Recent studies of Islamist movements in Muslim societies have drawn upon the alluring paradigm of 'alternative modernities' depicting such formations as emblematic of a 'civil Islam' (Hefner 2000), 'indigenous modernization' (White 2002) 'alternative secularization of Islam' (Turam 2007) 'enchanted modern' (Deeb 2006), or 'post-Islamism' (Yavuz 2006). Although these studies have challenged the dominant representation of the increasing appeal of Islamic ideas in Muslim societies as a premodern or antimodern phenomenon, they have nonetheless refrained from a profound hermeneutic exercise in critically revising the concepts drawn from western political theory. The underlying 'hermeneutic nadvety' has contributed to the conception of 'siege' characterized as cultural imperialism or neo-orientalism by the Islamist activists of the 'Generation of Qur'an' which constitutes the object of my investigation. In this paper bringing to attention the voice of the Generation of Qur'an in Turkey, I propose to call into question the unacknowledged ethical commitments underlying both democratic theory and theoretically informed empirical works on democracy in the Middle East. In response to the promotion of a 'mild Islam' compatible with democracy and liberalism in the context of Turkey represented as the 'model country' in such globalist schemes of democratization as the Greater Middle East Project, an Islamist intellectual discourse emerged that appropriates the Islamic identity as a basis of resistance to the processes of hybridization, identitarian eclecticism and postmodern pluralism. My project attempts to examine the micro-level resistance to the axiomatic power of the democratization discourse and the neo-liberal economic agenda, burgeoning in Turkish public sphere since 1970s and forming the backstage of Islamism in Turkey behind the window site of Fethullah Gulen's liberal Islam and the moderate Justice and Development Party in government since 2002. By making this hitherto unanalyzed peripheral subject the focus of my paper, I attempt to answer the following questions: How is an Islamic epistemology of resistance through shahadat (witnessing) fashioned, through the translation of Sayyid Qutb's project of building the 'Generation of Qur'an' in Turkey, in direct response to the paradigmatic status of international regimes of moderation and liberalizationu What are the intended and unintended forces of change being set in motion by the operationalization of moderation -the ethics of democratic theory- in governmental projects and by the various practical/ethical strategies of the Islamist actorsh In inspecting those questions, my objective is to explore the undertheorized intersection between intellectual knowledge production, universalist regimes of governance and local politics of counter-Discourse.