Islamist Mobilization in Turkey: A Study in Vernacular Politics (review)

Turkey is perceived to be an important test case for the intersection of Islam and political practice because it has a laicist government with a history of electoral politics, along with viable Islamic parties and organizations that have become politicized, and to some extent, influenced by international trends.

—Jenny B. White

After the extraordinary success of the Islamist Justice and Development Party in Turkey's 2002 elections, Islamic mobilization in Turkey acquired a fresh and complex meaning, one that is smoothly deciphered by Jenny B. White's insightful ethnography. As the above quotation suggests, White's book on contemporary Istanbul unearths the intricate process of Islamic mobilization from below. The author effectively links the local to public life at the national and global levels within the framework of religious and other cultural resources.

The book's success resides in the rigor of its premises, in the depth of more than a decade of intense fieldwork, and in White's compelling prose. While witnessing the rise of the Welfare Party (WP) in 1994, its demise in 1997, and its subsequent reformation as the Virtue Party in 1998, White tackles the problem of a successful grassroots mobilization that ranges far beyond party politics. Given that in Ümraniye—an expanding squatter area on the outskirts of Istanbul's Asian side where support for the Islamist parties was high—most residents were unconcerned about the Virtue Party's closing down, White asks, "If not party politics, what kind of politics was I witnessing?" (5). This question leads the author to formulate a new concept, that of vernacular politics. Vernacular politics enable mobilization via the popularization and personalization of a political message. Local cultural norms such as mutual indebtedness, patron-client relations, and traditional gender roles, fortified by and negotiated against an Islamic background, are the mechanisms through which this is achieved (27, 76).

As White herself engages with the poverty-stricken lives of Ümraniye, a squatter establishment now with an "industrial touch" (81), she experiences the wide variety of forms WP activism can take. These range from the inner workings of WP "cells," one-on-one interactions of party activists with various residents, municipal activities such as "Peace of Mind Conversations," or assistance offered by local charity foundations, as well as a WP rally at Izmit and a TV program on an Islamist station featuring Turkey's current prime minister, Tayyip Erdogan. All these data help delineate the breadth and the depth of vernacular politics, privileging the cultural over the ideological in the constitution of a civil society. Thus White challenges the long-held assumption that civil society and communal practices are antithetical and redefines "civil society" as one that "incorporates personal, kin, and ethnic relations on the one hand, and civic and political institutions on the other, linking them in practice, rather than artificially separating out ‘cultural,' civic, and political domains" (179).

White further claims that just as analytic categories overlap, so do social groups with their lifestyles, tastes, and political proclivities. She cogently debunks the myth of homogeneity with respect to political parties and their voters, as well as with respect to Islamist and Kemalist discourses, by pointing out how these are fragmented and crosscut along socioeconomic, gender, and generational lines. Hence, when situating the Islamist movement within Turkish political history in chapter 3, White addresses not only the multiple paths of institutionalized Islam but also the heterogeneity of the movement's voters, who range from "the urban dispossessed to provincial bourgeoisie and upwardly mobile young professionals" (101). She points out that the Welfare Party and its successor the Virtue Party have both incorporated conflicts among radicals and moderates. In chapter 4, titled "Generation X and the Virtue Party," White underscores the tension between the populist, horizontal...