Suchergebnisse

Imagining the secular nation : Mustafa Kemal and the creation of modern Turkey -- Narrating the nation : print culture and the nationalist historical narrative -- Provincial newspapers and the emergence of a national print culture -- Religious print media and the national print culture -- Muslim Turks against Russian communists : the Turkish nation in the emerging Cold War world -- Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and Mehmed the Conqueror : negotiating a national historical narrative -- Religious reactionaries or Muslim Turks? : print culture and the negotiation of national identity -- Conclusion: A Muslim national identity in modern Turkey

My engagement with the social history of the Middle East, as I embarked on graduate studies, coincided with Judith Tucker's lamentation in 1990 that it was a field understudied to the point of being largely ignored. I came to the study of this new region with training in the native history of Canada, which had introduced me to the challenges and rewards of reconstructing the stories of people who had been denied agency in a narrative dominated by European conquest and nation-building.

The article argues that to move beyond the standard nationalist narrative of Turkish history, scholars must employ new sources such as the provincial newspaper. Through a study of a religious nationalist provincial newspaper—Büyük Cihad (The Great Struggle)—from the early 1950s, it is possible to appreciate the extent and importance of a vibrant public debate concerning secularism and the place of Islam in Turkish society immediately after World War II. This debate has gone almost completely unnoticed, yet it constitutes an important foundation for understanding the present prominence of political Islam in Turkish society. Central to this debate is the person of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk: ultimately it was criticism of Turkey's founding president rather than any real threat of "religious reaction" that prompted the government's decision to suppress religious publications in early 1953.