Islam's Marriage with Neo-Liberalism: State Transformation in Turkey Book

Required reading for anyone interested in the politics of any Muslim-majority country.

My only real caveat is that Lewis tends to fall into the historian's trap of over-essentializing contemporary Islamic societies. For a scholar with a deep knowledge of the Muslim world's remote past, the natural temptation is to put maximum emphasis on ways in which the past controls the present -- and to give short shrift, I sometimes think, to the extent to which Muslim and non-Muslim societies are also being shaped by a common set of *contemporary* social forces.

In the interest of fairness: I do notice that our Afghan driver, whose English isn't too bad, tends to confuse the words "king" and "president" when he talks about previous rulers of the country.

And when I was in a taxi last week with a cabbie trying to ask what I thought about the elections -- a word I didn't recognize in Persian -- he began explaining the concept to me by saying it was all about "mulk", which thanks to Lewis I recognized as the classical Arabic term for "kingdom" or "king-ship".

Maybe things don't change so fast after all.