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Dynamics
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Book Review: Berna Turam : Between Islam and the State: The Politics of
Engagement. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007, 223 pp. $21.95 (pbk),
ISBN 978 0804755016
Hafeez Jamali
Cultural Dynamics 2007 19: 329
DOI: 10.1177/0921374007080298

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Book Review

329

BOOK R EV IEW

Berna Turam
Between Islam and the State: The Politics of Engagement. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2007, 223 pp. $21.95 (pbk), ISBN 978
0804755016.
Berna Turams Between Islam and the State: The Politics of Engagement
is a political ethnography of everyday manifestations of an increasingly
cooperative relationship between the Islamist movement and the secular
Republican state in Turkey. Contrary to popular accounts that, depending
on the commentators viewpoint, describe this relationship as either a
confrontational one in which the Turkish state or the Islamist movement
appears to be winning or as the fusion of Islam and the state, Turam argues
that it can be best described as an ongoing process of partial engagement
in which both state actors and Islamist leadership test the limits of their
agreement on the states role in society and forge workable compromises.
Through a review of historical evidence and her own multi-sited ethnographic
work in Turkey, Kazakhstan and the United States with the members of
the Islamist Gulen movement, she suggests that the engagement between
Islamists and the state took place largely outside regular political channels
in the associational public domain through the movements voluntary work
in the educational sector. This rapprochement between Islam and the state
in Turkey was facilitated by a minimal level of agreement between the
two over basic tenets of the Republican nationalist project such as secular
democracy (as opposed to an Islamic state), the necessary role of the armed
forces in protecting the nation and a shared sense of belonging to the Turkish
nation (as opposed to the global Islamic community or Ummah).
Turam argues that due to the Turkish militarys suspicion of Islamists
political agenda in mainstream electoral politics and the monopoly of the
civil society by Kemalist secularists, the followers of the Gulen movement,
led by Fethullah Gulen, attempted to carve out a space for Islamist
values and way of life in the inner spiritual domain of the nation while
subscribing to liberal democratic principles of pluralism and religious
and cultural diversity through their interactions in the public domain. In

19(2/3): 329332. [DOI: 10.1177/0921374007080298] http://cdy.sagepub.com

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Cultural Dynamics 19(2/3)

Chapter 3, she illustrates this bifurcation through the example of boarding

schools set up and administered by members of the Gulen movement. In
these schools, students are taught western science, computer skills and
English language and are encouraged to embrace modern technology,
secular values and competitive entrepreneurship in the classroom. She
points out, however, that they follow a strict moral discipline and are
expected to lead pious lives during their time outside the classroom in
their residence in the schools dormitories. According to her, private life
does not mean individual or familial privacy in the western sense. Rather
it refers to the inner life of the community or Gemeinschaft. This division
between inside and outside allows the movement to use its fundraisers and
school system to help the poor and promote deserving students, thereby
contributing to the upward mobility of its followers and earning nationwide
recognition for its work while being sensitive to the concerns of Turkish
state and secular civil society actors.
Turam maintains that Islamists dedication and voluntary work as
well as their willingness to engage the state and civil society have earned
them recognition in the eyes of the representatives of the state who no longer
see their activities as a threat but rather as an opportunity for preparing
morally superior and internationally competitive citizens at home and for
projecting a better image of the nation abroad. In particular, the movements
willingness to open up its educational and other philanthropic activities to
the scrutiny of the courts and the powerful Turkish military has allayed
state authorities fears. In this way, the movement accommodates the
concerns of state actors and allows them to assert their right to scrutinize
its activities while state actors acknowledge the movements legitimacy and
independent sphere of action in return. She further argues that this model
of non-confrontational engagement with the state is unique to the Turkish
Islamist movement and it laid the groundwork for cooperation between
Islamist political parties such as the incumbent Justice and Development
Party (AKP) and state authorities at a time when elsewhere in the
Middle East the state and Islamist movements have been locked in bitter
confrontation.
Successive chapters of this book chart the trajectory of encounters
between the Islamist Gulen movement and the Turkish state in different
domains. Chapter 2 describes how Islamists and the state negotiate the
meaning of secularism by working out the boundaries of public and private
spheres. Chapter 3 discusses contestation in the eld of education over
the kind of values that were being taught to children. Chapter 4 highlights
the cooperation between the state and Islamists in promoting the Turkish
nation state and engendering pan-Turk politics in Central Asia. Chapter 5
points out the extent of agreement between the Islamist and Republican

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Book Review

331

male elite over the role of women in the nationalist project despite their
rhetorical differences. Chapter 6 describes how the AKP institutionalized
the cooperation between Islam and the state in the political domain which
led to the pro-Islamist partys rise to power in Turkey.
Turams analysis makes two important contributions to the available
literature on the relationship between Islamist movements and the state
in the Middle East. First, she challenges the myth of homogeneity and
structural integrity of Islamist movements. She shows that the Islamic
revivalist movement in Turkey was internally heterogeneous with some of
its offshoots like Gulen deciding to cooperate with the state while others
preferred to challenge it. The movements methods of engagement were
locally specic and the outcomes of this engagement were historically
contingent and could not be predicted in advance. Second, drawing on
Tocquevilles formulation of civil society, she highlights the vertical
linkages between the Gulen movement and the state that led to their
mutual recognition of each others role. Her analysis shows that these
vertical channels linked rather than divided Islam and the state, thereby
facilitating institutional reform and the consolidation of liberal democracy in
Turkey.
However, there are some weaknesses in her argument which
constrain her analysis. Despite her attempts to maintain a critical distance,
she appears to be heavily invested in the liberal nationalist project in Turkey
and elides a discussion of class and ethnic dimensions of the Islamstate
encounter which obscure the problematic relationship of Turkey with its
ethnic minorities and the implications of Islamists embrace of neoliberal
policies for their grass-root followers in the rural hinterlands. In her grand
narrative of Islam and the state, minorities of non-Turkish descent such
as Armenians and Kurds only surface, if at all, in summary descriptions
like population exchange and the elimination of Armenians, which reect
insensitivity to minority concerns.
In addition, her reliance on a liberal democratic notion of civil society
leads to portrayal of the Islamstate encounter as essentially a cooperative
one whereas historical and contemporary ethnographic evidence presented
in her book could be interpreted as pointing to a quest for hegemony
between different Islamist factions as well as between the Gulen movement
and the state. Her approach also takes away from the violence and coercion
exercised by the Turkish state in confronting different Islamist factions. One
is tempted to ask of Turam whether she endorses a hegemonic compromise
between one Islamist faction and the Turkish state just because both
happen to subscribe to a secular liberal nationalist rhetoric and a neoliberal
economic agenda. She also does not explore the cultish devotion of Gulen
members to their leader, Fethullah Gulen, in the depth which it should have

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Cultural Dynamics 19(2/3)

received, considering his paramount role in setting the direction of the

movement.
This is an important text for students and scholars interested in
understanding the relationship between Islam and the state in the Middle
East but its conclusions should be taken with a pinch of salt.
Hafeez Jamali
University of Texas

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