Despite an increasing orientation to post-essentialism after the epistemological turn in human science, we have observed ‘Islamophobia’ as a reconstruction of orientalist stereotypes that frames Muslims as ‘threatening Other’ due to generalizing the radical Islamists` worldview to Muslim culture. On the contrary, a reverse reflection could be registered in anti-western Islamic fundamentalism which rejects modernity owing to a reactionary static perception of identity. Which conceptual frameworks can help analyze and break these stereotypical representations of Islam? Taking advantage of the post-structuralist critique of ‘ideological closure’, the paper considers both the discourses as essentialist identifications of Islamic culture founded on the radical polarization of ‘binary opposites’. To negate this, the article speculates a modality of ‘post-orientalism - post-occidentalism’ which points to the ‘dialectical understanding of identity’. The research maintains that Michael Bakhtin’s ‘dialectical understanding of identity’ might help explain the nature of Islamic democratism as a post-essentialist discourse. It might be exemplified by an Islamic intellectual-academic discourse in contemporary Iran which thinks of ‘contextual democracy’ built on an intercultural critical consciousness. Such an idea presupposes that withdrawing from essentialism in theorizing democracy for a ‘pragmatic flexibility’ might provide the possibility for re-interpretation and re-articulation of religious signifiers within a discourse of Islamic democracy.
