In anticipation of the fiftieth anniversary of its founding, past and present members of the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) organized a roundtable for the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) entitled “MERIP's Impact on Middle East Studies.” Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, on October 14, 2020, the roundtable was conducted as a virtual webinar. The participants included Joe Stork, Judith Tucker, Zachary Lockman, Ted Swedenburg, Norma Claire Moruzzi, Jacob Mundy, and Stacey Philbrick Yadav. The roundtable was moderated by Waleed Hazbun and offered reflections about MERIP's original mission, explained how its model for “research and information” evolved, and explored how over fifty years MERIP's contributions have helped transform Middle East Studies scholarship. The following is a transcript that has been edited for clarity and length.

Turkey has been absent from the growing literature on the phenomenon of transnational Salafism. A tendency among Middle East specialists to focus on Arab regions and in Turkey on the Islamist movement and its long struggle with the Kemalist establishment has perpetuated the notion of Turkey as a category apart. This article argues that, on the contrary, Salafism is a fringe strand of Turkish Islam that began to evolve in the context of the state's effort in the 1980s to recalibrate religion as a complement to nationalism. Salafism became a topic of discussion in media and scholarly writing in Turkish religious studies faculties, while self-styled Salafi preachers trained in Saudi Arabia found a niche through publishing houses. These publishers facilitated the translation into Turkish of Arabic texts by important Saudi religious scholars in an effort to change the discursive landscape of Islam in Turkey. I show that contra assumptions of a rich Sufi tradition acting as a block against modern Salafi ideas, Salafism managed to gain a foothold in Turkey, facilitated in part by the republic's experience of secular materialism.