A Kurdish Islamist Group in Modern Turkey: Shifting Identities

Abstract

Islamic movements have traditionally defended the idea of the broader Islamic community (ummet) while rejecting various forms of nationalism. However, since the formation of nation-states in the Middle East, nationalism has become a latent or open component of Islamic discourse. One form of this is official Islam, which is interpreted and supported by the state. Islamic movements which oppose the existing political system of their own countries, on the other hand, have developed another form of this discourse while rejecting nationalism on the grounds that it is based in Western ideology and thus is alien to Islam. Such ideas have emerged even while twentieth-century Islamic movements flourish in the context of nation-states. Many examples of such movements offer evidence of the significant role of the nation-state context in the formation of Islamic ideology during the twentieth century. Nationalist versions of the Islamic point of view can be found in the discourses of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt' and of various Islamic groups in Turkey (for example, some Nurcu groups, the Suileymancis, and the so-called Turkish-Islamic Synthesis movement).2 The evolutionary development of Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement) from an Islamic movement to a nationalist-Islamic movement provides another interesting example of shifting identities.3 Islam plays an important role in the lives of Kurds and has always been used as an ideological tool in Kurdish mobilization. Major Kurdish revolts during the 1920s in Turkey were primarily Islamic in nature with varying degrees of Kurdish nationalist ideology; that is, while the intellectual cadres of these revolts were Kurdish nationalists, they used Islam as a mobilizing force. The Kurdish nationalist movements of the 1960s and 1970s which flourished among leftist groups were, however, shown no sympathy by the anti-Communist Islamist Kurds. In 1984, the Marxist-Leninist Kurdish Labour Party (PKK) started a guerrilla war against the Turkish state in the southeastern part of Turkey, which intensified in the early 1990s. Most Kurds are Sunni Muslims and strict adherents of the Uafi rite. In the Ottoman Empire, the rulers of the Kurdish emirates established their