ABSTRACT
Agreement about a common framework based on individual rights has fundamental implications for democratic practice in Turkey. It provides the basis for new forms of cooperation between the Liberal Left Discourse (LLD) and the Islamic Discourse (ID). LLD's and ID's anti-establishment tendency brought a hostile attitude to the state. This is one of the main reasons both the LLD and the ID have similar views about the role of the state and the Army in democratic practice in Turkey. Starting within the left in the late 1980s, then within the Islamic discourse from mid-1990s onwards, a politics of basic individual rights rather than of class or Islam-based politics has become the main paradigm in some segments of the leftist and Islamic groups. Members of different Islamic groups ill-treated by the 1980 military regime formed their own human rights association, Mazlum-Der, in 1991. Mazlum-Der's formulation of human rights was by no means a cut and paste approach.
