ELISABETH ÖZDALGA, The Veiling Issue, Official Secularism and Popular Islam in Modern Turkey, Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Report Series, No. 33 (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1998). Pp. 125. $45.00 cloth.

Abstract

Elisabeth Özdalga's book is an important introduction to one of the issues that has been front-page news in Turkey since the 1980s. The most visible and controversial sign of the increasing participation in public discourse of Islamic revivalists has been the marked increase in numbers of women in urban spaces and institutions who wear the particular form of dress called tessetür, a public symbol of a personal commitment to a certain form of Islamic values. Özdalga's focus is timely and of interest to both a Turkish audience and a Western one, although it speaks mainly to the latter. The banning of the Islamist Welfare Party (Refah Partisi) from Turkish politics since the publication of the book, as well as the internationally noted furor surrounding the election to, and subsequent dismissal of, a headscarf-wearing woman in Parliament, show that what the author calls Turkey's “large-scale attempt to integrate Islam within the institutions of a modern, liberal democratic polity” (p. viii) continues to be a vitally important and controversial subject. Her book attends both to the symbolic power and legal status of women's clothing in public debate and to women's actual participation in the re-formations of public and private definitions of citizenship.