Sevgi Adak – författare

The veiling and unveiling of women have been controversial issues in Turkey since the late-Ottoman period. It was with the advent of local campaigns against certain veils in the 1930s, however, that women’s dress turned into an issue of national mobilisation in which gender norms would be redefined. In this comprehensive analysis of the anti-veiling campaigns in interwar Turkey, Sevgi Adak casts light onto the historical context within which the meanings of veiling and unveiling in Turkey were formed. By shifting the focus from the high politics of the elite to the implementation of state policies, the book situates the anti-veiling campaigns as a space where the Kemalist reforms were negotiated, compromised and resisted by societal actors. Using previously unpublished archival material, Adak reveals the intricacies of the Kemalist modernisation process and provides a nuanced reading of the gender order established in the early republic by looking at the various ways women responded to the anti-veiling campaigns. A major contribution to the literature on the social history of modern Turkey, the book provides a complex analysis of these campaigns which goes beyond a simple binary between liberation and oppression.

When Otto Habsburg, son of the last emperor of the Austria-Hungarian Empire Karl I, died in 2011, among those who prayed at the funeral in Vienna's Stephansdom was Mustafa Efendi Ceri?, the Reis ul-ulema of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This was to honour the long-lasting relationship between the bygone empire of the Catholic Habsburgs with European Muslims. The cornerstone of this association was the 1912 Islam Act (Islamgesetz) of the Habsburgs, which made Austria-Hungary the first Catholic European state to confer official status to Islam. This book explores the legacy of this act and the ways in which it continues to impact the legal frameworks and political structures governing Islam and Muslim communities in the successor states of Austria-Hungary. It discusses the unique coexistence in Central Europe of centuries-old, 'indigenous' European Muslims with recently settled Muslim immigrants, and the trajectory of their interactions with the state. This volume is therefore not only crucial to the debate about European Islam but also to the question of the legal and political framework of Islamic religious communities in a secular Europe.