UCLA

Scholars of Islamist mobilization commonly rely on typological explanations to interpret the motivations, strategies, and goals of religious activists. Such explanations often characterize Islamist movements as "political" or "militant" when they contest state power, and as "civil" or "apolitical" when they do not. This dissertation seeks to overcome the prevailing typological tendencies in the literature and to rethink the conventional dichotomies of the political and the social. The dissertation examines a religious pedagogical movement in Turkey that eschews conventional institutions of politics, and focuses, on the surface, on "teaching religion to fellow Muslims." In doing so, it aims to explain why, how, and with what consequences social movements challenge the state's monopoly over forming and reforming individuals, their morality, subjectivity, and culture. The dissertation draws on eighteen months of fieldwork in Turkey in formal and clandestine sites of religious socialization and pedagogy, one hundred interviews with key local and national actors, and archival work in national libraries. The dissertation makes three contributions to the study of social movements, politics, and social change. First, it advances the social movement literature by documenting how presumably non-political movements that appear on the surface to be concerned with moral reform are in fact deeply political and transformative in nature. Second, it deepens and broadens theories of social and cultural reproduction by demonstrating the centrality of a relatively understudied field--the field of religious socialization/pedagogy--to struggles over creating "orthodoxy" or "correct" forms of knowledge. Third, by extending the study of religious mobilization to a traditionally secular political system, it enlarges the scope of the literature on Islamization, pietism, and sociopolitical change and lays the groundwork for future comparative studies.