Mobilizing Religion in Middle East Politics: A Comparative Study of Israel and Turkey.

• Author: Tas, Hakki
• Position: Book review

Mobilizing Religion in Middle East Politics

A Comparative Study of Israel and Turkey

By Yusuf Sarfati

London, New York: Routledge, 2014, 256 pages, $125.30, ISBN 9780415540162.

In his book Mobilizing Religion in Middle East Politics, Yusuf Sarfati provides one of the few book-length, up to date, comparative studies between modern Turkey and Israel. Unlike what the title suggests, it might be misleading to assume such a comparison would be about Middle East politics in general. Nonetheless, Sarfati's in-depth study of these two non-Arab countries, both held as "exceptional" or "outliers" in their region, offers findings extending beyond its cases and the region.

The book has a clear focus: What are the dynamics and mechanisms behind the electoral success of religious political parties in democratic settings? Sarfati defines a religious party flexibly as "a political party that takes religion as a reference point for its policy proposals to address the major political problems of its country" (p. 10). He, then, scrutinizes the political rise and mobilizing power of two religious movement parties, the National Outlook Parties in Turkey and Shas in Israel, especially since the 1990s.

Initially, Sarfati draws a big picture from the literature of the rise of these new religious movements, which he categorizes into three main approaches: cultural, socioeconomic, and political (p. 14). While most of the contemporary literature accommodates the well-known "inclusion-moderation thesis," Sarfati differs from this mainstream and skillfully employs Social Movement Theory (SMT). This choice of theoretical framework greatly adds to the novelty of his book and reflects more on the process of moderation. As both Shas and National Outlook Parties rely on religious movements as their bedrock, SMT could point out different aspects left in the dark. To further elaborate on the sophisticated phenomenon in focus, Sarfati takes rather an eclectic and contingent approach and argues that "the interaction between political opportunity structures, framing processes and social networks explains the successful religio-political mobilization in Israel and Turkey over the past two decades" (p. 4).

Mobilizing Religion in Middle East Politics presents a parallel historical course in which both movement parties are contextualized and examined accordingly. The National Outlook Parties, established in 1970, and Shas, established in 1983, exploited the social cleavages...