Description: This book encompasses Serif Mardin's seminal essays written over a span of three decades (1967 to 1997). Comprising some of the author's finest and most incisive writings, the essays deal with the historical background, political travails, and socioeconomic metamorphosis of Turkey during a century of modernization.

With his characteristic sophistication and breadth of vision, Mardin provides the reader with a remarkably objective analysis of ideology, civil society, religion, urban life, and violence in late Ottoman and Republican Turkey. As one of Turkey's most prominent and original thinkers, Mardin's book is indispensable not only to scholars of Turkish history but also to all those seeking to acquire knowledge of the complex relationship between religion and secularism in the broader Muslim world.

Most of the articles have a common theme: they seek to explore alternative explanations to those provided by social scientists of the 1960s and 1970s. These include "Marxisant" versions of Turkish social and political history, and positivist convictions that belief systems cannot be counted among the "facts" of history. Mardin moves easily from sociological topics on violence and class consciousness to the history of the Ottoman Empire, and the philosophy and culture of modern Turkey within the greater Middle East. Mardin's most influential pieces -- collected for the first time in one volume -- represent an invaluable addition to the field of Middle East studies.

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