foreign policy of Turkey within the context of neo-Ottomanism, neoliberalism, and pragmatism. Filiz Zabcı focuses on the relations between the AKP and the institutions of global capitalism, such as the World Bank and IMF. She asserts that the reforms in the pension system, education, and healthcare, as well as the termination of subsidies in the agricultural sector clearly indicate that the economic tendencies of the AKP government have been determined by the demands of global capitalism. The last chapter in the book, by Zuhal Yeşilyurt-Gündüz, examines the relation between the AKP and the European Union (EU) in the context of the evolution of the EU’s social policy regime from social democracy to neoliberalism. Overall, Silent Violence aims to assess the AKP years of Turkey within the combined contexts of Islamic politics and neoliberal transformation. Each chapter evaluates the policies of the AKP on the basis of this combination. However, although this Islamic-neoliberal convergence partly succeeds in explaining both the violence of neoliberalism and the silence of society, the book remains impotent in the face of one central question: how has the AKP been able to stay in power despite its violent and oppressive neoliberal policies? From a broader perspective, why do people remain silent against the violence of neoliberalism? The contributors explain the silence of the masses by Islamist politics. Moreover, they assert that the separation of the economy from politics has led to the end of class politics, empowering the neoliberal and neoconservative parties as unrivalled political forces. However, these theories remain unable to explain the AKP’s ability to stay in power since 2002 as against ANAP’s inability to do the same. Thus, the question is how the AKP has successfully established its sociopolitical hegemony, and it remains to uncover the mechanisms of the reproduction of consent, embodied as the silence of the masses against the violence of neoliberalism. The political transformation of the state apparatus and the mobilization of civil society have enabled the AKP to establish hegemony through the mechanism of violence and consent. Yet, through their focus on neoliberal transformation per se, the contributors render the concrete policies of the AKP invisible. From this 153 NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY perspective, one other shortcoming comes to the fore: the homogenization of the neoliberal transformation after 1980. Turkey’s neoliberal experiment after 1980 cannot be reduced to a one-way linear development, which equalizes the ANAP of the 1980s, and Kemal Derviş, and the AKP of the 2000s. For example, both Ali Murat Özdemir and Filiz Zabcı claim that the AKP’s economic reforms accord with the postWashington consensus, which assumes the separation of the economy and politics through the autonomy of economic institutions. However, the AKP’s approach toward autonomous economic institutions has not remained uniform: Elsewhere, in an article on the “the politics of dedelegation,” Işık Özel has asserted that, after the 2001 economic crisis, Turkey’s establishment of independent regulatory agencies was related to the increased specialization of economic procedures under neoliberalism. However, she claims that recent legal changes by the AKP have aimed to reduce the dominance of bureaucrats in key sectors without any public accountability, denouncing it as a “lack of democracy” and the “hegemony of bureaucracy.” For Özel, this “de-delegation of politics” does not mitigate the neoliberal tendency of the AKP; however, it does suggest the different paths of neoliberalism under the AKP government and the complicated relations between political agencies and economic institutions. Lastly, any study focusing on the neoliberal transformation of Turkey under the AKP should analyze the role of the discourse of development and the construction sector. Making up 5.8 percent of GDP in 2012, this sector has been the lifesaver of the Turkish economy. It provides palliative employment for the masses and accommodation for the population, creating upward mobility for the middle classes while dispossessing those living in the informally constructed gecekondu neighborhoods. More widely, Turkey’s neoliberal transformation cannot be fully comprehended without relating the capital accumulation process to the increased exploitation of nature. In addition, the discourse of development realized in many urban transformation projects, hydroelectric power plants, and new highways plays a key role in the reproduction of consent. Despite these criticisms, Silent Violence is an important contribution to the literature regarding neoliberalism, political Islam, and AKP rule. The analysis of AKP policies as a combination of economic neoliberalism and social conservatism and the evaluation of the conservative characteristic of the AKP with reference to both Islam and neoliberal economic policies are significant attempts to comprehend the current situation beyond classical dichotomies