ABSTRACT
This chapter examines not so much the nationalism of state Islam, but its interrogator and interlocutor the Islamist movement, which though desiring one way or the other to replace Ataturk's seriat with Allah's, is ambivalently situated vis-a-vis other political identities provoked by Turkish nationalism. Typologies of Western and Eastern nationalism should be reconsidered, not merely because of the increasing multiculturalism of Western societies, but also because the institution of citizenship by Western liberal states entailed in practice both the production, and discipline/management of difference in the name of the national universal. Nationalism in the colonial world may be a derivative discourse, but the strategies it pursues to stabilize its production of identity are not peculiar to the post-colony. Turkish modernity, in its Republican moment, arrogated to itself enlightenment values of rationality, progress and universality. In short, the common Islamist critique of the post-1923 regime centres around the deconstruction of the Republic’s civilizing mission.
