ebooks Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database by From Yale University Press in History

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Turkey; Islam; Nationalism; and Modernity reveals the historical dynamics propelling two centuries of Ottoman and Turkish history. As mounting threats to imperial survival necessitated dynamic responses; ethnolinguistic and religious identities inspired alternative strategies for engaging with modernity. A radical; secularizing current of change competed with a conservative; Islamically committed current. Crises sharpened the differentiation of the two currents; forcing choices between them. The radical current began with the formation of reformist governmental elites and expanded with the advent of “print capitalism;” symbolized by the privately owned; Ottoman-language newspapers. The radicals engineered the 1908 Young Turk revolution; ruled empire and republic until 1950; made secularism a lasting “belief system;” and still retain powerful positions. The conservative current gained impetus from three history-making Islamic renewal movements; those of Mevlana Halid; Said Nursi; and Fethullah Gülen. Powerful under the empire; Islamic conservatives did not regain control of government until the 1980s. By then they; too; had their own influential media. Findley's reassessment of political; economic; social; and cultural history reveals the dialectical interaction between radical and conservative currents of change; which alternately clashed and converged to shape late Ottoman and republican Turkish history.