Ruth Braunstein is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut. Her research on the role of religion and culture in American political life has been published in the American Sociological Review, Contexts, the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, and Qualitative Sociology, among other outlets. She is the author of Prophets and Patriots: Faith in Democracy Across the Political Divide (University of California Press, 2017), based on a comparative ethnographic study of progressive faith-based community organizing and Tea Party activism, and coeditor of Religion and Progressive Activism: New Stories about Faith and Politics (NYU Press, 2017). She has previously served as Editor-at-Large and Managing Editor of The Immanent Frame, and has consulted with the SSRC’s program on Religion and the Public Sphere.
Professor Kuru’s authoritative study, written with remarkable precision, asks taboo-breaking questions and provides iconoclastic responses to them in strict accordance with the maxim facta non verba. First, it shatters the deeply internalized myth that Turkish laïcité is unquestionably sui generis and thus cannot be compared with any other case. Second, it rebuffs the widely accepted premise that Islam and secularism are inherently incompatible, and that assertive secularism would therefore be the only working model for Muslim societies. Third, it clearly shows that in its application of assertive secularism Turkey has gone far beyond its historical model, the French laïcité of the Third Republic. This exemplary piece of scholarship further offers invaluable insight into the present-day tug-of-war over secularism in Turkey.
Andrew Koppelman draws upon Kuru’s typology of secularism to posit a hypothesis “about state management of Islam, drawn from an analogous case in American law”:
Read his full post here.