The Historical Micro-Foundations of Political Islam

• In Event: Islamism and Islamist Politics in the Middle East

Abstract

What explains the variation in the salience of the religious-secular cleavage over space and time? In this project, we explore the relationship between state-led secularization programs and political Islam. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the Turkish Republic, all private Islamic schools were closed by early Turkish Republican rulers in 1924. This was a part of a series of state-led secularist westernization projects that hoped to transform individuals into citizens of a secular nation. We construct an original cross-sectional time-series dataset of Ottoman schools. We analyze geo-spatially whether Turkish provinces that had a greater share of private Islamic institutions under the Ottoman Empire exhibit significantly higher support for Islamist parties under the Turkish Republic. We employ and digitize an original source of data that tracks the development of Ottoman schools on a local level over time. We geo-code Ottoman schools’ locations on the level of vilayet-sancak (province-subdistrict), using historical shapefiles. First, we merge the geocoded school data with an original dataset of Turkish MPs (1923-1946) to analyze how secular republican rulers allocated MPs to Turkish provinces, in hopes of better integrating the public into the secularization process. We additionally test whether more Public Houses [secular institutions] were built in Turkish provinces that had higher levels of private Islamic school closures. We extend the analysis further by investigating the long-term effects of the state-led secularization program. We analyze if areas with high levels of private Islamic school closures have a higher level of support for Islamist parties, using elections data from the 1950s period. Our findings support the idea that state-led secularization processes lead to long-term support for political Islam.

Authors

• Ekin Dursun, Yale University

• Ashrakat Elshehawy, Stanford University

• Elizabeth R. Nugent, Princeton University

• Emine Deniz, Sabanci University