Secular State And Religious Society

Ever since the highly controversial appointment of a pious president in the secular Turkish Republic in 2007, both the Turkish state and society have been deeply divided over the issue of piety and Muslim politics. The essays in this book reveal and analyze specific affinities between the types of secularisms and pieties in a nation-state, by highlighting that secular state and the devout are neither friends nor strangers.

Through ongoing interactions between the state and pious actors, state secularism and religious society mutually form, inform and transform each other. The contributors use fresh data and a variety of primary research methods to explore all the facets of the state-society relationship. They consider the implications of their findings for freedom and democracy in the state, while challenging impartial and reductionist views that represent dynamic politics as a zero-sum game, such as Islamization of the market and/or the state, or secularization of Islam and the end of Islamic politics.

Review: How do we account for the relationship between the secular state and pious society? Rather than viewing the two as mutually exclusive, the studies in this volume, built on the Turkish experience, skillfully illustrate how a secular state can engage and accommodate the exigencies of a religious society.

The lesson may be highly instructive to the emerging democracies in the Middle East today.'--Asef Bayat, professor of Sociology and Middle East Studies, University of Illinois