Industrial Islamism: How Authoritarian Movements Mobilize Workers

＂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.