Islam, ethnicity and the state: contested spaces of legitimacy and power in the Kurdish-Turkish public sphere

ABSTRACT

The pro-Kurdish nationalist mobilization in Turkey was mostly built on the right to self-determination aligned with the Marxist-Leninist ideology for the insurgent Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the early 1980s and ethnic minority rights for the secular-leftist pro-Kurdish legal parties in the 1990s. The Turkish state mostly framed the legal and illegal pro-Kurdish mobilization as ‘the enemy of the state’ and ‘the enemy of Islam’ in its counter-insurgency efforts. However, in the 2000s, the PKK and the pro-Kurdish legal parties became more tolerant and inclusive toward Islamic Kurdish identity by mobilizing their sympathizers in events such as ‘Civic Friday Prayers’ and a ‘Democratic Islamic Congress’. This move aimed to function as an antidote to the rising popularity of the ruling conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the Kurdish Hizbullah in the early 2000s. In other words, Islam and pious Muslim identity has increasingly become contested among Turkish Islamists, Kurdish Islamists, and the secular Kurdish nationalists. This article seeks to unpack why, how, and under what conditions such competing actors and mechanisms shape the discursive and power relationships in the Kurdish-Turkish public sphere.

KEYWORDS:

• Islam
• ethnicity
• nationalism
• Kurds
• Turkey

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Mufid Yuksel, Daniel Karell, Hakan Erdagoz, Umur Erden, Ahmet Erdi Ozturk and an anonymous reviewer for their comments and feedback towards the completion of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Turkish Kurdistan refers to the geo-cultural territory in eastern and southeastern Turkey where the majority of the population today consider themselves ethnically Kurdish (around 73%); around 13% are Zaza, 9% Turkish and 5% Arab. The Kurdish population in Turkey overall amounts to between 15% and 18% of the population, or approximately 12 to 15 million citizens. Kurdistan as a concept is highly politicized in Turkey; Turkish nationalists criminalize it while Kurdish nationalists romanticize it. For a more detailed contemporary demographic account of Turkish Kurdistan, see Yegen et al. (2016).

2. Turkish citizenship was not necessarily solely based on ethnicity and Kurds were considered citizens of Turkey as well mostly due to their Muslim identity. Only non-Muslim communities were officially named minorities. Yet Kurdish identity, culture and language were still subject to highly centralized assimilation policies. For more on the formation of Turkish nationhood, see Al (2015a).

3. It is not my intention here to analyse the highly complex and deep history of the late Ottoman period, nor to crudely simplify the multi-level economic, political and social dynamics that led to the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire along with the emergence of many nation-states. Neither do I want to reduce everything to the grand narrative of nationalisms in terms of the empire’s disintegration. However, I intend to put Kurdish nationalism into a historical context and try to highlight a simple fact that it was only the Kurds who were the major losers at this historical period in terms of establishing their own state, which was not even a distant possibility at the time. For a more detailed account of the complex socio-political context and events in the late Ottoman period, see Yavuz and Ahmad (2016). For the dynamics in terms of the Kurds and Kurdish nationalism, see Olson (1991), Ozoglu (2001) and Klein (2007).

4. Sufi orders (tariqas) practice a form of Islamic mysticism (Sufism) that emphasizes spiritual development and individual deliberation transcending Sunni/Shia divisions. Sufi orders have been a significant part of social and religious life in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman period. For more, see ‘Sufism,’ in The Oxford Dictionary of Islam, edited by John L. Esposito. Oxford Islamic Studies Online, http://www.oxfordislamicstudies.com/article/opr/t125/e2260.

5. ‘Sheikh’ is a title given in Sufi orders to one authorized to teach and lead the followers of the tariqa. Mullah or Mele in Kurdish is a madrasa-educated religious leader who is different from the official state-educated Imam.

6. According to the Grand National Assembly of Turkey’s 2013 report on the Kurdish conflict, 7918 state security personnel, 22,101 PKK militants and 5557 civilians lost their lives since 1984. The report is available at the official website of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (TBMM): http://tbmm.gov.tr/komisyon/cozum_sureci/docs/cozum_kom_raporu.pdf. Since the peace process (2013–2015) between Turkey and PKK ended in the summer of 2015, renewed violence led to the death of 3996 more people, including 457 civilians, 1098 state security personnel, 2218 PKK militants and 223 youth of unknown affiliation. The death toll can be tracked at International Crisis Group’s interactive report on the PKK conflict at http://www.crisisgroup.be/interactives/turkey/.