such as center-periphery or laicfundamentalist. Ultimately, this collection positions the AKP in a his- NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY 154 Book Reviews torical and structural framework which helps the reader analyze the last decade in Turkey more systematically. Mehmet Ertan Boğaziçi University İren Özgür. Islamic Schools in Modern Turkey: Faith, Politics, and Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, xiv + 249 pages. What are the shifting relationships between political organization and religious education in contemporary Turkey? How do these shifting relationships articulate with and reorient broader debates over secularism, Islam, and Turkish national identity? In her thorough, accessible, and meticulously argued new book, Islamic Schools in Modern Turkey, İren Özgür raises and troubles each of these pivotal questions on the basis of a detailed history and ethnography of Turkey’s İmam Hatip schools. These are secondary public vocational schools intended to train religious functionaries; imams—prayer leaders at mosques—and hatips— preachers who offer Friday sermons at mosques. Few nation-states have exemplified French Marxist Louis Althusser’s contention that education is a key “ideological state apparatus” better than republican Turkey. From the early days of the republic through to the contemporary era, the Turkish education system has mediated and underpinned the relationship between national belonging and the legitimacy of the state. In most public schools, the narrative of nationhood hinges on Atatürk’s revolution itself while Islam plays a relatively smaller role, both inherent to Turks’ collective past and awkwardly situated in relation to their ostensibly modernist, secularist present. The pedagogical construction of this secular nationhood is no stranger to anthropologists and sociologists of Turkey; in recent years, monographs by Samuel Kaplan and Ayşe Gül Altınay have plumbed the processes and procedures of this national pedagogy. In spite of these valuable works, however, a major lacuna has persisted in the study of Turkish education and its attendant politics. In addition to standard public schools, Turkey also maintains a system of vocational high schools. By far the most influential, pervasive and controversial vocational schools are the İmam Hatip schools. Despite both the expansion of İmam Hatip schools in 155 The schools have experienced periods of prosperity and decline depending on how ruling governments have viewed them. Certain governments have considered [the] schools as threats to the secularist order and have taken measures to weaken them. Other governments have viewed [them] as tools for controlling religious discourse and have taken measures to develop them (pp. 26-27). Özgür carefully delineates the republican history of the İmam Hatip schools and contextualizes them in relation to other forms of religious education in Turkey, such as Qur’an courses sponsored by the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı) and less formal religious classes (dersler) organized by a variety of religious communities (cemaatler). In particular, she emphasizes the relationship between the İmam Hatip schools and the shifting fortunes of Turkey’s Islamist movement, beginning with Necmettin Erbakan’s National Vision Movement (Milli Görüş Hareketi) in the 1970s, extending through the brief era of the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi) government in the 1990s and culminating in the ongoing heyday of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP). Özgür also sheds light on the shifting role of the schools in relation to Turkish public life more generally. Most importantly, İmam Hatip schools can no longer be comprehended as mere vocational schools; although some of their graduates do go on to careers as imams and preachers, the vast majority of their students aspire to the same educational and professional opportunities and goals as Turkish citizens educated in standard public schools. This transformation of the İmam Hatip schools has fueled political debate over the schools themselves. While secularist political powers have attempted to steer İmam Hatip graduates away from university education by maintaining a punitive “coefficient” (katsayı), which automatically lowered the university entrance examination scores of vocational school students, advocates for the schools from within both the Islamist political establishment and civil society have successfully lobbied to abolish this coefficient, and thereby leveled the playing field for İmam Hatip graduates who aspire to enter Turkey’s universities. NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY recent decades and the vociferous public debate over their desirability and sway, scholarship on the schools has been remarkably scarce. Fortunately, however, Özgür has remedied this lacuna decisively. Islamic Schools in Modern Turkey begins with a thorough history of the İmam Hatip Schools and their relationship to the Turkish state. As Özgür provocatively