Islamism among the urban poor of Turkey: Religion, space, and *class in everyday political interaction.

Abstract

The rise of religious movements across civilizations has challenged long held expectations concerning the ultimate separation of religion and politics. The predominance of Islamic movements in Turkey is especially puzzling, given that it is arguably the most secularized country in the Middle East. Scholars of Islamism who have focused on cultural identity, political economy, and social movement dynamics have broadened our understanding of new articulations between Islam and modern politics. This dissertation aims to combine the insights of these approaches by analyzing the interactions between subordinate sectors of Turkish society and Islamism. I demonstrate that studying the urban poor support for Islamism reveals the connections between cultural, material, and agental (organizational and ideological) factors better than culturalist, political economic, and social movement approaches have done so far in isolation from each other. Two years of ethnographic research in the poorest district of Istanbul with the highest Islamist votes reveals that the supporters of the Islamist movement are hybrid products of a dialogic religious field, which consists of mutual tension, intervention and resistance among communal traditionalism, secularism, and Islamism. Being the outcomes of this field, their beliefs and practices are neither exclusively traditional and religious, nor completely modern and secular, as some scholars have argued. Islamist politics is successful only to the degree that it develops relevant strategies to approach the complex field of tension, intervention and resistance analyzed in this dissertation. The urban poor support for Islamism also has a spatial dimension. Islamism successfully develops and transforms the ways in which poor rural-to-urban migrants interpret, gain control over, and find their place in urban space. Nevertheless, bereft of the means and ends with which to mobilize the poor in times of political and economic crisis, the Islamist party fails to transform mass backing into militant action on its behalf. Consequently, despite massive support, it is not able to resist military pressures from the secularist Turkish state and sustain its ideological line. This inability, which is partially related to the reluctance of Islamists to engage modernity more critically, renders the movement incapable of thoroughly changing Turkish society.