Please join us for a presentation and discussion with Zeynep Ozgen on her book, Pious Politics: Cultural Foundations of the Islamist Movement in Turkey (Cambridge University Press, 2025). Pious Politics investigates a fundamental question of contemporary politics: what explains the rise and resilience of religious social movements in historically secular contexts? Drawing on two years of archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in formal and clandestine religious networks in Turkey, Ozgen shows that the Turkish Islamists captured the state by developing a popular, well-organized movement that rallied the masses and built vigorous political parties. But an equally formative, if not more significant, factor was the cultural groundwork Islamists laid through a quiet, gradual, and remarkably robust model of mobilization. Leveraging this groundwork, Islamists taught people to act politically in everyday life—situating personal choices about dress, speech, comportment, and social relations against a particular sociopolitical worldview. Pious Politics advances debates across political, historical, and cultural sociology, as well as scholarship on Islam and the Middle East.
Bio: Zeynep Ozgen is a political sociologist and ethnographer with a special focus on the Middle East. Her research integrates ethnographic and historial analysis, utilizing multi-sited participant observation, longitudinal qualitative fieldwork, in-depth interviews, and archival research. Ozgen’s book, Pious Politics: Cultural Foundations of the Islamist Movement in Turkey (Cambridge University Press, 2025) is a sociological examination of the rise and resilience of Islamist politics in Turkey since the early twentieth century. Pious Politics has received major honors from the American Sociological Association (ASA) and the American Political Science Association (APSA), including the Charles Tilly Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award (ASA Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section, 2026), the Barrington Moore Book Award (honorable mention; ASA Comparative Historical Sociology Section, 2026), and the Best Book Award (APSA European Politics and Society Section, 2026).
Her other work centers on ethnic relations, minority rights, and education reform. Articles from these streams of work appeared in Theory and Society, Qualitative Sociology, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Nations and Nationalism, and New Perspectives on Turkey. This scholarship has been recognized with awards from the American Sociological Association, including the Sociology of Religion Section’s Distinguished Article Award (2024) and the Global and Transnational Sociology Section’s Best Scholarly Article Award (Honorable Mention, 2022).
Additionally, Ozgen’s research has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright-Hays Program, and the American Council for Learned Societies, as well as the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Council for European Studies, and the Max Planck Institute. At NYUAD, she teaches courses on sociological theory, ethnographic fieldwork, and religious social movements.
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