In a seminal essay, “The Art of Memory: Islamic Education and its Social Re-production,” Dale Eickelman (1995) suggested that Islamic knowledge has twomain aspects. One emphasizes fixity and memory, though also allowing forflexibility and variation, and requires discipline and communal obedience.The other emphasizes Islamic knowledge as a cognitive style that accommo-dates a popular understanding of Islam, often communicated through musicand oral poetry, as well as by means of crafts and commerce. The Turkish ex-perience of Islam in the twentieth century, I suggest, has been skewed towardsthe second aspect by the Republican destruction of Islamic learning and theinstitutions that taught and disseminated it and by other Republican reforms,like language reform.

A powerful graphic novel that traces Turkey's descent into political violence in the 1970s through the experiences of four students on opposing sides of the conflict. 

Turkish Kaleidoscope tells the stories of four unforgettable protagonists as they navigate a society torn apart by violent political factions. It is 1975 and Turkey is on the verge of civil war. Faruk and Orhan are from conservative shopkeeping families in eastern Anatolia that share a sense of new possibilities. Nuray is the daughter of villagers who have migrated to the provincial city where Yunus, the son of an imprisoned teacher, was raised in genteel poverty. While attending medical school in Ankara, Faruk draws a reluctant Orhan into a right-wing nationalist group while Nuray and Yunus join the left. Against a backdrop of escalating violence, the four students fall in love, have their hearts broken, get married, raise families, and struggle to get on with their lives. But the consequences of their decisions will follow them through their lives as their children begin the story anew, skewed through the kaleidoscope of historical events.

Inspired by Jenny White’s own experiences as a student in Turkey during this tumultuous period as well as original oral histories of Turks who lived through it, Turkish Kaleidoscope reveals how violent factionalism has its own emotional and cultural logic that defies ideological explanations.

During today’s crisis in Turkey, victimhood authorises oppression, oppressors see themselves as victims and the oppressed are not only the poor, but educated middle classes. Citizen and state are imbricated in the same political and discursive fields where people mobilise against one another, some moving up and others down, creating unexpected landscapes of victimisation and oppression that do not fit comfortably in literature that analyses ‘politics from below’. How do we conceptualise this in a way that respects people’s understanding of their coordinates in a complex landscape of power? This article interrogates some basic assumptions of this literature, including the impact of the observer’s position and the oppression/resistance framework, replacing it with a model of politics as a shared horizontal topography of action across a terrain of values.

This article applies insights from cultural anthropology to the study of politics, nationalism and Islam in Turkey, with particular focus on group formation and competitive networks. It develops a model for understanding political fragmentation and inter-group hostility.

Muslim-majority societies, particularly in the Arab world after the 2011 uprisings, are undergoing a great experiment as Islamic actors move from arenas of dissent into formal positions of power. This opens up new sets of questions. What is necessary for Islamists to successfully become the status quo and gain the votes of a wider citizenry? What new forms of social alliances must be built, and what role does the initial institutional structure of Islam play in hastening or impeding democratic incorporation? Is there a pivotal moment? What is the role of a Muslim middle class, and must there be a liberal market economy for this transformation to occur? What happens to Islam in this process? And under what conditions does Islamic democracy coexist with liberalism and tolerance? For all of these questions, the Turkish example provides some tantalizing clues.