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Ahmet T. Kuru's I Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison i claims the state-ulema alliance as the key historical reason for the ever-lasting difficult question of the negative results of how Muslims interpret Islam. According to Professor Kuru, the state-ulema alliance has never been an essential part of Islam; it emerged only after the mid-11th century following some changes in the Muslim world such as the implementation of Persian political elements. More or less, the contemporary dynamics that survive the state-ulema alliance are the same ones that Kuru brilliantly demonstrates in the context of 12th-14th century Muslim societies. [Extracted from the article]

Although nationalists and Islamists are different groups and have different organizational structures, Islamic groups used to take nationalist stances on major political issues. However, the Islamic actors' policies of the 2000s have all but put paid to the historical harmony with nationalism. The Islamic bloc, having abandoned nationalism, emerged as an advocate of antinationalist policies. Inspired by Stathis N. Kalyvas, it is argued that the Islamic elites' strategy to avert the seculars' attacks of the late 1990s initiated a path-dependent course that in the end separated them from nationalism. Their new strategy denationalized the Islamic groups, yet its direct intention was to protect themselves against the seculars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The revival in Islamic studies of interest in explaining social transformation in Muslim societies has stimulated a need for new methodological inquiries. The deployment of informal institutions within daily life is also a rediscovery of the traditional Islamic networks, patterns, values and cognitive forms. The rise of daily life as the major unit of operation for the new Islamic movements directs them to a completely different position vis-a-vis modernity: to create an alternative Islamic civil society, that is indifferent to the existing modern one. The Gulen Movement, with its success at creating trans-national networks, is the perspicuous case for illustrating the amodern world view of new Islamic movements. Study of the Gulen Movement on the basis of its amodernity is a methodology that contributes also to the study of how Islam is reproduced in daily life despite modern challenges. Such a study makes a necessity, in any research agenda, of the acknowledgement of the amodern in the sociology of religion. The major contribution of this paper is to display how Islamic movements develop an irregular position towards modernity. Therefore, the validity of traditional binaries, such as 'Islamic movements vs. modernity', or 'Islamic movements as products of modernity', has to be questioned. Being indifferent to the state and operating through daily life, new Islamic movements gain the ability to connect with historical Islam, the roots of which had fixed well before those of modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Terrorism is a pivotal matter in Turkish politics. In this article, a specific terrorist activity, which is still having an impact upon Turkish politics, has been analyzed. It scrutinizes two perspectives of the event. Some actors lean towards a secular/positivist reading of events while others favour a conservative/postmodern reading. This serious factional political debate is possibly just the result that the terrorists had in mind. Being imbued by republican principles, the seculars' claims compel the conservatives to raise defensive points since they are blamed for murdering secular figures and targeting the very essence of the republic. Using different symbolic readings, both sides arrive at opposing conclusions: for the seculars the aim/message of the terror is clear - it is the republic; for the conservatives the aim/message is hidden - destabilizing the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]