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Liberalism believes that individuals are endowed a priori with reason or at least agency and it is up to that reason and agency to make choices, commitments and so on. Communitarianism criticizes liberalism's explicit and deliberate neglect of the self and insists that we attain a self and identity only through the effective recognition of significant others. However, personal autonomy does not seem to be a default position, neither reason nor community is going to provide it inevitably. Therefore, it is so important to go beyond the liberal–communitarian divide. This article is analysing various proposals in this direction, asks about the place of communities and the individual in times of populism and the pandemic and provides a global perspective on the liberal–communitarian debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I draw on Carl Schmitt's political and constitutional thought in order to reflect on the political struggle over the foundational norms and values of a constitutional settlement in modern Turkey. This analysis, which focuses on the relationship between democracy and sovereign decision in Schmitt's thought, extends the implications of his writings beyond the Weimar Republic. I argue that the political movement of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) successfully identified itself with two distinct (yet partly overlapping) narratives in order to establish a truer democracy than the old regime, which was guarded by the military and the bureaucracy. The first narrative concerns the subordination of the will of the people to the guardianship model of the old regime. The second narrative involves negating the political decision of the Kemalist elites on the grounds of identity, in particular, the dissonance between the Kemalist ruling class and the Muslim majority of the society. The party under the leadership of Erdogan used the first narrative to dismantle the old establishment, without replacing it with a liberal–democratic constitution, and the second one to justify its claim to be the founding agent of a new regime. The new regime, which brought a peculiar presidency with strong executive powers, retained the old regime's approach to national homogeneity. Nonetheless, the new regime detaches the name of Atatürk from the Kemalist ideology and secularism from nationalism, thereby inventing an image of Atatürk and nationalism purified from the modernist/secularist orientations of the founding political decision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I consider the problem of political pluralism for (Rawlsian) political liberalism: that not everybody agrees on fundamental political principles. I critically examine three defenses of liberal principles in situations of political pluralism—the realist defense, the pragmatic defense, and Gerald Gaus’ “justificatory liberalism”—all of which I find wanting. Instead, I propose a dialectical approach to justifying political liberalism. A dialectical approach is based on engaging (ostensibly) contradictory positions through conceptual investigation of key concepts claimed by both sides. Through such dialectical engagement, I seek a way to deal with contradictions between liberal and non-liberal philosophies as conceptual issues, rather than as antagonisms beyond reason. The ambition is to contribute to a more robust liberalism capable of defending itself in contexts of political pluralism. As an example, I apply this dialectical approach to the disagreement between political Islam and political liberalism on the issue of public religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its promises, the Islamic state of Iran has systematically prioritized political considerations over religious precepts, inadvertently generating a reformist religious discourse that challenges the very foundations of the Islamic state. This article conceptualizes the religious secularity discourse and the paradoxes ingrained in the Islamic state. The religious secularity discourse rejects the notion that Islamic holy texts offer a blueprint for governance and calls for the secular democratic state to realize the core principle of Islam: justice [Adl]. Towards this end, inclusive secular democratic principles champion a socio-political polity conducive to the cultivation of genuine religiosity, whereby faith and religious practices are free of coercion by fellow citizens or state institutions. By blurring the boundary between the religious and the secular and challenging the religious secular dichotomy, religious secularity highlights the relevance and possibility of harmonizing Islamic and inclusive secular democratic principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the tradition of dialogue in Islam and Islamic history and its importance in facilitating an inter-faith and cross-cultural dialogue with the West across the binary that has been increasingly strengthened since 2001. The rise in religious extremism and hegemony is an indicator of not only a crisis in religious authority, but also an absence of dialogue, the very dialogue that had shaped and conceptualized Islam and its tradition and is an inherent part of it. I examine the way The Amman Message and A Common Wordbetween Us and You bring back the role of dialogue and consensus in reconstructing Islam and how this has contributed to the dialogue at the international level. I also examine the role enlightenment thinking has played in promoting religious dialogue at both the internal and external levels, with the text, with traditional scholars, and with non-Muslim scholars and the non-Muslim public. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article deals with the impact of the free, democratic and peaceful accession to power of the Islamic Justice and Development Party (JDP) in Turkey on the Arab world in general and on the Islamic currents active in Arab societies in particular. A main point is looking into how Arab political formations and especially political Islam are trying to make sense out of such recent developments in Turkey as: (1) the fact that traditionally reviled Turkish secularism, Kemalism and westernism could produce a democratic form of political Islam capable of winning free elections and ruling Turkey without a catastrophe befalling the whole polity; and (2) the fact that an Islamic JDP is the most eager proponent of Turkey’s membership in the secular EU, while the traditional staunch military guardian of Turkish secularism is now the main obstructor of the drive for EU membership. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]