Reading Islam: Life and Politics of Brotherhood in Modern Turkey

In Reading Islam Fabio Vicini offers a journey within the intimate relations, reading practices, and forms of intellectual engagement that regulate Muslim life in two enclosed religious communities in Istanbul. Combining anthropological observation with textual and genealogical analysis, he illustrates how the modes of thought and social engagement promoted by these two communities are the outcome of complex intellectual entanglements with modern discourses about science, education, the self, and Muslims’ place and responsibility in society. In this way, Reading Islam sheds light on the formation of new generations of faithful and socially active Muslims over the last thirty years and on their impact on the turn of Turkey from an assertive secularist Republic to an Islamic-oriented form of governance.

Fabio Vicini is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Istanbul 29 Mayis University and an Affiliate Member of the School of Religious Studies, McGill University. In 2013 he has been awarded the Malcolm H. Kerr Award in the Social Sciences. His work has appeared, among others, in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Culture and Religion, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, and Sociology of Islam.