I first became interested in Imam Hatip Schools (İmam Hatip Okulu, İHO) as part of my ongoing doctoral research into debates on secularism over the last two decades in Turkey. During my field research, I learned about the Imam Hatip backgrounds of the country's most prominent political actors of the dominant conservative movement. As I delved more deeply into the issue, I realized that graduates of particular Imam Hatip Schools, most notably the İstanbul Imam Hatip School, were playing a key role in conservative politics and comprised a significant proportion of the conservative movement's current political actors – unlike earlier generations of conservative leaders, among whom engineers were conspicuous.

This discovery of the relationship between the conservative movement and the İstanbul Imam Hatip School raised questions: Was this an accidental correlation? Was there something that specifically propelled the graduates of this school into politics? Or, was it simply that conservative families with political ambitions were oriented towards Istanbul, the historical capital, rather than the capital of Kemalist Turkey, Ankara?

In search of better understanding, I decided to expand my research both forward and backward in time, and began to investigate the history and current situation of religious education in Turkey, and its relation with the emergence of the Turkish form of secularism. As I progressed, new questions were also incorporated into my initial research problem, which had already expanded horizontally in terms of its time line. The complexity and the scope of the research at that time made the İstanbul İmam Hatip issue seem less important than before.

Thus, my research came to involve three distinct but interrelated areas of investigation: (1) a social-historical analysis of religious life and religious education in the early republic; (2) a socio-political analysis of the cohort of graduates of the İstanbul Imam Hatip School that provided the akp with key elite members; and finally, (3) a sociological field study of current graduates of Imam Hatip Schools and, in particular, those who migrated to Europe for their university education after the February 28 process.

The current book is the outcome of my research into the aforementioned process. After the ‘soft coup’ of February 28, 1997, it was made practically impossible for İmam Hatip School graduates to enter universities or other institutes of higher education, except faculties of theology.