Tahir Abbas

This essay interprets the Gezi Park protests that began as a local resistance to government plans to level a public park but quickly escalated into a national outburst against government policies. How did the local events receive endorsements from different communities with otherwise ideological and cultural conflicts? This paper argues that political disenfranchisement intersected with society’s aspirations with regard to dichotomies between conservatism and secularism, localisation and globalisation, and nationalism and majoritarianism.

“The Rushdie Affair” that began in 1989 with the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, the “Book Burning in Bradford” that came soon afterwards, and the now infamous fatwa declared by the late Ayatollah Khomeini still have important implications for discussions of religion, culture, identity, faith and the nature of diverse societies today as it did then.

When I first received a copy of Zachary Shore’s Breeding Bin Ladens: America, Islam and the Future of Europe, published by John Hopkins University Press (2006), I was under the impression I was about to read a formidable academic treatise on an important but much maligned area of research, social commentary and policy-making thinking. However, as I began to read the text closely, I soon realised that this book is far from that.