This statement of near-Heideggerian dasein (existence), of religiously becoming what one already religiously was and is, appears on the final page of M. Hakan Yavuz's exhaustive new study, Toward an Islamic Enlightenment: The Gülen Movement, but it could very well serve as both an epigraph for the book and a mantra for the Gülen movement (also known as Hizmet) as a whole. As Yavuz tells us, the speaker is a merchant from the central Anatolian city of Konya, and hence a fitting mouthpiece: Konya is one of the dynamos—known colloquially as the Anatolian Tigers (Anadolu Kaplanları)—that have fueled Turkey's neoliberal economic growth and spurred the emergence of a multifaceted, public Islam since the 1980s. The Gülen movement, inspired by and oriented around the theologian Fethullah Gülen, his written corpus, his oral teachings, and his exemplary behavior, has arguably been the most vibrant, successful, and controversial aspect of the broader Islamic renaissance in Turkey; like his own model and inspiration, the early Republican theologian Bediuzzaman Said Nursi, Gülen has devoted himself to reconciling the discourses and identities of Turkishness and Islam, to encouraging Turkish Muslims to “become . . . what we are.” While several other sociologists—notably Berna Turam and Joshua Hendrick—have written excellent, rigorous studies of the Gülen movement in English, and while the movement sponsors a thriving cottage industry of para-academic texts about itself, Toward an Islamic Enlightenment is without a doubt the most comprehensive study of Gülen and his enthusiasts yet. It is indispensable reading for all those who aspire to understand the dilemmas and ambitions of Turkish Islam in the contemporary world.

Yavuz develops two loose, overlapping theses over the course of the book, which unites a biography of Gülen with a thorough description and analysis of the movement in relation to both its Turkish and transnational contexts. The two provocative theses are as follows: 1) the Gülen movement represents a mode of Islamic religiosity that has responded to the imperatives of modernization in the Weberian sense, in particular the articulation of religion within a sphere distinct from and related to those of politics, the economy, culture, and so forth; and 2) both theologically and sociologically, the Gülen movement exemplifies an “Islamic Enlightenment,” with forms, causes, and consequences analogous to those of the European (or, perhaps better, Christian) Enlightenment of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Yavuz's first thesis fares better than his second. His argument draws heavily on the pioneering analysis of Turkish sociologist Şerif Mardin, who famously argued that the modernist, individualist theology and piety of Said Nursi successfully bridged the political, social, and cultural rupture entailed by the end of the Ottoman Empire and the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923. This story is well known: inasmuch as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's Jacobin-laicist state severely curtailed the presence and puissance of Islam in the public sphere and political society, Turkish Islam throughout the 20th century necessarily occupied other spheres, initially the private and later, with the neoliberal opening of the 1980s, those of civil society and, to a degree, that of partisan politics proper. In Yavuz's estimation, the Gülen movement represents the most stunning, successful accommodation of Islam to the “opportunity spaces” available in modern Turkey. (In his earlier work, Yavuz develops the concept of “opportunity spaces” to account for the forms and transformations of contemporary Turkish Islam in general.) Indeed, the Gülen movement exemplifies a modern mode of Islamic piety in a liberal-secular vein, one that has endeavored to “reconcile Islamic values with secular discourses on human rights, democracy, and the rule of law, by excavating the core message of Islamic humanism and building deliberative bridges between tradition and modernity, reason and revelation, and economic development and social justice” (p. 135).

This argument—which, it should be noted, is not Yavuz's alone—is largely persuasive, but it demands several caveats and corollaries. Above all, we might still ask: does the articulation of a conciliatory, public Islam on the part of the Gülen movement amount to an “Islamic Enlightenment?” The answer to this question hinges on how broadly one defines “Enlightenment” itself, a quandry that Yavuz skirts rather carefully. He draws a strong analogy between post-Reformation Protestant Christianity and Gülen's vision of Islam; in this, he again follows Max Weber and his famous argument that this-worldly asceticism in religious practice, the famous Protestant work ethic, bears a deep, elective affinity with capitalist morality, practice, and organization. As other sociologists of the Gülen movement such as Elisabeth Özdalga have noted, there is indeed a striking resemblance between Weber's Protestant merchants and the affluent business elites who occupy the upper echelons of the Gülen movement. It is not clear, however, that this correspondence implies common causality. Certainly, no aspect of Gülen's theology is comparable to the fatalistic worldweariness of Calvinism that Weber identifies as the key principle of the Protestant work ethic and hence the inculcation of capitalist habits and practices. More importantly, the sociological crucible within which the Gülen movement has formed is not the “backwoods small bourgeois circumstances” of Weber's Calvinists, but rather that of modern Turkey, where a hegemonic state culture increasingly negotiates neoliberal economic and political imperatives. To put perhaps too fine a point on the matter, this “Islamic Enlightenment” is not a matter of universal political liberation on the basis of critical reason (in Kant's famous formulation), but rather the assertion of a liberal mode of Islam against the political powers of the Turkish state that have sought incessantly to curtail piety in public.

Undoubtedly, the past quarter century in Turkey has witnessed a welter of vibrant, creative mediations of Islam and political practice. As Yavuz points out frequently throughout his text—and as I have argued in my own work—the institutional and discursive domain of civil society, in particular, has formed and framed these mediations. Through and within civil society, Turkish Muslims are learning again to become what they once and still are. Nor is this pedagogical reformation of Islam within Turkish civil society singular: Muslim groups and communities with distinct theologies and sociologies, such as Turkey's Alevis, are also “discovering” and forging their identities on the basis of civil society. Yavuz's excellent, indefatigably thorough study of the Gülen movement is a timely, valuable contribution to our broader comprehension of the mechanics and dynamics of the mediation of Islam and civil society, both within Turkey and beyond. I only worry that his attempt to shoehorn his argument within the rubric of “Enlightenment” risks obscuring the remarkable material that constitutes his lucid exposition.