ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the main features of Islamist discourse, to discover which elements of Islamic vocabulary have captured its historical imagination. Aslan’s comments are directed to both Turkish and Kurdish notions of cultural specificity, but his diagnosis of the current conjuncture in world history makes it clear that his critique is aimed particularly at extant Kurdish petitions for political rights on the basis of their ethnic identity. Gleefully embracing apocalyptic predictions of the imminent collapse of the nation-state, especially in its post-colonial form, Aslan argues that if yesterday statelessness for a nation or community was a disadvantage, to be a possessor of a nation-state today carries an equivalent negative meaning. The Islamist critique of nationalism as non-Islamic makes no distinction, then, between state-sponsored nationalisms constructing an emergent national identity, and reactive nationalisms explicable only in terms of their negative inscription, or even denial, within the discursive practices of the new nation.
