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{ 2008 10 14 }

Generation Faithful: Youthful Voice Stirs Challenge to Secular Turks

This story appeared in the New York Times of October 14, 2008. It speaks directly to those NMH students headed off to Turkey later this fall, to the PA students who have studied Turkey and to everybody inside and outside of Turkey watching the country wrestle with it’s post-Ottoman identity. Turkey contains so many of the issues that mark our age, including the role of religion in a modern (or should I say, “post-modern”?) society. As we’ve briefly discussed in our classes, the headscarf has become a symbol or lightning rod for questions about freedom that play out differently in various places. Do a quick search on headscarves in France, Germany, Egypt and Iran to see how this one article of clothing can mean different things to different people in different countries. It has become a short-hand — but ambiguous — way of communicating one’s position on these issues, a fact that reminds us to avoid easy generalizations about Muslims, Muslim women and countries that may share Islam but not in the same ways. And, as our travelers to Turkey may see first-hand, depending upon their itinerary once there, there can be significant variation in attitudes on even basic matters within a single country or society. (Think about the U.S. right now, in full election-year mode.)

Posted by Peter Drench on Tuesday, October 14, 2008, at 7:10 am. Filed under Islam, Islam and Politics, Islam and the West, NMH-PA Media Reports, Stereotyping, Trends, Turkey, Women. Follow any responses to this post with its comments RSS feed. You can post a comment or trackback from your blog.

{ 1 } Comments

  1. Ted Thornton | October 14, 2008 at 7:42 am | Permalink

    Thanks, Peter, for this timely and useful piece! Our reading of Orhan Pamuk’s novels this summer and fall and our survey of modern Turkish political and constitutional life (to be broadened and deepened in the coming weeks with our reading of Kinzer’s book) have led us to weigh the deep divisions in the Turkish national psyche.

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