Suggested reading: Cihan Tuğal’s Passive Revolution

I have recently finished reading Cihan Tugal’s Passive Revolution: Absorbing the Islamic Challenge to Capitalism. I have met Cihan when he was doing his fieldwork for the research for this book when I was working on my master’s thesis. His book is an ethnographic contribution to understand contemporary Turkey. He plays with Gramscian ideas of hegemony convincingly but even for those who are not interested in that framework to have a look at the Part 2 and Part 3. More particularly Chapters 3-4-5 provide essence of his ethnographic work and in a thick descriptional way, he demonstrates how AKP governmentality transformed Islamist lower classes from anti-establishment positions to passive agents of neoliberal policies under the leadership of AKP. I would suggest that in another phase of this transformation, there might be the story of disjunction between these citizens and AKP leadership but for the moment, as election results proved, Tugal’s findings just point of the current situation…