The question posed at the beginning of this study asked why Islamism, which has been present in Turkish politics since the 1970s, has achieved electoral success, and assumed the powers of government, only in the 1990s. This study demonstrates that the rise to power of the Islamist social movement in Turkey can be attributed to three factors: first, the emergence of a political opportunity structure (POS), created primarily by the adoption of the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis (TIS) by the military regime in the aftermath of the 1980 intervention; second, the presence of movement entrepreneurs with significant organizational and other 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.

The Islamist movement in Turkey is largely nonviolent. One of the major theoretical findings of this study is that political context constrains movement entrepreneurs' framing activities, even if the movement is antisystemic. In the Turkish case, the existence of a secular-democratic regime and its acceptance by the vast majority of citizens constrained Islamist entrepreneurs' strategies for mobilization. But it also created an opportunity to be exploited. Islamist entrepreneurs, while utilizing social networks to overthrow the secular order by Islamizing the society from below, also mobilized by forming a political party. The political process model (PPM) proposes that movement entrepreneurs do not determine their goals and strategies for mobilization in a vacuum.