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Industrial Islamism analyzes the relationship, since the end of the Cold War, between the rise of political Islamism in Muslim-majority countries and the rise of a new global "middle class" of industrial entrepreneurs. Challenging common assumptions, Utku Balaban questions the idea that political Islamism represents the antithesis of Western modernity and industrialization. On the contrary: the more enthusiastically a Muslim-majority country industrializes, the more "Islamized" its politics becomes.
The book focuses on Turkey, historically the most industrialized Muslim-majority country in the world, with the most successful Islamist movement and a relatively competitive electoral system. It provides a fine-grained historical and ethnographic analysis at the local level of urban-industrial control over workers in sweatshops and working-class neighborhoods by this new global middle class, whom Balaban calls the
faubourgeoisie. As the central actor behind Turkey's post–Cold War industrialization, the faubourgeoisie allies with the Islamist movement to control its workers and significantly influence national politics.
Utku Balaban is Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Race, Intersectionality, Gender, and Sociology at Xavier University. He is author of A Conveyor Belt of Flesh and Social Inclusion Policies in Turkey.
"An excellent work which explains in an illuminating and productive way the social and economic as well as historical conditions for the rise of Islamism in Turkish society and politics in the 1990s and since."—Christine Philliou, author of Turkey: A Past Against History
"Balaban’s book is a groundbreaking reconstruction of the theory of Islamism based on statistics, childhood memories from a poor neighborhood, participant observation in sweatshops, interviews, and conceptual rigor. A rare combination of quantitative expertise, ethnographic texture, and theoretical imagination."—Cihan Tuğal, author of The Fall of the Turkish Model
"Utku Balaban’s Industrial Islamism challenges the idea that Islamism rose up in opposition to Western culture and society. Combining an outstanding theoretical analysis with vivid ethnographic research, which he conducted in Turkey, Balaban illustrates the ways this political movement has facilitated global capitalism while it has systematically undermined secular democracies in Muslim-majority countries."—Judith Friedlander, author of A Light in Dark Times: The New School for Social Research and Its University in Exile
"Utku Balaban’s Industrial Islamism is a meticulously researched and wonderfully provocative rethinking of the origins and dynamics of Islamist politics. While focused on Turkey, it develops a set of insights about the entanglement of class and Islam that have far-reaching implications for making political sense of the wider region. Drawing on statistical data, historical evidence, and ethnographic and personal experience, Industrial Islamism offers a much-needed and highly original intervention into a set of debates that have long needed a fresh perspective."—Christopher Dole, author of Living On: Psychiatry and the Future of Disaster in Turkey
334 pp.6 x 9Illus: 19 color figures, 1 color map, 5 tables
9780520422537$95.00|£80.00Hardcover
Jul 2025