Given the Islamist Welfare or Virtue Party’s rise to power in recent Turkish elections, the timing of this book's release must be the answer to a publisher's prayer. By an "Islamist movement" White means, "a general mobilization of people around cultural, political and social issues that are presented and interpreted through an Islamic idiom" (p. 6). In Turkey this has taken place largely since the 1980s, in the context of a constitutional democracy dominated by a military that is none too friendly toward the Islamists. White's orientation as a political economist is reflected in the way she contextualizes the rise of the Islamists in relation to economic changes over the last quarter century and their attendant impact on the class system, particularly in urban centers of Turkey.

The primary field site for White’s study was a poor working-class neighborhood of Istanbul, a hotbed of Islamist mobilization. The Islamists did not go unopposed by the secularist "modernists," or Kemalists, although it was apparent that the Kemalists were far less successful in winning adherents than their religious counterparts. White asks why this was the case. Critical at the time were the corruption scandals that surrounded the secularist parties and alienated actual or potential constituencies among the poor. But this negative factor alone could not account for the rapid rise of the Islamists, because they were organized along similar lines as the secularists. In White's estimation, what was decisive was not structural so much as it was procedural: the way in which the Islamists situated their messages and galvanized support.

White calls this process "vernacular politics"--that is, a politics that is not so much "official" and based on a conventional party apparatus as it is local, linking up neighborhood networks with regional and national institutions (see especially chs. 1 and 2). The Islamists understood how to appeal to voters through local cultural values (particularly imece, or community-based support, and himaye, or hierarchical cooperation based on family, region, and party) as well as through face-to-face, oral forms of interaction that often took place in the more intimate spheres of the neighborhood and household. To penetrate the latter spaces, women activists were crucial to the Islamists, and not surprisingly they are at the core of White's study (see especially ch. 7 but also throughout the book). By contrast, the Kemalists appealed to a more "modernist" narrative in which local peoples did not necessarily recognize their own regionally specific identities or sensibilities. Moreover, because of their relative lack of education, local people felt uncomfortable with the decontextualized, print-oriented forms of communication favored by modernists. Vernacular politics is also at the core of White's exploration of the outreach work that Islamists did through various institutions of civil society, such as political associations and charitable foundations (ch. 6), as well as the process through which the notion of democracy was interpolated into Islamic law (ch. 5).

Although her stress is understandably on the relative successes of the Islamist party, White is also cognizant of the strains, both personal and structural, that the party’s members have experienced. Chapter 4 is about Generation X's surprisingly receptive response to the creation of an Islamic polity and the tensions this has produced in that generation’s relations with the older generation that is steeped in a more secular politics. Chapter 7 focuses on women who participate in the Islamist movement and the problems they face in trying to wield, or at least share, power in the male-dominated party hierarchy, as well as the tensions they feel in relations with their husbands and fathers over issues of their personal autonomy. White is also cognizant of the profound structural contradictions that beset a movement whose grass-roots appeal at the local level does not necessarily translate into strength at the national party level.

This book has been made timely by world historical events. And it is gratifying to see the discipline of anthropology used so perspicaciously to explain those events. For that reason, and because of its accessible prose, it deserves to be read not only in Middle East Studies, the anthropology of Islam, and political anthropology, but also more widely by the nonacademic public.