Islamic banks create an interest in their own right as a rising branch in financial intermediation, particularly in the post-crisis era. In addition, they also deserve the attention of students of Islamism due to their possible connection with Islamic movements. Through a comparison of Islamic and conventional banking, we analyze the motivations and behavior of Islamic economic actors who determine the cash flow to Islamic banks. Our findings suggest that, in contrast to popular views that portray these actors as ideologues or financiers of radical Islam, they have pragmatic motivations and may adapt to liberal systems in order to seize economic incentives.

This paper investigates the rise of aesthetic modernism in Turkey’s early republican era (i.e., the late 1920s and the 1930s), with an emphasis on the influence of international cultural currents on Turkey’s intelligentsia. The paper concentrates on the modernist ideas and works of the D Group, who advocated a high modernism in the plastic arts, and the literary modernism of the socialist poet Nâzım Hikmet (Ran). Firstly, it addresses the historiographical argument that aesthetic modernism in Turkey was a derivative enterprise, a low-grade replica of European modernism. Secondly, it argues that the early republican intelligentsia found itself in a dilemma with regard to modernist currents. For them, aesthetic modernism was a sign of the modern epoch, but it also carried a radical potential for a critique of bourgeois modernity. Aesthetic modernism not only promised change, functionality, and renewal, but also manifested such disturbing symptoms of modernity as individualism, melancholy, degeneration, and restlessness. The paper reaches the conclusion that figures such as the D Group artists and Nâzım Hikmet translated the avant-garde international currents of aesthetic modernism into the early republican context, opting for positive and optimistic versions of modernism rather than adopting its more alienating, pessimistic, and despairing features. Through their works, an intellectual debate on aesthetic modernism was initiated in early republican Turkey.

This paper investigates the political subjectivities of Kurdish youth in Diyarbakır through the interplay of kinship and politics. We argue that it is through a framework of kinship that young people make sense of the Kurdish issue. We show that the war between the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, PKK) and the Turkish military has reshaped the Kurdish family, leading to a crisis in the life cycle. We suggest that the young feel indebted to the Kurdish movement, which they express using the term bedel (“debt”). Debt is related to the family, as the individual becomes indebted as part of a kinship group. We argue that the expansion of public space in Diyarbakır has created alternative ways of paying debt and doing politics.

This paper examines the impact underground literature (yeraltı edebiyatı) has on influencing the opinions and beliefs of Turkey’s youth regarding issues of contemporary importance. In order to understand the relevance of this genre to Turkish youth culture, we have not only examined the debate surrounding the topic in popular and academic circles, but also asked the readers themselves their opinions about their experience with the genre (in both its imported Western and homegrown Turkish variants) and its relevance to their lives. For our purposes, the effect of such texts on readers is the primary focus, and ours is the first mixed-media study to conduct a methodological, data-based investigation into the composition and opinions of underground literature’s readers. Thus, our study supplements a lack in the existing scholarship by offering concrete qualitative and quantitative data that will better elucidate our knowledge of the relationship between underground literature and Turkish youth attitudes, as well as the potential the genre might hold for the future of Turkey’s youth.

This article analyzes critical voices raised against the Bologna Process by various stake-holders of higher education in Turkey, such as rectors, professors, international office staff, students, and civil society organizations. The data collected through in-depth interviews were analyzed using the discourse analysis method on the basis of the interlocutors’ reflections on the Bologna Process. It is claimed in the article that most universities in Turkey have attempted a process of internationalization and institutionalization, but that there have been several impediments during the implementation of the Bologna Process. Rising Euroskepticism in Turkey has also changed the process of Europeanization in the universities. It is revealed that the structural changes made in line with the Bologna Process are perceived by several different stake-holders as neo-liberal acts, and are presented as activities of internationalization, but not of Europeanization.