EUME
2016/ 2017

Halil Ibrahim Yenigün

The Political Ontology of Islamic Democracy: An Ontological Narrative of Contemporary Muslim Political Thought

Halil Ibrahim Yenigün is a former Assistant Professor at Istanbul Commerce University, who was dismissed in February 2016 as a result of his signature on the Petition for Peace. He has also worked in the POMEAS (Project on the Middle East and Arab Spring) at Sabancı University’s Istanbul Policy Center. His research is focused on political ontology, political theology, and contemporary Muslim political thought. More recently, he is also researching religious social movements and youth movements in Turkey and Egypt. He received his PhD in 2013 from the University of Virginia's (UVA) political theory program. From 2006 to 2010, he was the managing editor of the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences (AJISS). He spent the academic year 2007-8 as a Malone & Gallatin research fellow at the American University in Cairo (AUC). Apart from his academic articles, Yenigün also gave interviews to newspapers and magazines in Turkey about the contemporary Muslim political thought, Turkish Islamism, and Turkish democracy.
Following his dismissal, Yenigün gave several invited lectures at North American universities on the current state of Turkish academia and democracy. He is also involved in several NGOs in Turkey, which work on human rights, social justice issues, and free circulation of ideas.

The Political Ontology of Islamic Democracy: An Ontological Narrative of Contemporary Muslim Political Thought

For the EUME program, Yenigün is working on his dissertation to turn it into a book manuscript. He also seeks to study the post-2011 developments of political Islam in Turkey as well as political theologies of Islamic movements and the future prospects of Islamist movements in the post-Arab spring world in countries such as Egypt and Turkey. His main project is a comparative political theory work and analyzes the trajectory of the democratic discourse in the post-Afghani (d. 1897) era of Muslim political thought, in particular among the reformist current. The central, normative focus of this project is on the deliberative quest for a just political arrangement among individuals who draw on different ontological commitments. It seeks to analyze the shifting attitudes toward self-government and popular rule over time among contemporary Muslim thinkers by approaching each of the selected thinkers’ political theories as a constellation of ontological, ethical, and political dimensions. For the latter project, he is more interested in the Islamist political praxis both in the form of Islamist parties and Islamist movements; in particular, he probes the relevance of theology for Islamist politics.