The Power of the Devout Bourgeoisie: The Case of the Justice and Development Party in Turkey

Religious Fundamentalism in Eight Muslim‐Majority Countries: Reconceptualization and Assessment

“…This finding suggests that, while fundamentalism may be a reaction to secular modernity (Antoun ; Lawrence ; Almond, Appleby, and Sivan ; Kaplan ; Riesebrodt ), it is not against development, reflecting adherence to religious modernity. As Iranian Muslim intellectual Ali Shariati (Shariati :23; Hanson ) stated, “Europe abandoned religion and made progress, [while] we abandoned religion and went backward.” This linkage may also explain why fundamentalism in such contexts as Pakistan under General Zia al‐Haqq or Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (Gumuscu and Sert ; Hussain ; Mohiuddin ; Talbot ) displayed strong support for economic development. Altogether, the robustness of these three predictors across the countries supports the view that this multifactor measure of religion, as conceived here, is an important contributor to the study of religious fundamentalism.…”

“…This finding suggests that, while fundamentalism may be a reaction to secular modernity (Antoun 2008;Lawrence 1989;Almond, Appleby, and Sivan 2003;Kaplan 1992;Riesebrodt 1993), it is not against development, reflecting adherence to religious modernity. As Iranian Muslim intellectual Ali Shariati (Shariati 1969:23;Hanson 1983) (Gumuscu and Sert 2009;Hussain 1999;Mohiuddin 2007;Talbot 1998) displayed strong support for economic development. Altogether, the robustness of these three predictors across the countries supports 18 One reason for a lack of significant relationship between religiosity and fundamentalism among Egyptians is that these variables have low variability.…”

Understanding Revolution in the Middle East: The Central Role of the Middle Class

“…This can be also seen very sharply at the macro level-by 2009, 30% of the Egyptian labor force worked for the state but earns a total wage bill of less than 9% GDP, implying that average wages were in the neighborhood of one third of GDP per capita, which is extremely low by international standards. 5 Indeed, it benefitted handsomely from the alliance with the support provided to SMEs and the rise of what became known as the Anatolian tigers, SMEs that drove growth in Turkey in the past decade (Demiralp 2009 andGumuscu 2009). World Bank data on income distribution, and utilizing reasonable assumptions on the definition of classes. The results represented in Figure 3 are striking: throughout the period, the size of the MC remains around 30% of the population for the region as a whole, that of the rich at about 10%, and that of the poor (using an expansive definition of having an income of less than $4 a day) at about 60%.…”

Electoral Polarization, Class Politics and a New Welfare State in Brazil and Turkey

“…Islamic capital had organized itself into a business association, MÜSİAD, which became a smaller counterpart and rival to the organization of Istanbul-based secularist big capitalists, TÜSİAD (Gumuscu 2010;Somer 2007). The AKP, like its predecessor the Welfare Party, was supported financially and ideologically by this comparatively small but growing devout section of the bourgeoisie and the middle classes (Gumuscu and Sert 2009;Hosgör 2011), whose loyalty they secured by distributing public resources through central and municipal governments. In spite of its overt pro-capitalist policies, and supported by the small devout fraction of the middle and upper classes, the AKP and its founding leader Tayyip Erdogan managed to appeal to the populous poor as the main source of electoral support rather than to the existing economic elites and middle classes that tend to identify themselves more with secularism and align themselves with economic globalization and cultural Europeanization (Keyder 2005;Yörük and Yuksel 2014).…”