TY - JOUR
T1 - From secularization to religious resurgence
T2 - an endogenous account
AU - Ozgen, Zeynep
N1 - Funding Information:
I would like to thank Elisabeth Anderson, Astor Avi, Rogers Brubaker, Miguel Centeno, Ivan Ermakoff, Elena Gadjanova, Phil Gorski, Eric Hamilton, Robert Jansen, Daniel Kerrell, Matthias Koenig, Elena Korchmina, Sabino Kornrich, John O’Brien, Peter Stamatov, Kristin Surak, anonymous reviewers, and the editors of Theory and Society for their invaluable feedback on previous drafts and to Fırat Kimya and Büşra Mahmutoğlu for their exceptional research assistance. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2013 American Sociological Association meeting and the 2014 Sociology Colloquium at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, where participants offered helpful comments. All translations from Turkish and Ottoman Turkish belong to the author unless stated otherwise.
Funding Information:
Funding for this research was provided by the Mellon/American Council for Learned Societies Dissertation Completion Fellowship, New York University Abu Dhabi’s Division of Social Science, and by the Max Planck Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.
PY - 2023/7
Y1 - 2023/7
N2 - What accounts for the resurgence of religion in Muslim countries that pursue strict secularization policies? Theories of religious resurgence have emphasized secular differentiation, religious growth, and pietist agency as animating sources behind politically engaged religions. Extending this work, I advance a typology of strategies oppositional actors employ to produce and sustain religious politics. I ground my approach in the study of Islamic resurgence in Turkey during the twentieth century. Drawing on published primary sources, secondary historiography, and multi-sited fieldwork, the analysis shows that Turkish Islamists spearheaded successful resurgence not only by capitalizing on exogenous “opportunities” that punctuated the “repressive” pathway but, more importantly, by pursuing endogenous institutional change. Even though secularizing agents restricted the religious field’s autonomy, dissidents avoided open confrontation with the state. Instead, they positioned themselves within official institutions (embedding, layering), changed their logic (conversion), and supplemented these institutions with alternative ones (substitution). As a result, religious actors turned Islam into an ideological counterattack on the regime’s secular institutions. These insights can be extended to religious mobilizations throughout the Muslim world as well as to non-religious social struggles beyond it.
AB - What accounts for the resurgence of religion in Muslim countries that pursue strict secularization policies? Theories of religious resurgence have emphasized secular differentiation, religious growth, and pietist agency as animating sources behind politically engaged religions. Extending this work, I advance a typology of strategies oppositional actors employ to produce and sustain religious politics. I ground my approach in the study of Islamic resurgence in Turkey during the twentieth century. Drawing on published primary sources, secondary historiography, and multi-sited fieldwork, the analysis shows that Turkish Islamists spearheaded successful resurgence not only by capitalizing on exogenous “opportunities” that punctuated the “repressive” pathway but, more importantly, by pursuing endogenous institutional change. Even though secularizing agents restricted the religious field’s autonomy, dissidents avoided open confrontation with the state. Instead, they positioned themselves within official institutions (embedding, layering), changed their logic (conversion), and supplemented these institutions with alternative ones (substitution). As a result, religious actors turned Islam into an ideological counterattack on the regime’s secular institutions. These insights can be extended to religious mobilizations throughout the Muslim world as well as to non-religious social struggles beyond it.
KW - Historical institutionalism
KW - Islamic activism
KW - Middle East
KW - Religious resurgence
KW - Strategy
KW - Turkey
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U2 - 10.1007/s11186-023-09512-9
DO - 10.1007/s11186-023-09512-9
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85163340536
SN - 0304-2421
JO - Theory and Society
JF - Theory and Society
ER -