Pious Politics

Cultural Foundations of the Islamist Movement in Turkey

Zeynep Ozgen

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009653282
• Year: 2025

What explains the rise and resilience of the Islamist movement in Turkey? Since its founding in 1923, the Turkish republic has periodically reined in Islamist actors. Secular laws denied legitimacy to religious ideas, publications, and civic organizations, while military coups jailed or banned Islamist party leaders from politics. Despite such adversity, Islamists won an unprecedented victory at the 2002 national elections and have continued to rule since. 'Pious Politics' explains how Islamists succeeded by developing a popular, well-organized movement over decades that rallied the masses and built vigorous political parties. But an equally formative-if not more significant-factor was the cultural groundwork Islamists laid through a remarkably robust model of mobilization. Drawing on two years of ethnographic and archival research in Turkey, Zeynep Ozgen explores how social movements leverage cultural production to create sociopolitical change.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration and Names
• Chronology
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 The Transformation Box
• 2 Explaining the Relationship between Culture and Politics
• Part I The Historical Trajectory of Islamist Resistance
• Part II The Grassroots Mobilization
• 7 Conclusion
• Appendix A: Methodological Reflections
• Appendix B: Glossary of Commonly Used Turkish and Arabic Terms
• Bibliography
• Index