Mustafa Akyol’s Islam without Extremes: a Muslim Case for Liberty (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011), carries an excellent analysis on the convergence of the Islamic and liberal trends in Turkey. Turkey is one of few Muslim countries in the world today which somehow escaped Western colonialism and consequently, does not perceive the West as its hostile ‘Other’. If the Muslims have a nemesis, an antagonistic ‘Other’, it is Kemalist secularism (born of its founding father, Mustafa Kemal ‘Ataturk’) with its “dictatorship of the seculatariat”, aspiring to re-engineer citizens into a class of “homo kemalicus”. The Kemalist legacy, which made it an explicit point to emulate the West in all its manner and form, down to the minutest details – even demanding the people to wear the brimmed hat as a mark of modernity (!), attracted disdain and revulsion, not just from the Muslim (or Islamist) camp, but also from the liberals. As a result they joined hands to confront the military-backed secularis...