Generation of Qur’an: Contesting Democratic Theory in Contemporary Turkey.

Recent studies of Islamist movements in Muslim societies have drawn upon the alluring paradigm of alternative modernities depicting such formations as emblematic of a civil Islam, indigenous modernization etc. Such studies have nonetheless refrained from a hermeneutic exercise in critically revising the concepts drawn from western political theory. The underlying hermeneutic naïveté has contributed to the conception of intellectual siege by activists of the Generation of Qur’an movement. In response to the promotion of a mild Islam compatible with liberal democracy in Turkey represented as the model country in the Middle East via such globalist schemes of democratization as the Greater Middle East Project, this radical movement juxtaposes a purified Islamic identity to contemporary processes of postmodern hybridization and identitarian eclecticism. This project examines emerging Islamist forms of counterhegemonic resistance to the axiomatic power of the democratization discourse, thereby tracing local efforts at defamiliarizing the democratic paradigm which call into question the self evidence of the universal value of impassionate and moderate citizenship cherished in democratic theory and the recent literature on Islamism. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]