Anatolia Junction

Marcia Sweet, former editor of the Queen’s Quarterly, is an
information consultant and freelance editor.

Anatolia Junction explores the renewal of fundamentalist Islam in
Turkey, a country that has been a secular state for 75 years and is
described by the author as “the great laboratory of Westernization in
the world of Islam.” Reed traces Turkish Islamic politics from the
Ottoman Empire through the Young Turk revolution to the Turkish
Republic. He uses as his focus the life of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi
(1877–1960); this multitalented and complex agitator, preacher,
theologian, soldier, spy, and public figure boldly challenged both
revolutionaries and government leaders on their ethical behavior and
secular commitment, for which stance he was jailed or banished on many
occasions.

Reed provides an extensive introduction to the history and teachings of
the Sufis, the Sunnis, and other Islamic sects, as well as those of
other religions that have existed in Turkey for centuries. The book also
makes for an interesting travelogue: Reed takes the reader into some of
the most remote and beautiful mountain areas of Turkey, where Emergency
Rule requires permission to enter and curfews are imposed by the army or
the Kurdish insurgents.

One cannot but feel sympathy for the population’s Muslim majority,
who are unwilling participants in the waves of “modernization” that
have changed their religious culture. Enforced by military regimes, the
policy of assimilation resulted in the expulsion and criminalization,
successively, of Armenians, Greeks, and Kurds.

Lay readers will find the book tough sledding. There are no glossaries,
organizational trees, chronologies, or explanatory footnotes to help
clarify the complex ethnic, religious, and cultural composition of
Turkey and Islam. Where Anatolia Junction succeeds is in showing readers
in the West that Islam is not a monolith, but “a rich and complex
mosaic.”