argues: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY 156 Book Reviews The political debate over the “coefficient factor” also relates directly to the demographic transformations that the İmam Hatip schools have experienced over the past half-century. Although the religious professions that ostensibly define the schools are exclusively masculine, İmam Hatip schools now educate equal numbers of young men and women. As Özgür cogently observes, “the admission of women, who could neither become imams nor hatips, symbolized that the schools were now preparing students for a wider range of graduate opportunities” (p. 47). It is precisely this wider range of graduate opportunities that has so troubled secularist opponents of the schools in recent decades. With this political history of the İmam Hatip Schools in hand, Özgür moves on to her most fascinating argument—at least from this reviewer’s perspective—namely, that the cultivation of a particular subculture within İmam Hatip schools defines and subtends a broader community of İmam Hatip alumni (İmamhatipliler) and affiliates. She productively adopts and adapts French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus in order to describe the distinctive nexus of attitudes, assumptions, comportment and sociality that defines and unites İmam Hatip students and alumni. Above all, this habitus constitutes and inculcates a comprehensive, explicit mode of Islamic religiosity among the “İmam-hatiplis.” In Özgür’s estimation: The formal and informal curricula at İmam-Hatip schools transmit a habitus that facilitates strong ties to Islamic norms and practices. İmam-hatiplis believe that the conduct of their public and private lives should adhere, to the greatest extent possible, to the Qur’an and the Prophet’s example. They emulate the Prophet in religious practice, social interactions, and even personal hygiene (p. 102). In this respect, İmam Hatip schools are representative of a much broader trend in global Islamic reform, as analyzed by anthropologists such as Dale Eickelmann and James Piscatori and sociologists such as Olivier Roy; the “objectification” of Islamic practice and doctrine and the explicit, reflexive concern for orthodox practice that this objectification entails. Within İmam Hatip schools, gendered social relations constitute a vivid locus of this objectification. Students debate the Islamic proprieties of gender segregation openly, and focus in particular on the question of the female headscarf (türban, başörtüsü), which is politicized in the Turkish political sphere more broadly. In the final chapters of the book, Özgür discusses and analyzes the political implications of the İmam Hatip schools more generally, with 157 NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY reference to both the vicissitudes of the Islamist political movement (and the AKP in particular) and to the various civil society organizations that fund İmam Hatip schools and lobby on their behalf. This analysis of the relationship among the schools, civil society institutions, and political society is a valuable complement and supplement to other recent works on the social bases and networks that have constituted the nexus and dynamo for the emergence of the AKP, notably those by Jenny White, Cihan Tuğal and Hakan Yavuz. As a coda to her principal argument, Özgür also gestures briefly to the comparative implications of her research, with reference to such institutions as Indonesia’s pesantren Islamic schools and madrasas in South Asia. Throughout these concluding chapters, she is careful to underscore both the relationship and distinction between the Islamic habitus that defines the İmam Hatip community and the politicization of this habitus within the broader Turkish public sphere. As she aptly demonstrates through the story of Ahmet and Mehmet—two brothers from Samsun who each attended an İmam Hatip school but whose quotidian pious practice and political affiliations are radically different—the connection between an İmam Hatip education and involvement in the Turkish Islamist movement is neither simple nor singular. In other words, the relationship between İmam Hatip Schools and political parties such as the AKP and the Felicity Party (Saadet Partisi) is a correspondence that demands analysis and explication, not a causality that researchers can simply assume. Ultimately, the most crucial contribution that Islamic Schools in Modern Turkey makes to current scholarship on Islam, secularism, and politics within Turkey hinges on the complex relationship between Islamic education and its constitutive habitus on the one hand, and the politics of and about Islam on the other. And it is precisely here that I would push the book’s exceptional argument even further. Özgür provides an exemplary account of how Turkey’s İmam Hatip schools articulate with broader debates over the politics and public place of Islam in Turkey generally, but she does not ultimately suggest why the dichotomous logic of these debates remains so formidable and so