Distributed for UCL Press
Poetics and Politics of Islamic Imaginaries
With a rise in new forms of identity politics, right and left populisms, and a myriad of global crises, this volume is a timely exploration of how contemporary Islamic politics are bound to other sociopolitical imaginaries: nationalism, masculinity, and revolution.
Poetics and Politics of Islamic Imaginaries shows how narratives of culture, masculinist restoration, and revolutionary spirit drive, connect, and reinvent different forms of politics in Muslim majority countries. The book moves beyond Eurocentric and positivist approaches to political formations. Instead, it sees these formations as evolving in specific temporalities and contexts. Gathering scholars in sociology, political science, anthropology, cultural studies, and social and legal history, the volume takes a decolonial approach to stimulate debate on the parallels and differences between various Islamic movements and their claims on the past, present, and future. Through a comparative approach that spans scholarship from Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, India, and China, readers gain a clearer understanding of the ways that contemporary Muslim societies understand, renegotiate, and reconfigure the presumed tension between imagination and reality.
252 pages | 6.14 x 9.21 | © 2026
Global Prosperity in Thought and Practice
Anthropology: Cultural and Social Anthropology
Sociology: Social Change, Social Movements, Political Sociology
Table of Contents
List of Tables
List of contributors
Abbreviations
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
S. Sehlikoglu, F. Sadeghi, S. Kalia
Section I: Gendered Imaginaries
1 Not-So-Gender Neutral: The New-Right, Populism, and the Politics of Gender in the Everyday
S. Sehlikoglu and E. Saglam
2 Beyond the Noise: Who Really Wants Muslim Women in India to Prosper?
S. Pandey
3 Life as Imtihan (Test from God): Women’s Religious Imagination, Destiny and Divorce in Istanbul
B. Kalpaklioglu
4 The Ritual Economy of Marriage and the Making of Bridal Subjectivity in Turkey
M. Kütük-Kuris
Section II: Narrating Imagination
5 Narratives and Imaginative Politics
S. Sehlikoglu
6 Yaxshi as Imagination: Folk Songs, Governance, and Politics around Xinjiang in China
M. Wang
7 Power of Resurrection: Turkey’s Dirilis Series and the Making of Transnational Populist Imaginaries
S. Kalia
8 News from the “World”: Broadcasting Turkish Geopolitical Identity in the Emerging World Order
L. Yanik and F. Hisarlioglu
Section III: Revolutionary Imaginaries
9 Remarks on Revolutionary Imaginations
A. Shehabi
10 Ethnographic Theory of Revolution: Understanding the Syrian Revolution beyond Failure and Success
C. Al-Khalili
Conclusion: Islamic Political Imaginaries and the Challenges of Eurocentrism
S. Sehlikoglu
Glossary
Index