Synopses & Reviews
Review
"Nilüfer Göle's insistence on the 'interpenetration' of Muslim and European experience is a major contribution, offering incisive theoretical formulations. In explicating the mutual interactions and transformations that arise from the conflicts and anxieties that accompany the proximity of Islam within Europe, she comments in new and insightful ways about Muslim/European relations. Göle is a major thinker who deserves more prominence."
Review
"The secular is never neutral, but it has been deployed in particularly challenging ways in relation to Islam. Nilüfer Göle's discussion in Islam and Secularity takes up the shifting projects and stances that shape this relationship, especially in Turkey and France, but in ways that are of global significance."
Synopsis
In Islam and Secularity Nilüfer Göle examines the transforming relationship between Islam and Western secular modernity and the impact of the Muslim presence in Europe. She demonstrates that Islam and secularism are mutually constitutive, constantly changing, and that the presence of Islam unsettles dominant narratives of Western modernism.
Synopsis
In Islam and Secularity Nilufer Gole takes on two pressing issues: the transforming relationship between Islam and Western secular modernity and the impact of the Muslim presence in Europe. Gole 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, Gole 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."
About the Author
Nilüfer Göle is Professor of Sociology at the Centre d'Études Sociologiques et Politiques Raymond Aron and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris). She is the author of Islam in Europe: The Lure of Fundamentalism and the Allure of Cosmopolitanism and editor of Islam and Public Controversy in Europe.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
1. Public Sphere beyond Religious-Secular Dichotomies 1
2. Secular Modernity in Question 31
3. Religious-Secular Frontiers: State, Public Sphere, and the Self 53
4. Web of Secular Power: Civilization, Space, and Sexuality 73
5. The Gendered Nature of the Public Sphere 103
6. Public Islam: New Visibilities and New Imaginaries 135
7. Public Culture, Art, and Islam: Turkish-Delight in Vienna 161
8. Europe's Trouble with Islam: What Future? 193
Notes 227
Bibliography 243
Index 257