ABSTRACT
In Islamist calculations ethnic political subjectivity derives from a nationalistic self-love alien to the sources of esteem in an Islamic polity. The suffering of Kurdish Muslims at the hands of the Turkish state is evidence of extraneous influences on the Muslim ummet, while being barred from constituting the ground for any political resistance. In this case the ‘plague on both houses’ pronounced by Islamist discourse upon the nationalism of both statist Islamism and Kurdish Islamism amounts to a remarkably indiscriminate imprecation. It refuses to differentiate between the modern nation-state’s construction of a uniform national Turkish identity, and the response of Kurds to the resultant denial of their existence. The writer’s rejection of his embeddedness in his own particular context, the fantasy of his self-projection as a singular subject detached from history or culture is palpable. True, his autonomy as a singular subject easily slides over into a collective one, the autonomy of the Islamist movement purging itself from ethnic contaminants.
