book reviews 142 Mark Soileau, Humanist Mystics. Nationalism and the Commemoration of Saints in Turkey. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2018. x, 363 pp., isbn 978-1-60781-633-1. Mark Soileau’s book is a revised version of his 2006 PhD dissertation submit- ted to the Department of Religious Studies in the University of California at Santa Barbara. In this richly researched and articulate work, Soileau exam- ines how medieval Sufi saints have been considered and commemorated in modern Turkey. More precisely, he engages with the question of how the leg- acies of various religious and mystical figures, e.g., Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi, Hacı Bektaş Veli, and Yunus Emre could be embraced by Republican Turkey, which had implemented radical secularizing reforms and closed down all Sufi orders during its formative period, including those formed around the cults of Rumi and Hacı Bektaş. Soileau argues that this adoption was achieved through a nationalist reinterpretation of the lives, works, and legacies of these three mystics, who were abstracted from their respective religious characters to the extent possible and presented as great Turkish humanists. Thus, their so-called Turkish ethnicity and the “humanist” themes found in their poetry and leg- ends began to be emphasized from the early decades of the Republican period. According to Soileau, although “it is not an entirely unwarranted assertion that these medieval mystics were in some sense humanists […] as they dealt with the themes of love, peace, and fellowship and focused at times on the human, […] it was the exigencies of a certain historical conjuncture that led to their being consciously identified with these values and having the label of ‘human- ist’ affixed to them” (p. 8). Soileau’s work successfully analyzes the causes and effects of these exigencies from this certain historical conjuncture to 2000s Turkey. Humanist Mystics is divided into five chapters along with a prologue and epilogue. In the first chapter, Soileau establishes a conceptual framework for his analysis by discussing the main themes and processes treated in the book, such as collective memory, commemoration, sainthood in the Islamic context, the institutionalization of Sufi saints, and nationalism and nationalization. The second chapter provides the historical background for what Soileau calls “the nationalization of Sufism” and focuses on the rise of Turkish nationalism in the early twentieth century, the secularist policies of the Kemalist period, and the efforts to form a Turkish national identity throughout the 1920s and 1930s. According to Soileau, it was within this context that the Sufi legacy began to be reconfigured and incorporated into the cultural heritage of the so-called Turkish nation. Published with license by Koninklijke Brill nv | doi:10.1163/15700607-20220003 © Erdem Sönmez, 2022 | ISSN: 0043-2539 (print) 1570-0607 (online) Downloaded from Brill.com08/03/2023 02:06:31PM via free access