Zeynep Ozgen is a political sociologist and ethnographer with a special focus on the Middle East. Her research integrates ethnographic and historial analysis, utilizing multi-sited participant observation, longitudinal qualitative fieldwork, in-depth interviews, and archival research. Dr. Ozgen will be sharing research from her 2025 book:
"Pious Politics: Cultural Foundations of the Islamist Movement in Turkey"
What explains the rise and resilience of religious movements in historically secular contexts? Pious Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2025) investigates this question through the case of Islamist mobilization in Turkey. Drawing on two years of archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in formal and clandestine religious networks in Turkey, Ozgen shows that the Turkish Islamists captured the state by developing a popular, well-organized movement that rallied the masses and built vigorous political parties. 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. Leveraging this groundwork, Islamists taught people to act politically in everyday life—situating personal choices about dress, speech, comportment, and social relations against a particular sociopolitical worldview. Pious Politics advances debates across political, historical, and cultural sociology, as well as scholarship on Islam and the Middle East.