Like other area studies, Middle East studies has an interdisciplinary scope, which enriches scholarly debates on Islamist movements, groups, and actors. However, while Middle East studies brings scholars from a wide range of academic backgrounds together, it is still predominantly represented by two major disciplines: political science and history. Relatively less attention is paid to what other disciplines, particularly geography, sociology, and the humanities, contribute to the understanding and theorization of Islamist movements.

No doubt, scholarly literature on Islamist movements and political Islam has been very rich in exploring whether (and in which ways) these movements propel or undermine civil society and democratization.Footnote ¹ Typical of studies of collective action, research on Islamism has largely focused on deliberate action, mobilization, strategy, and resources at the cost of neglecting the mundane aspects of faith-based lives and Muslim politics.Footnote ² By mundane aspects, I refer to daily lives, practices, and sites of ordinary Muslims (as opposed to political leaders, the elite, or activists). I highlight two specific issues that are largely understudied and deserve more attention. The first is the centrality of unintentional nonstrategic aspects of Muslim piety and ways of life and how transformative they have been in the region (and beyond). The second is the role of different geographies and urban space in reinforcing and/or mediating the tension and conflicts over Muslim politics in everyday life.

Islamist mobilization and its efficient networks across the globe have been extensively documented, analyzed, and debated. From the perspective of collective action, Islamists have challenged and confronted secular political institutions and secularist movements. However, the predominant dichotomy that has originated from these studies—Islamism versus secularism—needs to be rethought and questioned through a sociology of everyday life. Against the background of scholarship on strategic and planned actions of Islamists, we know very little about the unintended aspects and consequences of piety and faith-based lives in the region. More important, an exclusive focus on social movements is more likely to miss other sites and aspects of Muslims’ lives, which may not create, or might even dilute, a secularist–Islamist chasm in Muslim societies.

Let me explain this more concretely. When Islamists mobilize to establish some aspect of Islamic conservative morality, such as an objection to homosexuality or premarital sex, their mobilization appears as the major force and voice in society. However, when we study everyday life under the conditions of increasing Islamization over the last couple of decades, there seems to be little, if any, major disagreement between many secularists and Islamists regarding the acceptability of homosexual activity and the freedom of individuals to engage in it. A similar bias can be observed in gender politics in Muslim societies when we compare studies of collective action and everyday life. The number of surveys that insist on proving the inherent gender inequality in Islam continues to increase. Whether Islamic actors and movements are seen as players in democratization processes, they have been found guilty of discriminating against and oppressing women. However, when we situate Islamist movements within the larger context of everyday life, the advocacy of traditional gender roles does not seem to occur only among Islamist circles but also within the society at large. In the absence of any communication between surveys and ethnographies, one cannot help but wonder if we often exaggerate the role of Islamic mobilization as an independent explanatory variable in largely pious societies. Hence, the binary terminology of scholarship on Islamism such as radical/moderate, hardliner/softliner, and Islamist/secularist needs to be rethought in the larger context of daily life.

I do not mean that we tend to neglect the larger social context in which Islamist movements have flourished. There is a clear tendency, which appears in some disciplines more than others, of introducing a study with a section on “historical background” or the broader context of civil society or party politics. If we took one step further, the centrality of “the context” could also involve attention to the mundane, unintended, and nonstrategic aspects of politics. Studying Islamists and their actions without exploring the street or neighborhood where they constantly interact—agree, disagree, and negotiate—with other social actors may lead us to attribute the social practices to the movement, although these practices may be more deeply rooted in a place, neighborhood, city, or society. This may, and often does, lead to the formation of misleading causalities between Islamists and the issue at hand. Besides reactions against homosexuality and advocacy of traditional gender roles, there are numerous other issues, such as national(ist) sentiments or positioning toward the state, over which the pious may not necessarily behave much differently from others in society.Footnote ³ For example, contrary to popular belief, the Gulen movement—the largest Islamist movement in Turkey, which has expanded across the globe—does not confront the secular state. To the contrary, it has engaged and cooperated more efficiently with the secular state than many other secular(ist) groups.

One way out of thinking in binary constructs is in-depth analysis based on ethnographic fieldwork, which takes space and individuals’ narratives, such as oral histories, more seriously. When we juxtapose hands-on anthropological methods against surveys and comparisons based on a short field visit, or none at all, we see how extended exposure to the field is advantageous in breaking or challenging predominant dichotomies.

We have learned much about how Islamist movements act in a society that is stratified by class, gender, and ethnicity. But they also act in space, and attentiveness to geography reveals how space and power are constantly mapped onto each other.Footnote ⁴ Power dynamics are often spatially negotiated. For example, the headscarf ban has led to a wide variety of contestations across different countries (in young and old democracies as well as in authoritarian regimes) by stimulating numerous negotiations and innovative solutions in different urban sites, such as university campuses. The headscarved university students in Turkey have been very inventive in adapting the rules of conduct in different campuses by wearing substitute clothing that ranges from baggy outfits with hoods to wigs that cover their hair. Pious students state that they know every tunnel, underground passage, or side road on campus in order to hide their headscarf from authorities. Most of these spatial negotiations are spontaneous and individually coordinated rather than long-planned collective action. They succeed to the extent that the actors know the space intimately and use it “actively,” to use Asef Bayat's terminology.Footnote ⁵

The centrality of daily life and the spatiality of power deserve more attention in studies of Islamist movements. Incorporating them more systematically into the field may help challenge some problematic categories and generalizations that have been pravelent in Middle East studies. When we take into account that Islamists, like other activists, are embedded in the specificities of everyday life and negotiate politics spatially, we may overcome the challenge of singling them out systematically. We may avoid juxtaposing them against the “rest of the society,” often arbitrarily labeled as “secular” or “secularist.” This predominant binary obscures the ways in which different shades of the pious and the nonreligious are also divided within themselves (rather than merely between each other) in the intricacies of daily life.