Islam and Secularity: The Future of Europe's Public Sphere

Public Planet Books

by Nilüfer Göle

In Islam and Secularity Nilüfer Göle takes on two pressing the transforming relationship between Islam and Western secular modernity and the impact of the Muslim presence in Europe. Göle shows how the visibility of Islamic practice in the European public sphere unsettles narratives of Western secularism. As mutually constitutive, Islam and secularism permeate each other, the effects of which play out in embodied and aesthetic practices and are accompanied by fear, anxiety, and violence. In this timely book, Göle illuminates the recent rethinking of secularism and religion, of modernity and resistance to it, of the public significance of sexuality, and of the shifting terrain of identity in contemporary Europe.

 

280 pages, Paperback

First published October 23, 2015

About the author

Nilüfer Göle (born 1953) is a prominent Turkish sociologist and a leading authority on the political movement of today's educated, urbanized, religious Muslim women. From 1986 to 2001 a professor at the Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, she is currently Directrice d'études at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Centre d’Analyse et d’Intervention Sociologiques (CADIS), in Paris. Göle is the author of "Interpénétrations: L’Islam et l’Europe" and "The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling". Through personal interviews, Göle has developed detailed case studies of young Turkish women who are turning to the tenets of fundamental Islamic gender codes. Her sociological approach has also produced a broader critique of Eurocentrism with regard to emerging Islamic identities at the close of the twentieth century. She has explored the specific topic of covering, as well as the complexities of living in a multicultural world.

Reviews

[Derek Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is repetitive, because it is a collection of previous speeches and papers. But it still deserves four stars. Critical and original, Gole has done a lot to shape my understanding of the mutual encounter, which is aesthetic as much as it is "political," between Islam and Europe.