Since the advent of competitive politics in Turkey in 1946, Islamist parties have assumed increasing importance. During the 1970s, the National Salvation Party, headed by Necmettin Erbakan, was a participant in a series of coalition governments. The Welfare Party, also led by Erbakan, came in first (barely) in the 1995 election, catapulting its temperamental leader into the position of prime minister. In 2002, the Justice and Development Party (JDP) won an overwhelming electoral victory, capturing two-thirds of the parliamentary seats. Although the JDP denies that it is an Islamist party, its leader, the current prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has been a leading Islamist politician, including especially his stormy career as mayor of Istanbul, and both its supporters and opponents regard it as such today. The result of this dramatic rise of Islamist political forces in the formally and solidly secular Republic of Turkey has aroused a great deal of controversy. Not least of the questions raised is the popular conundrum of the compatibility of Islam and democracy.

Only recently has scholarly literature on these parties begun to appear, particularly studies based on first-hand research, as opposed to electoral analysis or perusal of materials published by the parties. The work under review here is a contribution to this growing literature. It focuses on the role of women activists in the Welfare Party. This is felicitous, as the role of women and the relations between the sexes are perhaps the most sensitive issues confronting modern Islamists. The legal order of the secular Turkish Republic is based on the principle of the legal equality of women and men. Traditional Islam, on the other hand, relegates women to secondary status. This is accentuated in various ways: by allowance of polygamy, unilateral divorce, discrimination against females in inheritance, and most visibly in public segregation of the sexes and prescription of exceptionally modest modes of dress. Modern Turkish secularism and traditional Islamic values thus appear to embody a clash of opposites. The rise of Islamist parties has therefore generally been interpreted as a threat to the survival of the secular order. This has been the particular concern of the Turkish military, which regards itself as the custodian of the Turkish state and its secular order. There is an uneasy truce between the current JDP government and the military, with public expressions of mutual respect punctuated by occasional appeals by the party to traditional values, such as a short-lived proposal to outlaw adultery.

Yesim Arat is not distracted by this pervasive political polarization. She is interested in what attracts Islamist women to active political participation, how they were recruited, how they recruit others, and what values they manifest. She undertook a series of intensive interviews, most with activist women involved with the so-called Welfare Party in 1998 (i.e., shortly after the party was outlawed). She also interviewed some activists in the Virtue Party, which replaced the Welfare Party

Most of the interviews were conducted in Istanbul (including then-Mayor Erdogan), the remainder predominantly in Ankara, with one conducted in the provincial city of Bursa. This immediately raises the question of representativeness. Most of the population of Turkey is provincial or rural. While the western regions and the major cities account for a large proportion of the national populace, it cannot be assumed that the views manifested there are necessarily exemplary of the whole country. On the other hand, limited resources undoubtedly played a role in geographically skewing the sample of interviews. In addition, national political power is based in these more developed parts of the country, so that the interviews are valuable in their own right.

Arat raises interesting questions (pp. 9–10): How did these Islamist women carve out their identity? How did they use that identity to “renegotiate power”? “What does it mean to assume an Islamic self and live Islamic lives in a secular context?” “How is an appeal to Islam reconciled with demands of political participation in a democracy?” The subjects of her interviews were all members of the Welfare Party's Ladies Commissions, specifically organized to mobilize female voters. These commissions existed alongside other organizations similarly designed to support the party, such as youth, professional associations, workers, civil servants, retired persons, and the handicapped. All of them presumably were subordinate to the administrative organs of the party through which power, concentrated at the center as has been true of all Turkish political parties, was exercised. Thus, there was a solid glass ceiling above which women could not rise (although Arat notes wryly that the secular order in Turkey manifests a similar pattern).

Many of the women in this study were raised in a secular environment and deliberately chose a religious lifestyle, in some cases against the vehement opposition of family members (one was the daughter of an army officer whose family had vigorously supported the young Bülent Ecevit, a strong secularist and social democrat). Many were well educated (including degrees in law, dentistry, divinity, and literature). All were married and had families. For many of them, the headscarf played a crucial role, in some cases interrupting university studies amid highly charged controversies pitting students against university administrators and faculty. For some, marriage presented problems, substituting a patriarchal husband for parental domination. All of them, however, found ways to assert their independence, step outside the family home, and engage in independent activities under the auspices of the Welfare Party. Thus, party activity became a means of reconciling the modern pursuit of individual fulfillment with the traditional demand for respect of the family and the marriage bond.

This is perhaps the key to the author's findings. She argues that despite the popular conception of polarization between secularism and Islamism, in fact the two have become intertwined. For example, in discussing the worldviews of these women, Arat finds that “[t]he women with the headscarves who belittled the threat of Islamic fundamentalism insisted on their own version of Islam that was ultimately based on a unique Turkish experience. They did not understand why they could be seen as a threat to the secular state, because their understanding of Islam was shaped with the values and norms of this secular state. They respect the secular or liberal concepts of justice and fairness…. [T]he political nature of their headscarves did not mean they were opposed to a secular democratic Republic that upheld respect for the individual. Women who covered their heads and worked for the party wanted to operate within the framework of a secular Republic where religion was allowed to be more publicly visible” (p. 107).

These religious women wanted the headscarf but opposed polygamy; “they wanted an Islamic state because they associated it with a moral secular state” (p. 108). In other words, Islamist women were reinterpreting Islam to make it more compatible with liberalism.

Rethinking Islam and Liberal Democracy is a very useful and informative book. It is hoped that this study will pave the way for more extensive research in the future. It is possible, after all, that Turkey will demonstrate that Islam and liberal democracy can be mutually compatible.