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Continuity and Change in Turkish Culture: Some Critical Remarks on Modern Mahrem

A convergence of intellectual trends in the world and in Turkey over the past two decades have led to a widening debate on various institutions and aspects of "modernity" i.e. the nation state, centralized political structures, cultural uniformity, relations with minority groups and religion. In Turkey, Kemalism, a term often used in a generic sense to refer to a wide range of ideas and institutionalized forms of behaviour, has become a specific reference for critical viewpoints. One major aspect of Kemalism which is vigorously taken up in intellectual debates is its approach to the place of religion in society and its relation with other aspects of social and political life. In her recent work on educated Islamic women wearing "turban" in areas which are identified as strongholds of secularism ("Modern Mahrem" as the description goes) Niliifer Gole attempts to explicate the experience of Turkish modernity which she identifies with Kemalism. Modern Mahrem is a thoroughly interesting book, full of new ideas, original views and important contributions to the literature on Turkish culture, and has indeed a remarkable style of presentation. At the expense of doing injustice to the wealth of evidence and the richness of some of its assertions, I shall limit the present discussion to a criticism of a line of reasoning and a series of background assumptions which seem to emerge from Gble's analysis. What makes Gole's book stimulating to read is the main crux of her thesis which involves the combination of two levels of interpretation politically initiated cultural models of modernity and the ways they reconstitute gender relations in society. According to the author, what lies at the centre of her analysis is the way "modernity" and Islam have provided diametrically opposed cultural definitions of feminine gender roles and woman's social position in the Turkish context. The specificity of Kemalism as a politically initiated cultural project, Gole argues, resided in its definition of Islam as the diametric opposite of Westernization, modernity, and universal civilization. Islam was thus