Book
Since its founding in 1923, the Turkish republic has periodically reined in Islamist actors. Secular laws denied legitimacy to religious ideas, publications, and civic organizations, while military coups of 1970, 1980, and 1997 shut Islamist parties down and jailed or banned their leaders from politics. Despite such adversity, Islamists won an unprecedented victory in 2002 national elections and have continued to rule for more than two decades. How did Turkish Islamists succeed in capturing political power in a historically secular and periodically repressive institutional context?
My book Pious Politics: Cultural Foundations of The Islamist Movement in Turkey (Cambridge University Press, 2025) is a sociological examination of the rise and resilience of Islamist politics in Turkey since the early twentieth century. It shows that Islamists seized state power by building a popular, well-organized movement over decades, rallying the masses, forming vigorous political parties, and pressing for legislative reform. But an equally formative—if not more significant—factor was the cultural groundwork Islamists laid through a quiet, gradual, and remarkably robust model of mobilization. The book demonstrates this argument by incorporating ethnographic research with historical analysis. In particular, it weaves together a wide range of data from published primary and secondary sources and multi-sited fieldwork I conducted in formal and clandestine networks of religious socialization. The book advances debates across political, historical, and cultural sociology, as well as scholarship on Islam and the Middle East.
You can read my blog post on the book here.
Cambridge University Press. Amazon, CUP*.
*Enter the code OZGEN25 at checkout to receive a 20% discount. Valid until 31 October 2026.
“Pious Politics is nothing short of a highly sophisticated ethnographic study of an underground social world embedded within a work of world-class historical sociological scholarship. It will serve as a methodological model for future scholars endeavoring to understand the present in its full historicity. At the same time, the book is meticulous in its evidentiary standards—both ethnographic and historical. Quite simply, a superb work of empirical scholarship.”
Robert Jansen
Associate Professor, Sociology Department, University of Michigan
“Pious Politics offers an engaging and ambitious analysis of the rise of Islamist politics in Turkey. The book provides a stark reminder of what we miss when we fail to take culture seriously and when we overlook long-term processes that lay the groundwork for significant political transformations.”
Rory McVeigh
The Nancy Reeves Dreux Professor of Sociology, University of Notre Dame
“A rich, insightful, and original addition to the literatures on Turkish Islamism, Bourdieusian theory, and contentious politics. Drawing on ethnographic research as well as archival sources, Ozgen shows that the electoral successes of Islamist parties are not solely the result of institutional shifts in the political field but involve extensive cultural work in the religious field as well.”
Philip S. Gorski
Professor, Departments of Sociology and Religious Studies, Yale University
Funding for Fieldwork Research and Writing
National Endowment for the Humanities (2022)
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (2014-2016)
American Council of Learned Societies, Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship (2013-14)
Fulbright-Hays/IIE, Graduate Fellowship for International Study (2011-12)
Wenner-Gren Foundation, Dissertation Fieldwork Grant (2011-12)
Council for European Studies, Mellon Pre-Dissertation Research Fellowship (2010)
