The Mobilization of Political Islam in Turkey

Abstract

The Mobilization of Political Islam in Turkey is part of a growing literature on political Islam in Turkey after the 2002 election victory of the Justice and Development Party (the JDP) followed by the increase of its support in the 2007 and 2011 parliamentary elections. Therefore, the book is a worthy contribution to the growing literature on political Islam in Turkey and social mobilisation theories. Banu Eligur uses ‘social movement theory’ to account for ‘the relatively sudden increase’ of the Islamic social movements in Turkish politics (p. 1) and shows contributions of the Turkish case to this theory. In general, the book attempts to present a comprehensive story of the last three decades of Turkish politics, with a special reference to the trajectory of political Islam.

The volume is organised as follows. The introductory section discusses theories of social movements mostly developed in the West and their adaptability to the non-Western world. The second section introduces the role of Islam in politics during the Ottoman and early republican periods in Turkey. The three subsequent sections are devoted to explaining the rise of political Islam at the centre of politics mainly in the last two and a half decades. The author elaborates that the Turkish-Islamic synthesis, the malfunctioning state and the organisational dynamics of the Islamist social movements promoted Islamist mobilisation in Turkey. The penultimate section discusses the rise of political Islam to power by utilising largely non-violent strategies and the gradual change of secular order in Turkey by Islamising the society from below and the state from above. The final section attempts to show the contributions of studying a non-Western case to the social movement literature.