Between Theology and Politics: Erbakan and the Institutionalization of Islamism in Türkiye

This study reconsiders Necmettin Erbakan’s place in modern Turkish Islamism: Was Necmettin Erbakan the architect of modern Turkish Islamism, or the organizer of an already-existing repertoire? Drawing on a qualitative, interpretive reading of his speeches and writings alongside the secondary literature, it first distinguishes foundational religious concepts (Islam, Muslim, sharīʿa ) from the later, externally coined label of Islamism. It then situates Erbakan within a selective genealogy of global ideologues (Afghani, al-Banna, Qutb, and Khomeini) against which his convergences and departures can be assessed. On this basis, the paper analyzes his program across four themes: knowledge and science as religious duty; social order and cohesion; political economy, centered on Adil Düzen (Just Order); and international relations, from his critique of European integration to the pursuit of Islamic unity through the D-8. Read against the Ottoman legacy, the Kemalist reordering of state–religion relations, and party competition from the 1950s to the 1990s, Erbakan emerges not as the founder of Turkish Islamism but as the figure who systematized, institutionalized, and translated a heterogeneous Islamist repertoire into an enduring political program suited to Türkiye’s distinctive institutional and geopolitical constraints. The research closes by considering how this organizing role was later reinterpreted and contested in the AK Party’s post-Islamist trajectory, which broke with Erbakan’s Milli Görüş even as it inherited its institutional groundwork.