Gülen's conception of Islam-friendly democracy is key to understanding his approach to sacred and secular relations. He does not see a contradiction between Islam and democracy, and he reasons that Islam establishes fundamental principles that orient a government's general character, leaving it...

The aim of this paper is to discuss how Turkey’s president Erdogan instrumentalized Diyanet in building his own foreign policy vision. Diyanet has always maintained as the tool in the hands of the government for integration of ideology into society. During the 80s Diyanet was very active in...

Islamist nationalist project the AKP has embarked upon has found its resonance in foreign policy which espoused a proactive, interventionist policy in ex-Ottoman territories and Turkish diaspora communities. The most striking and significant change in AKP’s conception of nationalism is the...

Early on, AKP governments tried to liberate the state institutions from Kemalist hegemony. However, this changed after AKP managed to weaken the Kemalist hegemony and assumed the balance of power in Turkey. One of these state institutions was Diyanet. Despite its substantial enlargement, Diyanet...

The modernist nation-building projects in Pakistan and Turkey have employed state law as an ideological apparatus and instrument of top-down social engineering to construct a new citizen identity of modern Muslims. These two Muslim-majority countries endeavored to reform the country's Muslim...

Similar to other Islamists, Turkish Islamists have also used intolerant and exclusivist rhetoric. They have used religion in a heavy-handed manner as the dominating parameter of their political ideology and have confined religious concepts and values to a certain group, nationalizing,...

With the increased international prominence of Turkey and its successful and internationally respected AK Party government, the Academia’s attention has focused on the Turkish Islamist experience. Turkey had already been seen as an almost unique case as far Islam-state-secularism-democracy...

Created for the Muslims of the Indian Sub-continent in 1947, Pakistan is by design a Muslim majority state with 97 percent Muslim population. Despite the division of India and Pakistan based on distinct religious identities as per the ‘Two-Nation Theory’ (Cohen 2004), Pakistan continues to...