Published Paper Details:

This paper undertakes a critical study of the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk�s Snow (2004) to picture Turkey�s contemporary socio-political issues. I have endeavored to show the modes and methods by which Pamuk brings contentious issues of religion which has largely been about women wearing the headscarf and the works of secular state in mitigating all the problems affecting the image of Turkey in the western world. Snow is a political novel and it explores the politics that is played in the daylight. Orhan Pamuk�s writings take place where Islam and secularism confront each other in a dramatic way. He is a globally acknowledged writer and he writes for global audience. Snow is a novel in which Pamuk takes Islamic and secularist clash whose roots go before the secularizing project of Turkey. It records socio-political condition of Turkey in the early 1990s. The hijab or headscarf adopted by many Muslim women across the world in accordance with their local rules has been a fertile issue for discussion all over the world. It signifies women�s subordinate status in Muslim societies in the vast body of literature on the topic. Turkey is the only country with a Muslim majority population that has been practicing a ban on hijab. This is the main point of contention between the secularists and the Islamists. In this novel, this issue is presented through many characters who bring out multiple responses to the question of headscarf. There are liberals who view the ban on the headscarf as a liberating one. On the other hand, followers of political Islam take it as an insult. They correlate it with religion and think that their religion is in danger. The main protagonist of the novel Ka finds himself in the middle of these things. He has come to Turkey after twelve years. The city of Kars unfolds a new world which he has never seen before. Thus, my paper will seek to explore Orhan Pamuk�s engagement with the contemporary Islam in Turkey.