Muslim Civil Society and the Politics of Religious Freedom in Turkey by Jeremy Walton, Oxford University Press, 2017, 264 pp., $99 (hardcover) ISBN 9780190658977

There is a strong body of ethnographic work on secularism, political Islam, Islamic civil society organizations, and religious minorities in Turkey. What sets apart Walton’s monograph is that it is the first ethnography directly tackling how the politics of religious freedom have taken shape within the heterogeneous field of Muslim civil society vis-à-vis the constrictions of statist sovereignty under the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government. Based on the multi-sited fieldwork he conducted between 2005 and 2007, Walton provides an engaging and erudite ethnographic survey of diverse Muslim civil society organizations (CSOs hereafter) championing religious liberty. A masterful ethnographer adopting the role of a flaneur, Walton takes his readers on a series of excursions to the sites that correspond to multiple modalities of public Islam in Turkey as well as chronicling the diverse “counterpublic” spaces and temporal practices of Muslim CSOs such as the Risale-i Nur reading circles, religiously-inspired academic conferences, Cem performances, and various museums and memorial sites.

Overview