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This article examines processes of ethnic and regional differentiation through a study of the 1977 local elections in Turkey's Kurdish-majority provinces. An analysis of electoral data shows a high level of support there for independent candidates, a result sharply at odds with voting in the rest of the country that indicates a new correlation between ethnicity and political behavior. We argue that independents benefitted from mainstream political parties' inability to mobilize voters in the southeast because of the declining power of local notables, the emergence of new social movements, and alternative frames that the parties were unable to integrate. This context allowed social and political outsiders to build social coalitions outside the mainstream parties, as we demonstrate through a case study of the election of independent candidate Mehdi Zana, a working-class Kurdish activist who won the 1977 Diyarbakır mayoral race.

This study offers a sociolegal interpretation of the ancient extant document generally referred to in modern scholarship as the “Constitution of Medina,” showing it to be a three-part composite document written between 622 and 627. Each part has considerable formal coherence as a legal deed. The first part was the deed of foundation of Muhammad's umma, not yet a community of individual believers but a confederation of clans and their clients unified in the struggle in the path of God. The execution of capital punishment for murder was transferred from the clans to the community. The second part guaranteed religious freedom to Jewish confederates, thus laying the foundation of the later Muslim system of religious pluralism; it created the first Muslim sanctuary (ḥarām) and introduced elements of individual responsibility. The third part, here considered a supplement to the second, concerned the defense of the city of Medina against the Quraysh and added one new Jewish clan to the confederation. Taken together, the three parts of the Constitution of Medina transformed the pagan cult of vengeance into holy warfare.

In 1925, the Turkish parliament commissioned a translation of the Qurʾan from Arabic to Turkish as well as a Turkish-language Qurʾanic commentary. This project is commonly misunderstood as an initiative engineered by Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) and linked to the radical institutional reforms of 1924: abolition of the Islamic caliphate, prohibition of the Sufi orders, and closure of the medreses. In fact, parliament's support of a Qurʾan translation was not a radical nationalist reform but an initiative supported and executed by devout intellectuals who opposed other facets of Islamic reform in the early years of the Turkish republic.