The Mobilization of Political Islam in Turkey

Explains why political Islam, which has been part of Turkish politics since the 1970s, has now achieved governing power.

Banu Eligür (Author)

9780521760218, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 12 April 2010

336 pages, 4 b/w illus. 27 tables
23.4 x 15.6 x 2.2 cm, 0.6 kg

'Banu's highly perceptive analysis provides an excellent resume or how Islamic oriented political parties can achieve their strategic targets by developing social networking even within a not so friendly constitutional and political culture.' The Muslim World Book Review

The Mobilization of Political Islam in Turkey explains why political Islam, which has been part of Turkish politics since the 1970s but on the rise only since the 1990s, has now achieved governing power. Drawing on social movement theory, the book focuses on the dominant form of Islamist activism in Turkey by analyzing the increasing electoral strength of four successive Islamist political parties: the Welfare Party; its successor, the Virtue Party; and the successors of the Virtue Party: the Felicity Party and the Justice and Development Party. This book, which is based on extensive primary and secondary sources as well as in-depth interviews, provides the most comprehensive analysis currently available of the Islamist political mobilization in Turkey.

1. Introduction
2. Emergence of the Islamist social movement in Turkey
3. The Turkish-Islamic synthesis and the Islamist social movement
4. The malfunctioning state and consolidation of the Islamist social movement
5. Organizational dynamics of the Islamist social movement
6. The soft intervention of 1997 and the Islamist social movement
7. The Islamist social movement today and prospects for the future.

Subject Areas: Comparative politics [JPB], Politics & government [JP]