Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction : competing claims to religious authority -- Secular time and the individual -- Islamic time and the village -- Good deeds and the moral economy -- Constructing Islam : mosques, men, and the state -- Women's traditions and innovations -- Ritual purification and the pernicious danger of culture -- Secular and spiritual routes to knowledge -- An entrepreneurial 'neo-tarikat' and Islamic education -- Dealing with the secular world : a trip to the beach.

Description based on print version record.

Turkey's contemporary struggles with Islam are often interpreted as a conflict between religion and secularism played out most obviously in the split between rural and urban populations. The reality, of course, is more complicated than the assumptions. Exploring religious expression in two villages, this book considers rural spiritual practices and describes a living, evolving Sunni Islam, influenced and transformed by local and national sources of religious orthodoxy.Drawing on a decade of research, Kimberly Hart shows how religion is not an abstract set of principles, but a comp