Cultural and political rights of Kurds have long been constructed as an adversarial agenda against Turkey in the official discourse. Recent liberal policies of the pro-Islamic party in power, Justice and Development Party (AKP), however, remarkably differ from the traditional secular nationalist agenda. Specifically, the launch of Turkey’s first Kurdish language television station (TRT-6) in January 2009 exacerbated much controversy. On the one hand, Kurdish nationalist circles, led by pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP), expressed their frustration due to the AKP’s hegemonic attempt to eliminate Kurdish resistance. On the other hand, secularist civil-bureaucratic elite found the channel as threatening to the Turkey’s national unity. Conducting twenty five semi-structural in-depth interviews with the AKP and the DTP officials in Ankara as well as the TRT-6 channel viewers in Diyarbakir (the largest city in the Kurdish populated region), this study aims to investigate the AKP’s reformist policies toward Kurds in general and the policy on the official recognition of Kurdish language in particular. Main thesis of the paper is that recent contestations over the the so called “Kurdish problem” does not only result in a re-definition of Turkish nationalist identity but also re-constructed the Islamist thinking. Political Islamic movements’ traditional solution of the Kurdish question has been a denial of ethnic differences for the sake of the global Islamic nation (ummah) at large. Yet, the denial itself has never been independent from the Turkish nationalist discourses. Therefore, the Turkish-Islamic synthesis had been a tool in hands of both secularist nationalists and their Islamic rivals (i.e. conservative Islamic resistance movements) until the AKP shifted from this traditional path. Through its policies toward Kurdish minority, the pro-Islamic AKP aims to give impression that it is a genuine lower-middle class people’s party that challenges the well-established secular nationalist and elitist status quo. Utilizing the concept of “identity contest,” this study shows that the Islamic identity in Turkey, which has a priori been considered as Turkish, lean to an all-encompassing “identity of resistance” to the secularist nationalism by including a strong Kurdish Islamic expressive identity. Contestations of the conventional identities (i.e. Turkish nationalist, secularist, Islamist) over the Kurdish question have ushered a new development of Kurdish-Islamic identity that is sympathetic with the new policies of the Turkish state.