What is Political Islam?: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Literature

Abstract

Political Islam, which has been the subject of much discussion in the media, political circles and academia, appears to have different dimensions in different historical processes. In particular, the political, economic and social depressions the Ottoman Empire experienced at the end of the 18th century also reverberated in the Islamic world beyond its borders in similar and different dimensions. military defeats, colonization, orientalism, missionary crises are among the main crises. Although the Islamism movement, which emerged from all these problem areas, had an intellectual grounding related to the problems mentioned above, its political aspect/discourse is emphasized, even reduced to the political field. This study examines the contexts in which the concept of ‘political Islam’ is discussed in the scholarly literature. In this bibliometric analysis, 1,209 studies were obtained from scanning the Web of Science database. The main findings are as follows: The United States had the most publications, and Georgetown University was the institution with the most publications. The most published journal is Insight Turkey, and Emmanuel Karagiannis had the most publications. In addition, in the keyword analysis, concepts such as Islamism, democracy, Arab Spring, came to the fore along with political Islam.