7. On February 28^th, 1997, the Turkish military issued a memorandum about protecting secularism and Kemalist principles, which forced Erbakan to resign. This post-modern coup later led to the foundation in 2001 of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as a new generation of conservative Islamic politics. Since 2002, the AKP has been the single governing party of Turkey and Erdogan as the prime minister (2003–2014), then in 2014, the first elected president. For more information on the sociological roots of political Islamist movements in Turkey and the rise of the AKP, see Yavuz (2009).

8. The first pro-Kurdish legal political party was the People’s Labor Party (Halkin Emek Partisi or HEP), founded in 1990. Turkey’s Constitutional Court banned HEP on separatism charges and affiliation with the PKK in 1993; the political group then founded other legal parties (OZDEP, DEP, HADEP, DEHAP, DTP, BDP), which were shut down by the Constitutional Court as well. None of these political parties were able to pass the 10% election threshold until the June 2015 general election where the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), the last generation pro-Kurdish parties, was able to gain 13% of the general vote in Turkey. For more information on legal pro-Kurdish political parties, see Watts (2010).

9. Erdoğan ‘andımız’ın neden kaldırıldığını açıkladı, 2013, Milliyet, August 10: http://www.milliyet.com.tr/erdogan-dan-partililere-gonderme-siyaset-1774517/.

10. President Erdoğan criticizes Council of State for ‘not working in line with new executive system’ in Hurriyet on 24 October 2018: http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/president-erdogan-criticizes-council-of-state-for-not-working-in-line-with-new-executive-system-138234.

11. ‘Evren-Özal kliğinin dine sığınması sahtekârcadır. Tonlarca ayet yazıp Kürdistan’da helikopterlerle dağıtarak Partimizi din düşmanı ilan etmeye çalışmaları çok sahtekârcadır ve karşı devrimci bir girişimdir.’

12. ‘Bunun yanı sıra sahte İslamcı akımlara Ortadoğu monarşilerince muazzam parasal destek yapılmaktadır. Kısmen “Müslüman Kardeşler” teşkilatında bu destek somutlaşmıştır. Ve Türkiye’de de “Refah Partisi”nin içinde, daha önce de MSP bünyesinde bu destek somutlaşmıştır. İslamı savunuyor gibi görünmelerine ve İslam kardeşliğinden yana olduklarını iddia etmelerine rağmen, kesinlikle İslamın devrimci özüyle, halkların bir moral değeri olarak İslamla hiçbir ilişkileri yoktur.’

13. For more information, see http://web.stanford.edu/group/mappingmilitants/cgi-bin/groups/view/25.

14. For the full transcript of Abdullah Ocalan’s ceasefire call on 22 March 2013, see https://www.euronews.com/2013/03/22/web-full-transcript-of-abdullah-ocalans-ceasefire-call-kurdish-pkk.

15. See Senem Aslan’s 2015 opinion piece in the Washington Post: Different Faces of Turkish Islamic Nationalism: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/02/20/different-faces-of-turkish-islamic-nationalism/?utm_term=.f0362c2e0ee3.

16. Piotr Zalewski, 2012 A Turkish War of Religion: Kurdish Activists Sense a Conspiracy, Time, June 4: http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2,116,330,00.html.

17. Diyanet’ten Güneydoğu Hamlesi, Haber7com, June 17: http://www.haber7.com/ic-politika/haber/816700-diyanetten-guneydogu-hamlesi.

18. See Zübeyde Sarı and Sinan Onuş’ news regarding to the Democratic Islam Congress in Diyarbakırin 2014, BBC Türkçe, https://www.bbc.com/turkce/haberler/2014/05/140510_kongre_diyarbakir.

19. ‘Bunlar camilerimizi yakmadılar mı, bunlar ateist, bunlar zerdüşt, bunlardan bir şey olmaz. Bunlar bizim değerlerimizle hareket etmiyorlar’, Cumhuriyet, May 2016, http://www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/haber/siyaset/541650/Erdogan__Bunlar_ateist__bunlar_zerdust….html.

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Serhun Al

Serhun Al received his PhD in political science (2015) from University of Utah in the United States. Since 2016, he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Izmir University of Economics, Turkey. His research interests include politics of identity, ethnic conflict, security studies and social movements within the context of Turkish and Kurdish politics. His publications have appeared in journals such as Ethnopolitics, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, Nationalities Papers, Globalizations, and Journal of International Relations and Development. His new book entitled Patterns of Nationhood and Saving the State in Turkey: Ottomanism, Nationalism and Multiculturalism has recently been published by Routledge.