taken-for-granted. In order to address this question, we minimally require a comparable account of the habitus of secular public education in Turkey and its articulation with national political debates and forms. My only moments of unease while reading Islamic Schools in Modern Turkey stemmed from the intuition that Özgür could have marshaled her admirable data to destabilize the hegemonic naturalness of the Islamist-secularist polarity in Turkey more than she ultimately did. But this is perhaps unfair. The puissance and irresistibility of the Islamist-secularist dichotomy is both an object NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY 158 Book Reviews and a hurdle for most contemporary social scientists of Turkey, and it would be arch to expect a single volume to untangle this knot entirely. Rather, as scholars of Turkey, our primary response to Islamic Schools in Modern Turkey should be one of grateful thanks. Özgür has written a definitive, magisterial text on Turkey’s İmam Hatip schools; one that will intrigue and provoke any scholar concerned with broader questions of Islam, politics and Turkish public life. Jeremy F. Walton Georgetown University Aslıhan Sanal. New Organs within Us: Transplants and the Moral Economy. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011, xx + 264 pages. Aslıhan Sanal’s New Organs within Us: Transplants and the Moral Economy provides an ethnographic analysis of organ transplantation in Turkey, relating it to cultural and medical conceptions of body, death, and life, as well as to historical and current debates around Turkish modernization and multiple modernities. The book gives examples of Islamic discourses and practices which have shaped the conceptualization of organ transplants and displays the close interaction between religion and medicine in different contexts, such as in the illness narratives of kidney-transplant patients. It also addresses the political economy of organ transplantation, investigating patients’ different strategies of finding a new organ depending on their economic conditions and social networks, as well as the ways in which doctors interpret and negotiate the existing laws on organ transplants. Through a close reading of the transplant narratives and debates, Sanal helps the reader understand how major political and economic problems and inequalities are reflected and reproduced in the Turkish health sector. She explores how the social actors involved in organ transplantations—dialysis and transplant patients, their relatives, doctors of various specializations, and businesspeople who import grafts—“attribute, transfer, translate, or lose” organ transplantation’s particular meanings. In the 2000s, organ transplants became a popular topic among social scientists working on health and illness thanks to the issue’s close connections with patterns of health inequalities at local, national and global levels and the global phenomenon of illegal organ transplants. In 1999, a 159 NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY research team of anthropologists called Organs Watch was founded and led by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Lawrence Cohen at the University of California, Berkeley, in order to research the global traffic in human organs and the inequalities that facilitate that traffic. The team have conducted ethnographic research in several countries, such as the US, Israel and Brazil. Sanal joined the team to conduct research in Turkey in 2000 as fieldwork for her PhD thesis at MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS), and this book is partly based on that research. The book is also comparable to Sherine Hamdy’s Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt, which relates debates over organ transplantation to the recent political events in Egypt. One of the key terms the book discusses is benimseme which Sanal defines as “becoming familiar or feeling at ease with something by making it one’s own” (pp. 4-5). This term suggests both patients’ physical, metaphysical, and psychological acclimatisation to having somebody else’s organ in their own body and society’s coming to terms with the fact that dead human bodies become cadavers used for scientific and medical purposes. Through the transplant narratives, Sanal illustrates how having someone else’s organ within one’s body often challenges the taken for granted boundaries between oneself and others, and changes patients both spiritually and socially. Similarly, doctors reveal their discomfort and alienation while working on cadavers while doing their best to respect the dignity of the dead person. Sanal weaves those two layers together to show how a global medical technology is internalized and negotiated in a particular cultural context, in accordance with local conceptions of ethics, life, death, and body. In doing so, she also contributes to the classical debate of nature vs. culture and shows how those concepts are made interdependent in people’s efforts to accept organ transplants at a conceptual