7 - The Path to Progress and to God

Summary

Chapter 7 addresses the self-consciously modern religious revival of the 1940s and 1950s. It investigates the way government officials and conservative magazine editors promoted this revival as a part of a broader return to faith that encompassed the Christian West and offered a necessary corrective to the limits of positivist modernity. Across the ideological spectrum, they insisted Islam was fully compatible with modern thought and science, while holding very different ideas of what this meant. Their reform efforts won praise from many Western observers, who saw in the advent of modern religiosity proof that Turkey no longer needed the rigid secularism of the Kemalist era.