This book explains why political Islam, which has been part of Turkish politics since the 1970s but on the rise only since the 1990s, has now achieved governing power. The book focuses on the dominant form of Islamist activism in Turkey by analyzing the increasing electoral strength of four successive Islamist political parties: the Welfare Party; its successor, the Virtue Party; and the successors of the Virtue Party, the Felicity Party and the Justice and Development Party. The Justice and Development Party is now the party of government in Turkey. Drawing upon social movement theory, and the political process model variant of this theory, this book argues that the rise of political Islam in Turkey can be attributed to three factors: first, the emergence of a political opportunity structure, created primarily by the adoption of the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis by the military regime in the aftermath of the 1980 intervention; second, the presence of movement entrepreneurs with significant organizational, financial, and human resources; and, third, the successful framing of issues by entrepreneurs to expand the appeal of the Islamist social movement beyond the population of Islamists to secular but socioeconomically aggrieved voters.

While the successful mobilization of political Islam can be attributed in part to the malfunctioning state and the structural conditions that it created, particularly since the 1990s, these factors alone do not explain how the Islamist movement could establish the well-organized and resource-rich networks that enabled it to address the ills of the state since the 1990s.