Title: ISLAM AND KURDISH NATIONALISM: A THEORETICAL AND EMPIRICAL APPROACH TO THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RELIGION AND NATIONALISM
Author: MUTTALİP ÇAĞLAYAN
Place of publication: Turkey
Publisher: MIDDLE EAST TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY
Release date: 2023.
This study attempts to understand and explain the intricate relationship between Islam and Kurdish nationalism. It first provides a framework in which the nexus between religious and national identity is relativistic, with varying degrees of conflict and coexistence. Then, it reduces this complexity to a bifurcation in terms of interaction between Islam and Kurdish nationalism. In doing so, it develops a binary approach by which a competitive and symbiotic relationship between nationalism and religion occurs simultaneously. In this configuration, Islam averts the awakening of the Kurdish national consciousness by promoting a transnational identity building on one side, breeding the attainment of Kurdish political aspirations on the other. The competitive interplay presents religion and nationalism as virtually equivalent but contradicting order-creating systems while postulating Muslim nationalism as a distinctive religious nationalism. Islam, on the contrary, ceases to be an obstacle to slowing down Kurdish political mobilization by playing a supportive role, albeit not a leading one, in the symbiotic or intertwined relationship. It serves as a source of motivation for legitimizing and reinforcing the Kurdish national cause through spiritual words, images, and symbols based on the discourse of egalitarian justice. Islam is thus no longer a barrier for ethnically conscious pious Kurds to correlate religious identity with national self-consciousness.[1]