The forbidden modern: civilization and veiling

Abstract

The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling, by Nilufer Gole. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. 140 pages. Notes to p. 159. Bibl. to p. 167. Index to p. 173. $42.50 cloth; $15.95 paper. The Forbidden Modern was originally published in Turkish in 1991 as Modern Mahrem (Metis Publishers). It is a valuable addition to the studies of the veiling of women within contemporary movements. Nilufer Gole joins the ranks of such writers as Fadwa El-Guindi and Sherifa Zuhur writing on Egypt, and Fatima Mernissi and Germaine Tillion writing more generally on the Islamic world, in trying to understand a phenomenon that is widely misunderstood and that is the subject of much debate both within the Middle East and beyond. Gole also seeks to view veiled women as social actors in their own right, not merely as agents for Islamist movements. Gole writes primarily for academics, but she recognizes the relevance of her work for other audiences, including: the mass media, both regional and global; dichotomous groups of secularists and Islamists in Muslim societies, especially in Turkey; and policy makers both within the Middle East and in the West. She should be applauded for moving beyond the stance taken by many secularist Turkish intellectuals who wrote in the past. She exemplifies a growing and transforming recognition among Turkish social scientists of the importance of Islam as a topic of research. Her began with a historical event, the post-1983 Islamist veiling movement of university students in Turkey (p. 2). She eschews approaches that use external factors such as economic deprivation and social alienation to provide either theological or political explanations of veiling. She favors instead an approach that incorporates interpretations by the Islamist actors themselves, namely, the women who choose to don the veil. Thus, she utilizes a theoretical approach that originates from the question of 'meaning' rather than from a relationship of 'causality' (p. 87). Gole begins with a stimulating introduction outlining the theoretical issues that inform her approach: This book explores the significance of the veiling movement in Turkey through a multilayered analysis of power relations ranging from . . private relations to . . . [the] encounter between civilizations (p. 1). As a study of the embeddedness of gender in Islamism and modernism (p. 1), the book also illustrates the power of studies to illuminate large social and political realities. In the following two chapters, Gole's historical analysis illuminates the civilization project that occupied first the Ottoman and then the Republican Turkish elite from at least the Tanzimat reform period (1839-1876). …