cover image The Kemalists: Islamic Revival and the Fate of Secular Turkey

The Kemalists: Islamic Revival and the Fate of Secular Turkey

Muammer Kaylan. Prometheus Books, $28.98 (450pp) ISBN 978-1-59102-282-4

Poised geographically between Europe and Asia, Turkey also balances precariously between the poles of Western secularism and Islamic fundamentalism, at least according to longtime journalist Kaylan, a former editor-in-chief of Turkey's major daily, Hurriyet. This memoir cum history traces his long and colorful career in journalism, as well as his experiences with the secular education instituted by the westernizing regime of Kemal Ataturk, who helped found the Republic of Turkey in 1923. Kaylan sets out to explain to Western readers the importance of the Kemalist reform movement-which after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire sought to radically transform Turkish society along European lines-and to argue how, beginning in the 1950s, widespread corruption and (ironically) the flowering of political pluralism brought Islamic sectarianism back to the surface, along with extremism from the Marxist-Leninist far-left. Returning home in 1999 after nearly three decades of ""self-imposed exile,"" Kaylan found his country dangerously disunited, ""no longer the progressive, secularist and enlightened culture I had known."" In a somewhat meandering if often piquant narrative mixing anecdotal and historical explication and example, the author tries to steer a middle course between political extremism on the right and left. There's a tendency here, however, to paint the whole range of challenges to state power with the same broad brush of ""terrorism"" (particularly ironic in the case of the Turkish government's devastating repression of Kurdish separatism in the 1990s). At the same time, the book offers Western readers the affable and unpretentious voice of a successful newspaperman with an adventuresome career and a practiced eye on the seamier side of politics.