Kurdishness at Peace with Islam: Indigenization and the Kurdistani Approach to Post-Conflict Articulations of Kurdish Identity in Turkey The end of armed conflict between the PKK and the Turkish state has brought striking changes to the landscape of the Kurdish self-imagination. A whole new generation of Kurdish intellectuals, not beholden to the PKK but not hostile to it, either, are emerging to advance a new formulation of identity politics. They call it the “Kurdistani approach” and it is being articulated in such relatively autonomous spaces as the new social media, and under institutional umbrellas like the civil society organization “Mazlumder”. Through my recent participant observation in the field and interviews with several of these rising Kurdish opinion-makers, I have noticed a couple of areas where their thinking is distinctive, and reflects a new current in the popular imagination of Kurds of Turkey. One is the return of religious identity. In the past, religiosity was instrumentalized against Kurds by the Turkish state and shunned by the PKK. In the new, post-PKK climate, pious intellectuals see a chance to reclaim Islam and use it differently. As the self-serving exploitation of religion by Turkish nationalists recedes or fractures, Kurds are beginning to publicly reintegrate their Islamic/Shafii traditions into their larger identity. This is both a strategic move and a major step in the indigenization of the Kurdish politics. A second distinctive trait of the new Kurdistani discourse is the tendency to reframe Kurdish identity not in terms of a deterritorialized individual identity, but by reference to a larger cultural-geographical entity, Kurdistan. This move imagines Kurds not as citizens of the Turkish state who simply happen to be Kurdish, but as a people to be reckoned with on its own terms. The retrieval of “peoplehood” seeks to relieve Kurdish identity politics of the unnecessary weight of ideologies (be they leftist or Islamist). Reference to Kurdistan as an anchor of identity prevents the Kurds from being swamped by Turkish cultural/political hegemony, even as they remain active participants and stakeholders in the new Turkey. Relying on interviews with key figures of this emerging intellectual movement and close reading of their media appearances over the past two years, especially since the start of the current peace process in March 2013, this paper contributes to the elucidation of new Kurdish identity discourse, which promises to be highly influential in shaping the Kurdish world in the coming decade.