Poetics and Politics of Islamic Imaginaries

Sertaç Sehlikoglu (Editor), Fatemeh Sadeghi (Editor), Sumrin Kalia (Editor), Erol Saglam (Editor), Alexander Pymm (Editor)

Series: Global Prosperity in Thought and Practice

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.

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 socio-political imaginaries: nationalism, masculinity and revolution.

List of Figures
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. Kalpaklıoğlu

4 The Ritual Economy of Marriage and the Making of Bridal Subjectivity in Turkey
M. Kütük-Kuriş

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 Diriliş 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. Hisarlıoğlu

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

DOI: 10.14324/111.9781806551699

Number of illustrations: 5

Publication date: 01 October 2026

EPUB ISBN: 9781806551705

Sertaç Sehlikoglu (Editor)

Sertaç Sehlikoglu is an anthropologist and an Associate Professor at UCL, Institute for Global Prosperity. She leads the ERC-funded TAKHAYYUL project and is the author of Working Our Desire: Women, Sport and Self-Making in Istanbul (2021). She has co-edited multiple special journal issues on intimacy, critique, ethics, and imagination and serves as Reviews Section Editor for the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies and the Editor-in-Chief of Contemporary Islam.

Fatemeh Sadeghi (Editor)

Fatemeh Sadeghi is Senior Research Fellow at UCL, Institute for Global Prosperity. Her research investigates political imagination as both an epistemological construct and an intersubjective phenomenon shaped by nostalgia, selective memory, and reinterpretations of the past. She was part of the ERC-funded TAKHAYYUL project, where she led the work package The Aftermath of Takhayyul.

Sumrin Kalia (Editor)

Sumrin Kalia is a researcher and lecturer for civil society organizations at Department of Management at FU Berlin’s School of Business and Economics. Her research has been published in Political Science, Public Policy and Area Studies journals such as International Journal of Public Administration, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, Non-Profit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Contemporary South Asia etc. She is also the co-editor of the book Local Responses to Global Challenges in Southeast Asia and has written several opinion pieces and policy papers.

Erol Saglam (Editor)

Erol Saglam is Associate Professor of Sociology at Istanbul Medeniyet University and a Research Fellow at UCL. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Stockholm University and Freie Universität Berlin, and a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge. Saglam publishes on topics such as conspiracy theories and their socio-political effects, everyday dynamics that forge and maintain masculinities, vigilantism, bureaucracies, and ethnographic methods.

Alexander Pymm (Editor)

Alexander Pymm holds an MSc in International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies programme from London School of Economics. Following his work at the UK House of Commons, providing research and communications support to Members of Parliament, he has worked as a project administrator and editorial assistant for the TAKHAYYUL Project.