Umut Uzer's An Intellectual History of Turkish Nationalism offers a textual analysis of the ideational grounds and developments of Turkish nationalism from the late Ottoman Empire to the present. The book's overarching argument is that in the course of its “ideological odyssey,” Turkish nationalism has evolved from a modern, secular, progressive, and even revolutionary idea—which the author loosely associates with early Kemalist thinking—to a “conservative” and patriarchal ideational formation that embrace traditional, exclusionary, and Islamic values. Uzer mainly credits the transition to multiparty democracy in the 1950s for this transformation but also emphasizes other factors, including the republic's gradual welcoming of Islamic ideals and groups into political life, the Cold War dynamics and anxieties about communism, and urbanization. In mapping this transformation, the book covers an impressive range of primary literature including not only the nationalist thinkers such as Ziya Gökalp who commonly feature in studies of Turkish nationalism, but also, more usefully, neglected figures such as Nihal Atsız, the influential proponent of Turkish racism. Indeed, the book's strongest contribution is its comprehensive analysis of racist thought and ethnic nationalism in modern Turkey. Thus, in addition to Uzer's analysis of the racial components of Turkish nationalism, the expansive primary sources contained within the book make it an important and useful resource for students and scholars interested in the region and era, but who cannot read Ottoman and Turkish.

There are, however, three criticisms that could be raised against this otherwise important book. The first concerns style. Despite bringing together close readings of an impressive body of literature, some of which appears for the first time in English, the texts covered are not situated within a broader theoretical structure. Nor does the book offer a theoretically rich account of them. Instead, the presentation takes the form of descriptions and summaries of different texts, leaving the reader craving a more robust analysis of their theoretical depth and structure. The second point concerns the book's main argument about the evolution of Turkish nationalist thought from a relatively progressive and revolutionary ideational form to a more right wing and Islamist ideology. While not novel in the scholarship, this argument endorses a somewhat romanticized depiction of early republican nationalist thought. Uzer notes in passing the more problematic racist and xenophobic components and violent manifestations of nationalism in the late Ottoman and early republican era, but he does not fully reckon with the theoretical and political legacy of these components. For example, while violent and exclusionary outbursts from the Armenian genocide of 1915 and the 1942 wealth tax placed on non-Muslims to the Istanbul pogrom of 6–7 September 1955 are invoked, they are quickly put aside to sustain the narrative of the progressive nature of early nationalist thinking and practice. The same tendency marks Uzer's handling of “nonprogressive” elements in the thought of figures such as Gökalp, noting them only to quickly render them as not so significant, rather than engaging with their theoretical implications and consequences. It seems to me that a more comprehensible theoretical account and engagement with such nonprogressive elements is necessary to understand the complex dynamics shaping the development of nationalist thinking in Turkey—and one that resists the homogenizing tendencies undergirding Uzer's account.

A further consequence of this approach is the book's tendency to treat the trajectory from progressive to conservative nationalism as a neater phenomenon than it actually is. In particular, several post-1950s developments that indicate a more complex and ambiguous relationship between liberal and conservative, and secular and religious attitudes are not sufficiently engaged with in the book. Some of these include, for instance, the neoliberalization of the economy and political arena during the late 1980s and early 1990s, as well as the early years of Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP; Justice and Development Party) government. Both of these periods witnessed ideologically hybrid and often novel engagements with market-oriented ideals of individualism, (neo)liberal rights and freedoms, gender, the public sphere, multiethnicity, and the peace process. While none of these developments refute Uzer's observations about the increasingly more conservative and Islamist character of Turkish nationalism, they complicate the thesis of a steady and linear increase in this direction. A more thorough engagement with such periods would have offered a more comprehensive understanding of the ambivalent, incomplete, and sometimes paradoxical dialogues between progressive and conservative ideas and secular and religious sensibilities in the transformation of nationalist ideas and attitudes in Turkey.

And the final point I would like to make concerns the book's concluding argument. Uzer suggests that as a result of the transformations of nationalism and due to the increasing importance of religious attachments in politics, the former has lost its force in Turkey and is no longer an all powerful discourse or practice to reckon with. The problem with this argument is not simply that recent historical developments and the AKP's revival of an aggressive and exclusionary ethnic nationalism have come to refute it empirically. More importantly, Uzer's analysis takes the spoken claims of party representatives announcing “postnationalist politics” at face value rather than submitting them to critical scrutiny on the basis of actual policies and developments. The book's analysis would have been more accurate if it took into consideration the actual performance of governing institutions, especially on issues concerning national and religious minorities, in addition to discursive disavowals of nationalism. Such an approach would have arguably shown not an end of nationalism under AKP governance, which the book claims to be the case, but continuing systematic discrimination against non-Turks and non-Muslims as well as Alevis. It would have further prevented the opposition Uzer sometimes reasserts between religion and nationalism. A growing body of scholars including Talal Asad (Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003]) and Saba Mahmood (Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015]) have recently drawn attention to the crucial roles the nation-state and national ideologies have played in the (re)structuring and regulation of the religious sphere and sensibilities. Scholars such as Peter van der Veer, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Philip Gorski further utilized the theoretical framework of religious nationalism to emphasize the manner in which religious and nationalist ideas compete and complement each other in contemporary nationalisms. Rather than a simple trumping of religion over nationalism, contemporary national governance and nationalist ideological dynamics in Turkey represent the more complex and ambiguous interplay between religion and nationalism, and religious and nationalist attachments, that these studies emphasize. An engagement with this critical literature on the relationship of the nation state to religion, and the religious nationalism theoretical framework would have therefore enriched the book's analysis of the continuing transformations of Turkish nationalism under AKP rule—and thereby enabled a theoretically richer and more accurate account of the role of religion and religious attachments in contemporary Turkish politics.