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Passive Revolution

Stanford University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments.............................................................ixAbbreviations...............................................................xiIntroduction................................................................11 Toward a Theory of Hegemonic Politics.....................................192 Islamization in Turkey as Constitution of Hegemony........................363 Vicissitudes of Integral Political Society................................594 The Making and Unmaking of Integral Civil Society.........................1025 The Emergence of Modern Islamic Political Society.........................1476 Modern Islamic Civil Society Triumphant...................................192Conclusion: Islamic Hegemony in Comparative Perspective.....................235Notes.......................................................................267References..................................................................283Index.......................................................................301

Chapter One

THE CRISIS of the analysis of Islamic politics is the crisis of the paradigms that have been used to study Islamic politics. This chapter will situate the problems of the scholarship on Islamism within general sociological problems. The objective is not only to develop an alternative account of Islamic politics but to use the case of Islamism to revise the sociological theory of politics. A hegemonic perspective provides a more complete account of how politics work when compared to existing analyses of politics and society.

MODELS IN THE STUDY OF ISLAMIC POLITICS

This section illustrates why each conventional explanation in the study of Islamic politics is either problematic or only partially valid.

Orientalism and Modernization Theory

Culture-based explanations of Islamism point out the significance of the traumatizing influence of Westernization on traditional Muslim cultures (Aksoy and Robins 1994). Culturalist scholars-ranging from Orientalists to modernization theorists-base their claims concerning the popular support of religious movements on assumptions about the persistence of traditional religions. Some of them attribute the rise of religious movements, especially in the Muslim world, to the particularly political nature of Islam (Huntington 1996; Lewis 1993). Others define these religious movements as natural derivatives of popular religiosity in Muslim countries (Nasr 1998).

Explanations along these lines characterize both the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its predecessors as hopeless resistances to modernization or as wisely adapting actors of jihad. According to one interpretation, this party is dissimulating its real ("fundamentalist") goals because the Turkish regime makes an openly fundamentalist position impossible (Rubin 2007). The AKP, culturalists argue, is a pragmatic Islamist party that aims to build a totally Islamic society in fifty years.

My research reveals that the ideal types (traditional vs. modern, religious vs. secular, local vs. Western) put forth by culturalist explanations are misrepresentations of cultural complexity. The last two de cades in Turkish history exemplify how religion and secularism, Islam and Westernization, mix together to produce cultural composites, and this is particularly what has made the AKP possible: the coexistence of the Islamic and the modern in the AKP's practice and symbols is not an ill-conceived attempt to hide its real Islamist identity, but it is the creative making of an alternative modernity.

Political Economy

Other scholars have accounted for Islamic popularity by conjunctural and class factors (Abrahamian 1989, 1991; Ayubi 1991; Keddie 1991). They have focused on social sectors and classes (or national cravings) that secularist modernization has been unable to satisfy. University graduates without jobs, provincial businessmen who are not supported by the state, and rural-to-urban immigrants without secure employment are the primary factors underlying the rise of Islamism in their explanations. As to the question of why these grievances take an Islamic color, political economic explanations point to the property structure and the class balances in the Middle East. The Islamic variety of populism has emerged because of the failure of former (nationalist) populisms, which has left Islam as the only untarnished cultural system (Burke 1998). Most political economic accounts tend to put less emphasis on (1) the multilayered religious and cultural work that actors have to carry out to lend any sociopolitical project credibility and (2) how this religious and cultural work decisively transforms the project with which it is articulated.

In the Turkish context, Ziya nis (2006b) has argued that the AKP has been successful because it was able to combine the winners and losers of neoliberal globalization. The party has built a broad coalition of business sectors with the poor, while running on a pro-Europe an Union and pro-International Monetary Fund ticket (nis 2007, 252). The split of the AKP from the Islamist mainstream, indeed, was facilitated by the emergence of a conservative business class, which influenced and moderated the Islamism of the poor (nis 2006a). The AKP is able to appeal to all these sectors because it sustains economic growth, comes from an Islamist tradition of municipal effectiveness, and carries out demo cratization (nis 2006b). The party also emphasizes social justice, seems to be committed to the poor, and is critical of corruption (Keyman and nis 2007). However, as the AKP's policies have not so far significantly improved the conditions of popular sectors, political economic approaches have to resort to explanations regarding the cultural and religious spheres, and this does not neatly fit in with their overall theorization. nis, for example, has stated that the AKP is able to get the support of the poor also by "using religion as an effective mechanism of mutual trust and bondage" (2006b, 212; emphasis mine).

While the political economy approach is right on target in its focus on the AKP's multiclass coalition, it does not tell us much about why Islam can become this cementing tool in the hands of an emergent neoliberal elite. While religion is of secondary importance in this account, winning the cultural and economic consent of subordinate classes is an integrated process that requires taking a microperspective on how the poor are mobilized. Therefore, the socioeconomic explanations of this literature have to be supplemented by accounts of how the economy is experienced and constructed in everyday life, how activists interact with authorities and followers in particular contexts to mobilize people, and how Islam shapes these experiences and interactions.

Social Movement Studies and Institutionalism

An emergent paradigm in the study of Islamic politics is social movement theory (Wickham 2002; Wiktorowicz 2001, 2004). Analysts of "resource mobilization" have focused on how activists mobilize people and how they frame their appeals-particularly the questions socioeconomic approaches leave unanswered. These scholars have attributed the popularity of Islamic movements around the world to successful activist tactics.

While...