Rapid urban migration swelled the Islamist constituency in the 1970s and 1980s.

Evidence

The third key element in the Islamist constituency was recent migrants to the cities. Throughout the Islamic world in the 1970s and 1980s urban populations grew at dramatic rates. Crowded into decaying and often primitive slum areas, the urban migrants needed and were the beneficiaries of the social services provided by Islamist organizations. In addition, Ernest Gellner points out, Islam offered “a dignified identity” to these “newly uprooted masses.” In Istanbul and Ankara, Cairo and Asyut, Algiers and Fes, and on the Gaza strip, Islamist parties successfully organized and appealed to “the downtrodden and dispossessed.” “The mass of revolutionary Islam,” Oliver Roy said, is “a product of modern society … the new urban arrivals, the millions of peasants who have tripled the populations of the great Muslim metropolises.” — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 309

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Milgrom’s work on how institutions fill gaps for new populations, and to broader claims about social mobilization driving political movements.
• DEFINE: Islamism here is functionally defined as the appeal to recent urban migrants through both social services and identity.