In the last decade, Turkey's rise as a regional power that has experienced rapid economic growth and has forged a forceful Middle East foreign policy is increasingly drawing the attention of policy makers and scholars. The Arab Spring and the ongoing debates about the possibility of democratization in the Middle East increase the importance of studying Turkey to understand the relationship between Islam and democratic principles. Thus, Berna Turam's edited volume on religion and secular state in Turkey is a timely addition to the literature.

This edited volume brings together a collection of articles examining state and society relations in Turkey. The editor begins by noting that the existing scholarship on religion and politics overemphasizes the confrontation between the secular state and the religious society as the dominant division in Turkish politics. According to this view, religious actors in society and the secular Turkish state are in inherent conflict with one another. Turam notes that this perception of the state-society interactions, in Turkey in particular and in other Muslim countries in the Middle East in general, is overly simplistic and unrealistic. In contrast to this common misconception, the relationship between the state and society is a dynamic one. Over time, as a result of many interactions with each other, the secular state and religious actors transform each other.

Several of the chapters in the volume illustrate the ways in which the Turkish state has been actively involved in religion. The first three chapters take the reader back to the founding years of the Turkish Republic and show that the state, though founded on the principle of secularism, was actively involved in controlling, redefining, and using religion as it saw fit. For example, religion played an important role in the education policies of the early Republic. Even now, through the Diyanet (Directorate of Religious Affairs), the state disseminates information about a particular version of Islam, and thus does not repress religion from the public sphere, but rather controls it. Several chapters in the volume focus on more recent instances of cooperation between religious societal actors and the state. One of the contributors, for instance, promotes the idea that the religious in Turkish society are at least as loyal to the secular state as others. Another contributor argues that as a result of globalization and increased engagement with free market economics, religious actors in the society changed and secularized.

Overall, the idea that secular state and religious society constantly shape and change each other is the recurring theme in this volume. However, even though the volume includes chapters that illustrate how religious actors have changed over time, it does not give the reader enough of an idea about how the state has changed. Thus, the reader is left wondering whether the interactions between secular state and religious society only lead to changes in religious society and leave the state intact. Indeed, many critics of the Justice and Development Party government argue that it is altering secular state institutions to make them more religious.

Second, the volume raises some important but unaddressed questions about the future of Turkish democracy. I am particularly curious about the implications of acknowledging the importance of dynamic interactions between the secular state and religious societal actors. What does the existence of a more dynamic relationship between state and religious actors mean for the stability and longevity of Turkish democracy? Similarly, given that the editor in the first chapter emphasizes the relevance of state-society relationships in Turkey for understanding similar dynamics in other Muslim societies in the Middle East, the volume would benefit from a discussion of the implications for democracy in the Middle East. These are especially pressing issues given the turmoil in countries such as Egypt and Tunisia, which are experiencing tensions between religious and secular forces that held power before the Arab Spring.

To sum, Secular State and Religious Society is an interesting study that highlights the importance of moving away from the commonly held view that the secular state and religious actors are in inherent conflict with each other. The volume suggests that future work needs to explore when and why the secular and the religious cooperate with and change each other.