Trust and the Islamic Advantage
Religious-Based Movements in Turkey and the Muslim World

This cutting-edge analysis of Islamic politics and economics shows how Islam builds trust in communities and serves as a collective identity.

Avital Livny (Author)

9781108485524, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 3 September 2020

256 pages
16 x 23.5 x 2 cm, 0.55 kg

'… Trust and Islamic Advantage makes an empirically rich and theoretically engaging contribution to the scholarship on religion and politics and Middle Eastern politics. With its meticulous empirical analyses, it will stimulate high-quality scholarly discussions on the role of identity-based trust in political processes in Muslim-majority countries and beyond.' Güne? Murat Tezcür, Perspectives on Politics

In much of the Muslim world, Islamic political and economic movements appear to have a comparative advantage. Relative to similar secular groups, they are better able to mobilize supporters and sustain their cooperation long-term. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Turkey, a historically secular country that has experienced a sharp rise in Islamic-based political and economic activity. Drawing on rich data sources and econometric methods, Avital Livny challenges existing explanations - such as personal faith - for the success of these movements. Instead, Livny shows that the Islamic advantage is rooted in feelings of trust among individuals with a shared, religious group-identity. This group-based trust serves as an effective substitute for more generalized feelings of interpersonal trust, which are largely absent in many Muslim-plurality countries. The book presents a new argument for conceptualizing religion as both a personal belief system and collective identity.

Part I. Theoretical Development: 1. Understanding the rise of Islamic-based movements in the Muslim world
2. Evaluating existing theories of the Islamic advantage
3. Generalized distrust and the participation gap in the Muslim world
4. Muslim identity and group-based trust
Part II. Applications and Empirics: 5. Explaining the Islamic advantage in political participation
6. Islam, trust, and strategic voting in Turkey
7. The quasi-integration of firms in an Islamic community: the case of MÜS?AD
8. Conclusion
Appendix
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Political ideologies [JPF], Comparative politics [JPB], Politics & government [JP], Islamic studies [JFSR2], Religion & politics [HRAM2], Middle Eastern history [HBJF1]