Mavi Boncuk | Religion, Society, and Modernity in Turkey[1]By Şerİf Mardin
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006), xvi + 388 pp.
Ibrahim Kalin[2]
Journal of Islamic Studies, Volume 19, Issue 2, 1 May 2008, Pages 275–279,
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.
[1]
Contents
Social Class and Class Consciousness 1
Power Civil Society and Culture in the Ottoman Empire 23
Civil Society and Islam 44
The Transformation of an Economic Code 60
The Modernization of Social Communication 83
Some Consideration on the Building of an Ottoman Public Identity in the Nineteenth Century 124
Super Westernization in Urban Life in the Ottoman Empire in the Last Quarter of the Nineteenth
Century 135
Continuity and Change in the Ideas of the Young Turks 164
An Attempt at a Partial Explanation of a Revolutionary Conscience 182
Ideology and Religion in the Turkish Revolution 192
Youth and Violence in Turkey 205
Religion in Modern Turkey 225
Necip Fazil and the Naksibendi 243
Islam in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Turkey 260
Center Periphery as a Concept for the Study of Social Transformation 298
Playing Games with Names 316
Works Cited 331
Index 369
[2] İbrahim Kalın(b.1971) is assistant to the Turkish President and the current Press Secretary in the Turkish Presidential Complex. He is also a senior fellow at the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at the Georgetown University.
Kalin received his B. A. from the University of Istanbul and Ph. D. from George Washington University. From 2002 to 2005 he was a faculty member at the Department of Religious Studies at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. From 2005 to 2009 he was the director of the SETA Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research based in Ankara, Turkey.
On December 11, 2014, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced that İbrahim Kalın would be the first official Turkish Presidential Press Secretary.