The Kemalists: Islamic Revival and the Fate of Secular Turkey مقاله

The Kemalists: Islamic Revival and the Fate of Secular Turkey Muammer Kaylan Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2005. 27 Book Reviews Kaylan was a leading Turkish journalist from the early 1950s until 1970, when he abruptly left the country after receiving death threats following a strongly worded front-page editorial against then-president Süleiman Demirel (pp. What Kaylan offers is a mixture between an autobiography and a polit ical narrative of modern Turkey designed for a broad, predominantly non Turkish, audience (although the book came out in Turkish in 2006). In Kaylan’s view, this was temporarily halted by Atatürk, whose radical secularization and modernization politics following the Turkish War of Independence (1919-22) represent the apex of Turkish modernity. ” For Kaylan, modern Turkish history unfolds in an almost Manichean struggle between secularist Kemalists and “[t]he fundamentalist Islamic extremists bent on establishing orthodox Muslim regimes [that] daily men ace the world with terrorism in their efforts to rid the world of secular tra ditions” (back flap cover).