Review of Güneş Murat Tezcür, Muslim Reformers in Iran and Turkey: The Paradox of Moderation

Abstract

As the Arab revolts continue to unfold in the Middle East, an increasing debate over the emerging Islamic political actors takes place: are they post-Islamist activists as some scholars lately point out (see, for example, Asef Bayat’s works: 2007, Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn, Stanford University Press, and, 2010, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East, Stanford University Press) or typical political Islamists who have alliances with various segments of their societies? The case of the Muslim Brotherhood after the Egyptian unrest has put these questions straight. Is it a new era of post-Islamist turn in the Middle East? Or, is it a typical revolutionary episode in which moderates overthrow the government in the first place, and later, radicals take over– a trend noted for the Russian revolution to the Iranian revolution? At the center of these debates, we often see two non-Arab countries, i.e. Iran and Turkey, which are generally depicted in a mutually exclusive duality in the Western media: can the Muslim Brotherhood internalize liberal democratic values as the Muslim reformers in Turkey did or will it be the engine of new Islamic Republic? In this sense, Tezcur’s scholarly analysis is a very timely contribution that provides a critical outlook in the wake of the speculative media comments on the emerging Islamic actors. Tezcur’s book draws our attention to a quite interesting fact: the most prominent post-Islamist movements in the Middle East have emerged in two dissimilar contexts, i.e. Iran and Turkey. Analyzing the Reform Front (RF) in Iran and the Justice and Development Party (JDP) in Turkey, the author offers the first systematic and only comparative analysis of Muslim reformers in these greatly different Cont Islam (2013) 7:237–239 DOI 10.1007/s11562-011-0161-z