The hybridisation of religion and nationalism in Iraqi Kurdistan: the case of Kurdish Islam

ABSTRACT

This paper asks two interlinked questions: 1) How do Kurdish Islamists navigate the dilemma of having to relate to Islamism and nationalism at the same time? 2) Why have Kurdish authorities in Iraq taken steps to centralise control over religious activities since 2014? The paper argues that nationalism and Islamism have a long history of being intertwined in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), a de facto state. Kurdish Islamists, even Salafis, must relate to Kurdish nationalism to keep their followers. But they also believe in the specificity of Kurdish culture and identity, and support Kurdish statehood. The hybridisation of Islamism and nationalism in KRI has gone further since 2014, attributable to new political pressures in the religious field after Daesh. Kurdish political authorities intervene in the religious field by bureaucratising Islam, co-opting Islamic figures and promoting Kurdish Islam. Our argument is that state co-optation of religion is a step in the process towards state- and nation-building, but it is also a way of taking greater control of society. Analysing the Kurdish case, our paper takes an empirical approach informed by contextual and case-sensitive knowledge.

KEYWORDS:

• Islamism
• religious nationalism
• Kurdish Islam
• state-building
• hybrid identity

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the interviewees for their generous time, knowledge and personal insights. The authors also wish to thank Dlawer Ala’aldeen, Olivier Roy, Kjetil Selvik, Morten Bøås and Khogir Wiraya for useful comments on previous drafts. All mistakes remain authors’ own. Moreover, we thank Zubir Rasool, Mohamed Waladbagi and other Middle East Research Institute (MERI) staff for kind assistance during the data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For similar discussions on the Turkish case, see: Özdalga (2006); Uğur (2004); Erturk (2020).

2. We distinguish between the history of Kurdish Islamic thought and the history of Kurdish Islamist organisations.

3. In the late 1980s, they were part of the armed struggle against Saddam. At that time ‘jihad’ meant fighting Saddam. After 1990s, they maintained ‘jihad’ but without making it specific to any group. Other extremist groups, such as Krekar’s group, believed in jihad against the KDP-PUK rule.

4. Moderate in this context means that the Islamist parties do not believe in armed struggle; instead, they pursue political and civil mechanisms to enhance their interest and power.

5. Other forms of Salafism are constituted by haraki Salafis, who engage in parliamentary politics or petitions, organisations, demonstrations; and by the Salafi jihadis, who believe in individual, non-defensive jihad. See (Maher 2017; Bonnefoy 2017) in Cavatorta and Merone 2017: 208; (Meijer 2017) in Cavatorta and Merone 2017: 220 and (Utvik 2014, 10).

6. Two famous quietist Salafi scholars in the Kurdistan region before Dr Abdullatif include the late sheikhs Hamdi Abulajeed al-Salafi in Sarang and Ali Nabi in Duhok.

7. We are grateful to Olivier Roy for this analysis.

8. For earlier efforts, see for example Zeghal 2002.

9. 550 Iraqi Kurds are known to have travelled to join Daesh in 2014 and 2015 and at least 150 returned to Kurdistan. In addition, more than 800 Kurds were arrested by the Kurdish security forces before they were able to join the group (anonymous, interview with Erbil security official, December 2019). Moreover, Kurdish jihadi networks in the European diaspora and Turkey are known to play an active role in radicalising Iraqi Kurds to jihad (anonymous, interview with Erbil security official, December 2019).

10. For instance, a high-level conference on religious rhetoric was convened under the supervision of the former Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani.

11. The KPD-PUK Unification 2005 agreement allowed the Kurdish de facto state to unify and nationalise the existing institutions, including religious institutions (Palani et al. 2021, 411).

12. Insights from Salahaddin University’s Workshop on Combatting Violent Extremism. (6 August 2019).

13. Authors’ observation of TV programme, 25 December 2015. Available at https://www.kurdistan24.net/so/program/d15fbee7-7d3e-4e3c-ba29-93f129ac344f

14. Authors’ observation of TV programme, 18 March 2016. Available at https://www.kurdistan24.net/so/program/37871756-6873-4118-b203-31127ef14e8a

15. Abubakir Karwani, for example, a senior member of the party and rival for the leadership, promotes the idea of Kurdish Islam.

16. Hadi Ali, Head of the Leadership Council of KIU, for example, downplayed the importance of the Kurdish Islam tendency as coming from ‘individuals’, ‘very limited and it is not correct’. Interview, March 2020.

17. Statements of Salahaddin Mohammad Bahauddin, the Secretary General of KIU, during the party’s eighth Congress in December 2019. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olJ8LsFzcEk

18. Saudi Arabia’s Sheikh Rabi‘ al-Madkhali belongs to a current of thought that was supported by the Kingdom in the 1990s against the Ikhwan-inspired Sahwa Movement (Lacroix 2011, 212). He distinguishes himself by his anti-political stance and his insistence on the need to support the ruler (wali’ al-amir) to avoid chaos.

Additional information

Funding

The research and drafting of this paper were funded by a grant (No. 261844) by the Norwegian Research Council.

Notes on contributors

Tine Gade

Tine Gade is Senior Research Fellow in the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs’ (NUPI) Research Group on Peace, Conflict and Development. She holds a PhD from Sciences Po Paris, and is a former Max Weber fellow at the European University Institute and the 2012 recipient of the Michel Seurat prize. She has conducted fieldwork on Sunni movements in Lebanon since 2008 and in Iraq since 2016. She is the author of Sunni City: Tripoli from Islamist Utopia to the Lebanese ‘Revolution’ (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press).

Kamaran Palani

Kamaran Palani is Research Fellow at MERI, and Lecturer in International Relations at Salahaddin University. Palani holds a PhD from Leiden University (Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs). He is the author of Kurdistan’s De Facto Statehood: A New Explanatory Framework (forthcoming, Routledge).