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Chapter 4 of the book "Remaking Muslim Politics: Pluralism, Contestation, Democratization," edited by Robert W. Hefner is presented. It explores the Kemalist policy advocated by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the republic of Turkey, in which religious expression is prohibited in public sphere. It also examines the ability of such personalized Muslimhood model to reflect the characteristics of Turkey.

This chapter establishes the relationship between kinship, reciprocity and business in Istanbul, Turkey as of 2000. Regardless of the specific spatial and structural configuration of production, one element common to individual production, piecework and workshop work in the squatter areas of Istanbul is the use of family labor. If the labor is done by non-kin, the relations of production are euphemized as kin relations, emphasizing the parties' participation in the collective reciprocal exchange of labor, services and money that characterizes kin relations in Turkey. When middlemen and producers are strangers or relative strangers and of different classes, the relations of production are disguised as paternalistic concern for the welfare of the producers. As a result of this ideological filter, both the women themselves and the middlemen undervalue the women's labor and do not consider it to be work having a market value, although income may be derived from it. The outsider middleman's relationship with the producers lacked much of the sense of mutual obligation that disguised economic activity between neighbors and kin. Among themselves, however, the women kept to the fiction that they were only doing and giving out to the middleman. This allowed them to avoid the onus of being considered a woman who had economic dealings with strangers, a woman who had to work, demonstrating that her husband was not able to support his family financially. The latter would dishonor the family as a whole, including the women. In this way, the organization of women's and children's labor in family and neighborhood workshops and as piecework constructed and reaffirmed their roles as members of these social groups. Conflation of labor with women's traditional activities and of labor relations with kinship obligations kept production costs and profits high for middlemen, exporters and merchants.