xxii
My approach was also shaped by commentators and audiences at invited
lectures in U.S. and European departments of history including those
at the University of Southern California, Williams College, Tulane Uni-
versity, the University of California, Irvine, the University of California,
Santa Cruz, and the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg, Germany.
Research institutes in Canada and Europe, including the American Re-
search Institute in Turkey, Istanbul, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin’s
The Middle East in Europe / Europe in the Middle East lecture series, and
Centre canadien d’études allemandes et européennes, Université de Mon-
tréal, Montréal, Canada, were other locales where I discussed the Dönme
with engaged audiences. I thank Tony Greenwood, Nora Lafi, Gudrun
Kraemer, Georges Khalil, and Till van Rahden for these latter three op-
portunities to receive valuable feedback on the Dönme.
Martha Fuller’s “Autobiography, Memoir, and Fiction” course at the
University of California, Irvine greatly improved my ability to tell and,
more important, show the history of the Dönme. Matt Goldish and
Hasan Kayalı read the book in parts. The graduate students in my “Trans-
gressing Boundaries: Race, Religion, Gender” course at the University
of California, Irvine, two anonymous readers for the Press, and Esra
Özyürek read it in full. Peter Dreyer’s meticulous editing increased the
clarity of the narrative.
Esra Özyürek has helped make this project bloom from a dissertation
proposal (for a dissertation never written) thirteen years ago into the book
it is today. She even gave it its title. For all of this time she has been my
intellectual partner and role model, as well as beloved partner, for which
I am deeply thankful. We were doubly blessed by the births of Firuze
and Azize shortly after I completed the manuscript. Their arrival has con-
firmed that miracles do happen. Twice.
In the end, the book’s faults are entirely my responsibility, and what-
ever strengths it has are largely thanks to others.
The core of the book’s argument was first presented in two articles:
“The Double Bind of Race and Religion: The Conversion of the Dönme
to Turkish Secular Nationalism,” Comparative Studies in Society and His-
tory 46 , no. 4 (October 2004 ): 678 – 712 , and “Globalization, Cosmo-
politanism, and the Dönme in Ottoman Salonica and Turkish Istanbul,”
Journal of World History 18 , no. 2 (June 2007 ): 141 – 69.
Acknowledgments