M. Hakan Yavuz is a professor of political science at The University of Utah. He has produced a body of scholarly work dealing with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the patterns of nation-state building, secularism, ethnic conflict, transnational Islamic networks, civil society and the public sphere. His books include Turkey's July 15th Coup, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey (Oxford), and Secularism and Muslim Democracy in Turkey, among others.