by GIANCARLO BOSETTI
Nilüfer Göle, a Turkish intellectual born in Ankara in 1953, is a world-renowned authority on Turkish and Muslim sociology. She began her studies in Turkey and completed them in Paris under Alain Touraine. After completing her doctorate in France, she became a professor at Bo?aziçi University, then returned to the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales as the director of studies, dividing her life between Paris and Istanbul, where her husband, economist Asaf Savas Akat, teaches at Bilgi University.
Göle researches why extremism establishes roots in various youth sectors and among women, European behaviour in response to Islamic immigration, and conflicts arising from the problems posed by the veil, the construction of mosques, and the rise of xenophobic extremism. Her books and her work as a journalist have also been invaluable in clarifying the nature of the political evolution currently underway in Turkey, where what she describes as the process of “democratizing secularism” has begun, a process that is dismantling the nationalistic and authoritarian taboos of the Kemalist republican tradition, linked to the success of Erdo?an’s Justice and Development Party and the beginning of negotiations for Turkey’s access to the European Union.
Her books include Interpénétrations: L’Islam et l’Europe (Galaade Editions, 2005), Islamisme et Féminisme en Turquie: Regards Croisés, in Le foulard Islamique en Questions (Éditions Amsterdam, 2004), and The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling (University of Michigan Press, 1997). In The Forbidden Modern, Göle critiques Turkish modernization, which has tried to homogenize cultural differences and identities in a nationalist ideology, placed under pressure by a fear of a plurality of ethnicities and political movements, including Islamism. Islamism has, instead, increased precisely as a reaction to this homogenizing modernization, which has ignored the religious identity of the Turkish people.
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