Review of “Islam and Secularity: The Future of Europe's Public Sphere” (Nilüfer Göle)

This volume offers a series of studies, written by a leading scholar in the field, on the changing relations between secular modernity, Islam, and the West. The geographic focus is on Europe—particularly on France and Turkey—but the arguments presented here extend far beyond these confines. Göle’s fundamental interest lies in ‘non-western “habitations” of modernity’ and, at the same time, in rethinking the very distinction between east and west. It is this general problematic that leads her to examine how Muslims are ‘critically appropriating and reinventing the modern experience’ in Europe (p. 3), and how ‘Islam functions as an alternative ideological resource to dispute the cultural orientations of modernity’ (p. 26). In the author’s perspective, Europe, ‘more than any other place’, constitutes a ‘privileged site’ for studying how ‘the differential attitudes toward modernity become a battleground between religious and secular agents’ (p. 25). Furthermore, Göle’s study is not only concerned with charting the reconfiguration of secular public spheres in Europe—against the background of the lost hegemonic status of Western modernity—and the simultaneous transformations in Muslim subjectivities.