After more than seventy years of secularist rule in Turkey, victory of the Islam-based Welfare Party in the mid-1990s came as a surprise to many political observers. Electoral support for religious party politics increased despite heavy pressures from the secular army and state officials. Based on over twenty years of ethnographic research in a low-income neighborhood in Istanbul, Jenny White's Islamist Mobilization in Turkey explores the basis of this support and the meaning it carries in the daily lives of people.

White argues that Islam-based parties in Turkey are successful because they are able to engage in vernacular politics, which she defines as “a value-centered political process rooted in local culture, interpersonal relations, and community networks” (p. 27). She claims that because party members see Islam as a local cultural idiom, rather than a coherent ideology, they are able to connect local values and social organization to larger national interests. Thus, rather than being political parties that represent Islam, they serve as Muslim parties interested in politics. Moreover, the effort party activists spend to personalize and popularize politics through face-to-face connections and networks of mutual obligation helps them establish bridges among otherwise divided social classes and ethnic groups. By becoming intimate with people's lives, White argues, Islamist parties transform politics into an integral aspect of everyday life. It is due to this organizational strength that religion-based politics survive the repeated banning of Islamist political parties.

An equally important contribution of White's study is its answer to the question why Islamist parties are more successful than secularist parties in Turkey. Even though the Republican Peoples Party activists she observed in the same neighborhood also engage in grassroots organization and face-to-face activism, they are not as successful in mobilizing people. White argues that this is because secularists aim to transform and go beyond local values and communal ties, rather than utilizing them, in order to popularize their ideological message. As secularist activists try to modernize the values and life-styles of the residents in the neighborhood through top-down social engineering projects and with an elitist attitude they create feelings of alienation among residents.

This lucid ethnography of political mobilization is especially important at a time when scholars are declaring the contemporary neoliberal moment as postpolitical, or politics as dead. The consensus among critical political theorists suggests that at the turn of the millennium politics became a field for the construction of privatized moral communities rather than for battling conflicting interests. Although White does not ask why this transformation took place at this particular moment in time, she suggestively tells us how the new form of politics shapes and is shaped by everyday engagement. Her study shows that even though community and morality based politics may be changing the nature of politics, it also functions as a resource for drawing the masses into this new political field where they feel intimately comfortable.