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Industrial Islamism analyzes the relationship, since the end of the Cold War, between the rise of political Islamism in Muslim-majority countries and the rise of a new global "middle class" of industrial entrepreneurs. Challenging common assumptions, Utku Balaban questions the idea that political Islamism represents the antithesis of Western modernity and industrialization. On the contrary: the more enthusiastically a Muslim-majority country industrializes, the more "Islamized" its politics becomes.

The book focuses on Turkey, historically the most industrialized Muslim-majority country in the world, with the most successful Islamist movement and a relatively competitive electoral system. It provides a fine-grained historical and ethnographic analysis at the local level of urban-industrial control over workers in sweatshops and working-class neighborhoods by this new global middle class, whom Balaban calls the faubourgeoisie. As the central actor behind Turkey's post–Cold War industrialization, the faubourgeoisie allies with the Islamist movement to control its workers and significantly influence national politics.