ABSTRACT
The Islamist movement, according to its own admission, has been remarkably quiescent vis-a-vis state policies towards the Kurds. This chapter demonstrates that there are in fact several different responses to the Kurdish question within the Islamist movement itself, and that these different responses reveal both the continuous politicization of ethnic identity in Turkey, and the nationalization of religious identity - despite the professed intention of die Islamist movement to 'ethnically cleanse' its politics. It argues that the Islamist movement, which not only bears the fingerprints of nationalistic discourse but has been 'raised on its slogans', is unable to find a position properly sensitive to Kurdish suffering as a direct consequence of its constituting rhetoric. Ozturk attributes the passivity of the Islamic community on the Kurdish question to the day and age in which the religious movement is living, in that it does not fully understand the transformed concepts with which it is confronted.
