The Middle East’s modernization drives initiated in the 1800s transferred power in stages from clerics to secular officials. Turkey’s secularization under Atatürk and İnönü is the boldest effort in this vein. Other ambitious campaigns occurred in Iran under the Pahlavis, Egypt under Nasser, and Tunisia under Bourguiba. These regimes might have been expected to facilitate exits from Islam, radically reinterpret the Quran, and broaden religious freedoms generally. In fact, they simply made it easy to ignore Islam. Their ideal was to have citizens disconnect their public selves from religion, and they felt justified in imposing their preferences on the masses. Indeed, they treated certain Islamic practices as archaic and drove them out of the public realm. Just as heterodox Muslims were once repressed as heretics or apostates, so now under secular leaders the pious were persecuted as obscurantists. In the process, modernizers constricted all discourses on Islam. Quashing dissent on religious policies, they effectively replaced one form of religious repression with another. Some secularists considered their illiberal policies transitional. Religiosity would decline with economic development, they believed, and worldviews would become secularized. But resistance from the pious led, instead, to a softening of secularist repression.

Using comparative and global perspectives, this chapter places in an historical context the bitter controversies which have erupted across Europe and the Middle East in recent years over women's veiling, and especially their wearing of the face-veil or niqab. It shows how the deeper issues contained within these controversies – secularism versus religious belief, modernism versus tradition, individual freedom versus social or family coercion, identity versus integration – are not new but are strikingly prefigured by earlier conflicts. The chapter focuses particularly on the state-sponsored anti-veiling campaigns which swept across wide swathes of the Muslim world in the interwar period of high modernism, especially in Turkey and the Balkans, Iran, Afghanistan and the Soviet republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia, narratives of these campaigns revealing much about the ambitions of modernism, the triumphs of nationalism and state-building, and the struggles of class and gender.. In contrast to the accepted view, which sees female dress reform and other modernist gender policies as largely imposed by male-dominated authoritarian regimes and deeply unpopular among both men and women, the chapter emphasizes the agency of women themselves as they intervened forcefully in contributions to debates and by adopting different forms of clothing on their own initiative. Again in contrast to existing scholarship, the chapter observes that governments saw their repressive policies as primarily aimed at recalcitrant men and at defending women as they unveiled against a possibly violent male backlash. The chapter concludes by showung how, in the late twentieth-early twentieth century, veiling was reimagined, reinvented and widely readopted, becoming sometimes a hallmark of the modern Muslim woman, sometimes of the radical Islamist, once again demonstrating its profound liminality.

What can explain the rapid rise of Islamic politics in Turkey, a historically secular country? Many observers assume that the success and sustained popularity of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) reflects a religious resurgence in Turkey. But when this presumption is directly tested, evidence indicates that Turkish piety may actually be declining over time. This highlights the importance of statistical tests,leveraging variation across individuals, space, or time: they have the potential to overturn widely held assumptions and reopen key questions about the world around us. In finding no evidence of a religious resurgence in Turkey,an alternative explanation is needed. I introduce my trust-based theory of Islamic mobilization, explaining how references to Islam prime feelings of trust among those with a salient religious group identity, and how this group-based trust operates as an effective substitute for more generalized feelings of interpersonal trust, which are largely absent in Turkey and in many other Muslim countries. I contrast my trust-based theory with existing theories of Islamic-based politics and economics and preview the findings of the book, wherein I dismiss the existing explanations and offer support for mine.

Attitudes towards what we term ‘domestic violence’ are hard to locate in the ancient Greek sources, but they do emerge in a variety of literary and artistic genres which span several centuries. This chapter explores some of the key evidence and, utilising anthropological theory, asks what kind of violent treatment women received at the hands of male relations, and why. Issues of honour and shame surface as key causes, and the chapter explores the fragility of male and familial codes of conduct and the consequences of their infringement. It becomes clear that the sources on violence towards women are not so infrequently encountered as to suggest that violence did not occur often, but show that violence towards women was so matter of fact that it barely deserved mention.