level, in narratives negotiating the boundaries between the unnatural/natural, abnormal/normal, and uncanny/familiar. Those boundaries are also related to the boundary between life and death, the general dichotomous conceptualization of which is challenged by the narratives’ metaphors, visions, and dreams about transplantation, cadavers, burials, sacrifice, and suicide. Sanal describes the concept of “biopolis” as the universe constituted of the “collective life of patients and physicians in a common space and within a biopolitical history” (p. 11). This is a particularly useful concept for understanding how the broad range of issues covered in the book contribute to a wider effort to (re)conceptualize organ transplants in physical, metaphysical, psychological, and cultural terms. Transplant NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY 160 Book Reviews medicine developed in the 1980s in Turkey, and since then there has been a legal effort to prevent people from selling their organs, although this is “widely practiced in Turkey and other places in the Middle East, even without the involvement of dealers, merchants and businessmen” (p. 92). Sanal relates this problem to political instability and poverty in Turkey, and states that small private hospitals have become the natural habitat of the organ mafia and organ trafficking. The strategies Turkish patients employ to find an organ vary, depending on their ability to afford them, from organ donation by a close relative to travelling abroad—to India, Russia, or the United States—to have the transplant operation. However, most endure an excruciatingly long period of waiting and remain dependent on a dialysis machine due to the long lists of patients in need of organs, the lack of organ or tissue banks, and the inadequacy of donations from cadavers, despite recent encouragements by the Turkish media and major Islamic scholars. Doctors’ opinions on organ donation vary, ranging from Dr. S., labeled as a member of the “organ mafia” by the Turkish media because of his involvement in the organ trade in Turkey and his clandestine organ transplants in foreign countries, to Dr. Eldegez, who only operates with cadaveric organs since he believes that the transplant medicine is not yet adequately adapted to Turkish culture. Dr. Eldegez’s dedication to transplants from cadavers is described as a particularly ambitious and meticulous project, requiring a network with other hospitals to share information on brain deaths on a regular basis. Sanal contends that there is rivalry among these doctors at a biopolitical level, shaped by their different approaches to organ transplantations and health inequalities in Turkey. In her rich ethnographic fieldwork, Sanal also benefits from sources in the media, visual arts, poetry, literature, and theater. She also uses detailed and vivid narratives of “spaces of death,” such as dissection rooms where the cadavers are dissected, mental health units where dead residents’ unclaimed bodies are used as cadavers for scientific and medical purposes, cemeteries, and organ transplantation units. Sanal is especially successful in presenting the variety of conceptions of dead bodies and their parts, including those seemingly devoid of any taboos on death and dead bodies. These range from the eerie descriptions of the pool of the dead (Ölü Havuzu), an old swimming pool filled with unclaimed dead bodies kept in formaldehyde in the basement of the Cerrahpaşa Medical School, to the unemotional accounts of “grafts,” the human bones imported and rendered “lifeless” through demineralization by radiation to be used by the orthopedists for transplants. Sanal indicates that concep- 161 Ayşecan Terzioğlu Koç University NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY tualizations of death are highly nuanced. This is even so in the case of suicide, the most unacceptable and intolerable form of death in Turkey, partly because of the “negative correlation between suicide and Islam” (p. 153). However, attitudes may change depending on whether the organs of the person who committed suicide are used to save the lives of other people. The author also describes different conceptions of life and being alive in different contexts related to organ donations, such as the ritual of sacrifice in Kurban Bayramı (“Festival of Sacrifices”), where the sacredness of the life force (can in Turkish, but spelled “jann” in the book) of the sacrificed animal is “released to restore purity,” (p. 168) and its meat is distributed to the poor for charity as a “donation” (bağış)—the same term used to describe organ donation. This work is an important contribution to the fields of science and technology studies and the anthropology of health and illness, and will help those fields become more visible and established in Turkey. However, the book’s large theoretical scope also contributes to globalization studies, Middle Eastern studies and the anthropology of religion, particularly in terms of the debates on various Islamic discourses and practices.