Karpat, Kemal H.

Kemal H. Karpat (1923–2019) was a Turkish historian and writer whose scholarship connected late Ottoman change with modern Turkey through population, migration, religion, and politics. Turkey's Politics: The Transition to a Multi-Party System explains the move from single-party rule through social as well as constitutional change. The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State follows the interaction of religion, identity, and state power across the empire’s final decades. Studies on Ottoman Social and Political History gathers the range of his archival and comparative work, while The Ottoman Mosaic: Exploring Models for Peace by Re-exploring the Past turns imperial diversity into a question for the present. Turkey's Politics is the most direct beginning; The Politicization of Islam then supplies the deeper Ottoman background to Karpat’s account of modern public life.