![]() Göle is a controversial figure in Turkey. In her words, “militants who shouldered the most democratic aspirations of the society were longing for a totalitarian system.” Coming from a secular, social democratic background, Göle was estranged from leftist groups at university, and when they “started to find pleasure in guns”, that was the last straw for her. The first part of Migration of the Forbidden focuses on Göle’s background in Ankara, recollections of her father serving in the parliament for CHP how on the night of the coup in 1960, he was constantly on edge for fear of being taken away any moment. She is originally from Kars (the city Orhan Pamuk’s Snow is set in), which we learn in the first pages of Çavdar's interview with her. A polyglot who publishes in Turkish, English and French, Göle refers to herself as a craftsperson, an entitlement through which she can defend and own the ideas she treats as craftwork. Nilüfer Göle is a sociologist who teaches in EHESS (The School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences) in Paris, with research interests including the public sphere, Islam in Europe, secularism and multiple modernities. She wrote those words in 2017 but the time she refers to is 2002, the year when the death penalty was abolished to align Turkish laws with the EU acquis, a few months after which AKP came to power for the first time. “Thinking back to that time, my disappointment is immense,” admits Nilüfer Göle in an Op-Ed in the Huffington Post. For the past two years, Turkey has been the biggest jailer of journalists in the world. Ideological differences among the Muslim intelligentsia have been replaced with deep hostilities, former allies have become the worst of enemies. In seven years, the Turkish political landscape has changed dramatically. In January this year, the former was named advisor to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the latter has been in prison since July 30, 2016. I am especially drawn to two of the writers: Sibel Eraslan and Ali Bulaç. The final part of the book is dedicated to articles reflecting on Göle’s heritage penned by four commentators, adhesion to Islamist principles the only link between them. The interviewer Ayşe Çavdar, an academic herself, starts the conversation with Göle’s personal history in the first chapter and moves onto questions surrounding her books in the next four chapters, to which Göle responds with both scholarly judgments and anecdotal examples. Mahremin Göçü (The Migration of the Forbidden), one long interview with Nilüfer Göle, was published in early 2011. A pre-ISIS era when the term “refugee” had not yet bonded with “crisis” in European news outlets. ![]() It was also the year Necmettin Erbakan, Erdoğan’s political mentor and predecessor, died of heart failure. It was the year when the telecommunications directorate prohibited certain words from Turkish domain names, including “ yasak” (prohibited) and “ baldız” (sister-in-law) among 136 others. ![]() Reading Nilüfer Göle in the “New” Turkey By Merve Pehlivan ![]()
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