| Summary/Abstract |
RELIGIOUS PARTIES AND THEIR IDEOLOGIES have captured the imagination of academic scholarship and public discussion since the 1980s. Specifically, Islamist parties have become a focal point as they entered the electoral politics of many Middle Eastern countries. Much of this focus is devoted to how such parties engage in ideological moderation—a legitimate academic concern with important practical implications for democratic governance, pluralism, and violence. Observers often treat religious ideology either as a fixed attribute on one extreme, or as an entirely malleable and instrumental feature on the other. For example, the Turkish president and leader of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has been criticized since his rise to political prominence in the mid‐1990s for being too ideologically rigid and threatening secularism in Turkey, gradually moving the country closer to a theocracy.1 Simultaneously, Erdoğan is characterized as a political opportunist who has no ideological commitments and exploits religion with reckless abandon to serve his own political interests.2 Yet these two seemingly conflicting views are not incompatible.
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