Elites and Religion

“Elites and Religion” is assembled from a series of articles written across Kemal Karpat's whole life, offering not isolated snapshots of the Turkey, but its total arc across nearly nine decades of development and sophstication. With careful deliberation over records not available to Western historians, Karpat looks in detail at the way that religion has been used, misused and downright abused by the elite circles of power in the Turkish Republic. No understanding of the Middle East is complete without subtle insight into Turkish politics, and no perspective of Turkey is complete without the input of a titanic intellectual and historian like Kemal Karpat. If you are looking for clarity and solid academic writing that you can count on, you will find it here.
The author of this book, Kemal Karpat, is a celebrity in Turkey who taught for almost 20 years at the University of Wisconsin as the Director of the Department of Middle Eastern Studies. He has given his life to service to his country and planet as his own brand of intellectual monk, dedicated to only the most intricate and detailed research and writing, engineered to the core with quality and integrity. Here he writes about how the religious faith that is so rooted in the individual and collective Turkish soul was used by the ruling class of the new Republic to meet political ends.