Feyda Sayan-Cengiz's first ethnography examines lower-class, headscarf-wearing women who work in the private sector and their precarity at work through the politics of visibility, class, and gender. The author takes issues with what she calls “culturalist lenses” that often carelessly divide women as either Islamist or secularist based on their headscarf (or lack of it). In Sayan-Cengiz's argument, such a lens not only fails to reflect the fluidity and diversity she witnesses in Turkish social life, but does so “at the expense of folding issues of social inequality into cultural difference-based social stratification” (p. 3).

The scholarly discussion on the headscarf in Turkey is dominated by questions about Islamic revivalism in the 1990s, and how, during this period, religious women started demanding modern and Western values and access to spaces such as universities and the political arenas. This literature, often unavoidably, furthered the (mis)understanding that Islamic visibility (headscarf) is the immediate indicator of religiosity, Muslimhood, or Islamism. However, Sayan-Cengiz's work ethnographically demonstrates how complex the picture is for many women, especially those from the lower class.

Beyond Headscarf Culture in Turkey's Retail Sector is composed of seven chapters, including an introduction and a conclusion. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction. Chapter 2, “The Culturalization of the Headscarf,” historicizes the political discussions around the headscarf, introducing the theoretical background as to why lower-class, headscarf-wearing women's stories might complicate the existing, often dualist representations of headscarf-wearing women in Turkey. This chapter is crucial, especially for a non-speacialist, to understand the kind of public meaning women negotiate. The author reviews post-1990s literature with a critical lens. In Chapter 3, “The World of Retail Sales in Turkey,” Sayan-Cengiz discusses the ways in which the retail market is formed in Turkey, providing insight into the variables that might affect employees. Chapter 4, “Demarcation Lines in Retail Employment,” delves into the precarious relationship between employer and employee, addressing how certain retailers refuse to hire headscarf-wearing saleswomen and how other employers exploit this ban, subjecting headscarved-women to unacceptable working conditions. This chapter demonstrates how “moving up” becomes even more challenging for lower-class women in headscarves. In Chapter 5, “Meanings Loaded on the Headscarf,” and Chapter 6, “Desire to Be Unmarked,” Sayan-Cengiz addresses women's own practices, imaginaries, negotiations, and frustrations. These final chapters focus on the ways in which women negotiate the meanings attached to their attire in various settings. Chapter 5 details long conversations the author had with informants about other headscarf-wearing women: who are more religious, conservative, upper class, and so forth. This ethnographic account is valuable in seeing the diversity and penetrating the understanding of the headscarf, not only as an indicator of Islamism or religiosity, but also as one of family, ethnicity, and class. I would also be interested in an analysis of those layers and whether class and privilege makes it easier for the religious communities to maintain the modesty boundaries. Chapter 6 revisits the idea of long gone dreams, including that of Selen, and explains how the headscarf ban, the meanings attributed to the headscarf, and employers’ exploitation of women who wear the headscarf, not only impede the possibility of “moving up,” but also, in turn, reinforce class dynamics. To a careful reader, Sayan-Cengiz's book also provides an ethnographic account of lower-class Adalet Ve Kalkinma Partisi supporters who would understandably cling to the option that might unleash job prospects to them.

The author is very careful in staying loyal to her informants, both as an ethnographer (during her data collection) and as a scholar (during her analysis). Her informants let her into their everyday lives and into their families. They freely shared their personal conflicts, hesitations, anger, and frustrations; all of which are only rarely achieved in anthropological research. This proximity is also rare in research on headscarf-wearing women in Turkey, as the very presence of the headscarf often has been associated with religiosity by the researchers, in contrast to the Turkish secularist position of the ethnographer. However, Sayan-Cengiz vigilantly draws our attention to what her informants call “half-covering,” something only non-Kemalist women would know. Women, as Sayan-Cengiz discusses throughout the book, are not covering their heads because they are necessarily devout Muslims or are careful about all the rules associated with head-covering. Rather, they are in constant negotiation with multiple social, familial, and class dynamics.

The author is also loyal to Turkish terminology as she explores headscarf wearing in a Turkish context. She does not fall into the same trap as many scholars, which is to equate Turkish basörtüsü (which literally means “headscarf”) with hijab, a term which is not used in Turkey. Sayan-Cengiz resists the tendency to sacrifice the social and historical meanings attached to terms by conflating them with terminology that belongs to another geography. This mistake reflects a larger problem in much research on Islam in Turkey, that is, ignoring the social construct of Islamic terms and their cultural specificities by immediately replacing them with their Arabic equivalents, and by doing so, further reinforcing the tendencies to homogenize Islam across the Middle East.

The sixth chapter, examining women's own practices, imaginaries, negotiations, and frustrations, is perhaps the most interesting part of the research, but also the most underdeveloped. Several of the points Sayan-Cengiz raises could have been expanded into independent chapters. The background on the mechanisms that produce women's precariousness is necessary but has taken up too much space in the book, leaving little room for how women process those limits, including the ban itself and their employer's exploitation of it.

Despite the shortcomings, this book deserves to be in university and college libraries within the section on gender and Islam/Middle East. It is also essential for researchers who work on those subjects or who are endeavoring to understand the true fabric of Turkey's nonconservative Muslim Sunni population.