Following the trajectories of the Iranian Reform Front (RF) and the Turkish Justice and Development Party (JDP) from 1990–2010, Güneş Murat Tezcür claims the two parties represent the forces of Muslim reformism. Although highly desirable, such comparative studies especially among non-Arabic countries are uncommon in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. The difficulty of such comparisons stems from fundamental historical differences. In the case of Turkey and Iran, differences in religious history (Sunni v. Shia), imperial past (Ottoman v. Safavids/Qachars), regime type (radical secularism/parliamentary democracy v. secular monarchism/radical Islamic republicanism), political economy (capitalist v. rentier state), intellectual roots (sophisticated reformist intellectuals v. intellectually shallow political pragmatists), and last, but not least, in foreign affairs (affiliated and supported by Western institutions such as NATO and EU v. US support under the Shah followed by siege mentality and isolationism during the Revolution).

Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including ethnographic observations, interviews, electoral results, surveys, macro-level socioeconomic and demographic data, Tezcür successfully tackles these great challenges finding meaningful political patterns in both countries while also testing and showing the paradoxes of the famous “moderation” theory in an “Islamic” context. The theory, originally based on European socialist-Marxist and Christian democratic parties in the 1920s and 1930s, argues that radicals organized into electoral parties will likely develop centrist and vote-maximizing platforms; the parties will act moderately, especially under the threat of repression; as the parties grow, organizational survival takes priority over ideology; ideological moderation takes place as strategic and organizational interests change; and, that ideological and behavioral moderation are conducive to democratic transformation.

In Chapters 1 and 2, Tezcür engages moderation theory, and other scholarly literature, endorsing the first and second propositions, but revising the third. He argues “organizational survival gains priority over ideological lines as long as party members are motivated by selective incentives or believers have no alternative.” He also challenges the fourth and fifth propositions: “ideological moderation precedes, facilitates or accompanies behavioral change” and “behavioral moderation may be pernicious for democratic transformation under certain historical conditions” (36). Although central to Tezcür's argument, and discussed somewhat repetitiously in the first two chapters, moderation theory is not effectively integrated into the rest of the work. Chapter 3 surveys the literature on the relationship between Islam and democracy while the fourth analyzes experiments with secularism and democratization. The national institutional environments are dealt with in Chapter 5, particularly “guardianship,” i.e. the clergy in Iran and secular establishment in Turkey. Tezcür reduces the secular establishment in Turkey to the military and judiciary thereby downplaying the role of universities, media, and intellectuals. While he rightly argues that the evolution of reformers was shaped by their struggle with the guardians for political legitimacy and power, he disregards dialectical learning and evolution of the guardians themselves. Chapters 6 and 7 deal with the evolution of Muslim reformers in Iran and Turkey, especially the rapid rise of the RF and the JDP as well as the fall of the former. In Chapter 8, he discusses the July 2007 election results in Turkey and the March 2008 elections and protests in Iran.

Tezcür claims that ideological moderation of the RF and the JDP did not take place in Iran or Turkey as a result of political inclusion since they were already moderate (41). In so arguing, he assumes that both the RF and the JDP are monoliths. From the beginning, however, both parties were composed of different groups. The RF included moderate clergy, leftists, liberals, and other disillusioned ex-revolutionaries. Likewise, the JDP is not just an offspring of the National Outlook (Milli Görüş) Movement or mostly of Sufi origin (9, 86), but, somewhat similar to Turgut Özal's Motherland Party in the 1980s, it is composed of different types of Islamists (undefined in the book), right-wing politicians, and liberals. The JDP also has a proportionally small, but intellectually powerful group of ex-radical Islamists. As predicated by classical moderation theory, these radical Islamists (similar to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Nahda in Tunisia), increasingly curbed their anti-systemic and anti-capitalist rhetoric once they became part of the electoral and legal system.

The RF and the JDP are particularly difficult to compare because of the fall of the former in 2002 and the rise, and continuing power, of the latter since 2002. Since both parties came from different intellectual backgrounds, and are fighting against different political systems, the RF has to appear more Islamist than it actually is and the JDP has to appear more secularist (13). Perhaps both the moderation theory and Tezcür miss the point: once moderation takes place – sometimes for tactical reasons – there is no assurance the actors will remain moderate. When the parties feel relatively free from the “guardians,” they may engage in some of their earlier behavioral and ideological radicalism imposing their agenda on society, which is what some claim about the JDP today. In that regard, rather than calling the JDP a post-Islamist entity (156), it would be more accurate to call it a neo-Islamist party. The author is right, however, in saying that Muslim reformism has yet to come to terms with social pluralism (79).

Despite these issues, Tezcür's work is a well-written political history of the last two decades in Iran and Turkey, a substantial contribution to the study of Muslim politics, and provides a much needed revision of the “eurocentric” theory of moderation.