Religion Society and Modernity in Turkey

This book brings together Serif Mardin's seminal essays over the last forty years on the history of the late Ottoman Empire and modern Turkish Republic. Touching upon the social, political and religious aspects of the last two centuries, the essays have one underlying theme: understanding Turkish social and political history outside the dominant paradigms of ‘Marxisant’, positivistic and secular–modernistic constructions of Turkish culture and society (p. xiii). Like his other pioneering works, Mardin's essays in the present collection provide penetrating analyses of the transformation of the classical Ottoman civilization into the modern Turkish Republic and its far-reaching consequences for contemporary Turkish society, and the relationship between tradition and modernity. Instead of interpreting modern Turkish history as the decline of Islam and the triumph of secularism (p. 260), Mardin provides an alternative narrative of Turkish modernization, one in which the parallel histories of modernization and counter-modernization and the centre–periphery relations shape the way Turkish society copes with the challenges of a multifarious tradition and a multiple modernity. For Mardin, the top–down analyses of Turkish modernization are marred by their simplistic binaries of religion versus secularisn