Journal of Ilahiyat Researches

Abstract

This study is
inspired by the observation of the changing panorama of Islamist popular
culture from romantic Islam to Islamic romanticism in Turkey and its aim is to
make a panoramic sociology of this change by a qualitative comparative case
analysis method.

In the first part of
this study we have tried to combine the horizontal/side-by-side squares of
romantic Islam at the theoretical level, in the second part to combine the
horizontal/side-by-side squares of Islamic romanticism obtained from an
(n)ethnographic research that intended for discovering the place of it both in
the social media and in the world of the selected examples from the Faculty of
Theology students. Then, we intend to discuss a panoramic sociological
assessment of the change by combining and comparing vertical/overlapping
squares of romantic Islam and Islamic romanticism.

The general result obtained this evaluation that the common theme is
love, in both vertical/overlapping and horizontal side-by-side views of both
phenomena. In the early days of romantic Islam, the love gained meaning as
metaphorical representation of overcoming the dichotomy that experienced in the
face of modernity; as for the 1990’s it transformed into an instrument of the
individualization of Muslim person. In Islamic romanticism, it was Islamized by
halal stamping and has pledged Islamist popular reality.