Review by Choice Review
As the blurb on the back cover of this book states, "[t]his book should cause quite a stir"; and so it will, but for all the wrong reasons. While the author's ostensible goal is to marshal the pros and cons from an EU perspective as to why Turkey should or should not be admitted to the EU, it quickly becomes polemical. Bogdani's main argument, pursued through the majority of the book, is that Turkey (a Muslim country of 73 million people) and the estimated 5 million Turks in EU countries threaten the Christian culture and identity of European Christianity. In marshaling her arguments, the author relies heavily on books by Bernard Lewis, Francis Fukuyama, Martin Kramer, and Larry Siedentop, among others, whose views and interpretations of Islam, and especially of political Islam, are rejected by many respected scholars of Islam, the Muslim world, and the Middle East. She bases her overarching interpretation on Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations (1996), which stresses Muslim civilization's challenge to Christian European civilization in spite of the fact that Huntington's thesis is rejected by most scholars of Islamic civilization and Muslim cultures. This extended polemic will be of little use; for an alternative see Ioannis Grigoriadis's The Trials of Europeanization (CH, Dec'09, 47-2240). Summing Up: Not recommended. R. W. Olson University of Kentucky
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
