Utku Balaban, "Industrial Islamism: How Authoritarian Movements Mobilize Workers" (U California Press, 2025)

May 20, 2026

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In a 2008 fieldwork stint, Utku Balaban worked as a laborer in a garment sweatshop in Istanbul. His original goal was not to study Islamism, but to understand the lives of industrial workers. Yet what he witnessed up close—the exhaustion, the long hours, and the seemingly unbreakable bond between his coworkers and their employers—convinced him that the core of the Islamist movement’s success lay not in culture or piety, but in the social dynamics of the workplace. That insight became the foundation of his book Industrial Islamism: How Authoritarian Movements Mobilize Workers (University of California Press, 2025).

Islamization Follows Industrialization

Balaban’s core argument is that the Islamization of politics in Muslim-majority countries is not a cultural backlash against Westernization, but a structural outcome of industrialization. He defines Islamization not by whether an Islamist party wins power, but by the growing visibility of religious motives in politics—whether advanced by Islamist movements or by secular rulers reacting to them. Using data from the Varieties of Democracy database, he shows a clear pattern: the larger the relative size of a country’s industrial workforce, the more visible Islamization becomes. This correlation holds across roughly two-thirds of the Muslim world.

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What you'll learn

1 (02:31) **Book Origins & Inductive Discovery** - Balaban describes how his research on industrial Islamism emerged gradually from unrelated fieldwork projects over 20 years.
2 (07:07) **Core Thesis: Industrialization Precedes Islamization** - Balaban argues that Islamization of politics follows industrialization in Muslim-majority countries, not cultural backlash or nostalgia.
3 (16:20) **Four Main Arguments of the Book** - Balaban succinctly summarizes the four central claims that structure his analysis.
4 (18:01) **Distinction from Existing Scholarship** - Balaban explains how his thesis differs from cultural or civilizational explanations of Islamism's rise.
5 (21:56) **The Faux Bourgeoisie Defined** - Balaban introduces and refines his key theoretical concept of the third primary class.
6 (27:34) **Global Model of Islamization** - Balaban presents his three-factor model predicting Islamization patterns across Muslim-majority countries.
7 (37:40) **Historical Context: Necmettin Erbakan's Role** - Balaban traces the contingent historical path of Turkish Islamism through its founding figure.

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Show Notes

What explains the rise of religious populism in contemporary Turkish politics and society? How does industrialization help to explain change and continuity in social and religious life in Muslim majority countries? In his new book Industrial Islamism: How Authoritarian Movements Mobilize Workers (University of California Press, 2025), Utku Balaban examines Turkey’s rapid post-Cold War industrialization and argues that the answers to these questions lie in a class analysis centered on the relationships between employers and employees situated within larger contexts of globalization and historical Islamization. Political and religious transformations occurring in the 1980s and 1990s are not the result of a cultural backlash to or rejection of “Westernization,” or a nostalgia for an idealistic past. Rather, Balaban argues they are related to the rise of a socio-economic-political class he calls the “faubourgeosie” that strategically employ Islamic populism as a method of protecting their interests against other primary class actors. These changes are internal to the mechanics and logics of capitalism as shifts in the traditional relations of production produced new alliances and networks based on small-scale capital accumulation. Balaban’s Turkish case study can be applied to other Muslim-majority countries in which small-scale industrialists similarly dealt with economic anxiety and aspirations through recourse to popular Islamist rhetoric not as a specifically moral strategy, but as a political one.

Industrial Islamism recently received the best new book in the category of international political economy from the International Studies Association.

Dr. Utku Balaban is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Xavier University. He is the author of A Conveyor Belt of Flesh: Urban Space and the Proliferation of Industrial Labor Practices in Istanbul’s Garment Industry (2011) and Social Inclusion Practices in Turkey (2015).

Dr. Jaclyn Michael is an Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (USA). She is the author of several articles on Muslim cultural representation, performance, and religious belonging in India and in the United States.

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