The Second Life of the Constitution of Medina: On the Possibility of a Liberal Islam in Turkey in the 1990s.

Ali Bulaç, prominent Turkish Islamist intellectual, proposed in the 1990s to revive the Constitution of Medina (622 CE) as a global social contract for post-modern, post-national societies. Focusing on this non-Western rejoinder to the Western conversation on multiculturalism, we analyze the possibility of a liberal interpretation of Islam. Can a faith-based document lend itself to liberal interpretations, leading to a Nozickean night-watchman state? How did this debate attract a broad array of liberals, New Leftists, and Islamists? We attempt to show how the CoM debate in Turkey provides us with a snapshot of pollination between Western and Islamic political thought.