In November of 2002, the Justice and improvement social gathering swept to victory within the Turkish parliamentary elections. as a result of the party's Islamic roots, its electoral triumph has sparked a number of questions either in Turkey and within the West: Does the social gathering harbor a mystery Islamist time table? Will the hot govt search to overturn approximately a century of secularization stemming from Kemal Atatürk's early-twentieth-century reforms? such a lot essentially, is Islam suitable with democracy?

In this penetrating paintings, M. Hakan Yavuz seeks to respond to those questions, and to supply a finished research of Islamic political identification in Turkey. He starts off within the early 20th century, whilst Kemal Atatürk led Turkey via a means of quick secularization and beaten Islamic competition to his authoritarian rule. Yavuz argues that, seeing that Atatürk's loss of life in 1938, although, Turkey has been steadily relocating clear of his militant secularism and experiencing "a quiet Muslim reformation." Islamic political identification isn't really homogeneous, says Yavuz, yet should be glossy and revolutionary in addition to conservative and almost certainly authoritarian. whereas the West has commonly visible Kemalism as an engine for reform opposed to "reactionary" political Islam, actually the Kemalist institution has routinely used the "Islamic risk" as an excuse to prevent democratization and hence carry directly to strength. Yavuz bargains an account of the "soft coup" of 1997, during which the Kemalist military-bureaucratic institution overthrew the democratically elected coalition executive, which was once led via the pro-Islamic Refah get together. He argues that the smooth coup plunged Turkey right into a renewed legitimacy concern that could in simple terms be resolved through the liberalization of the political method. The ebook ends with a dialogue of the latest election and its implications for Turkey and the Muslim world.

Yavuz argues that Islamic social pursuits should be vital brokers for selling a democratic and pluralistic society, and that the Turkish instance holds long-term promise for the remainder of the Muslim international. in accordance with broad fieldwork and interviews, this paintings deals a cosmopolitan new realizing of the function of political Islam in a single of the world's such a lot strategically vital countries.