Kurdish Nationalism And Political Islam In Turkey

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book examines some of the most pressing issues facing the Turkish political establishment, in particular the issues of political Islam, and Kurdish and Turkish nationalisms. The authors explore the rationales of the main political actors in Turkey in order to increase our understanding of the ongoing debates over the secularist character of the Turkish Republic and over Turkey’s longstanding Kurdish issue. Original contributions from respected scholars in the field of Turkish and Kurdish studies provide us with many insights into the social and political fabric of Turkey, exploring Turkey’s secularist establishment, the ruling AKP government, the Kurdistan Workers' Party and the Institutions of the European Union. While the focus of concern in this book is with the social agents of contemporary politics in Turkey, the convictions they have and the strategies they employ, historical dimensions are also integrated in their analyses. In its approach, the book makes an important contribution to a widening investigation into the making of politics in the contemporary world. Incorporating the importance of the growing transnational connections between Turkey and Europe, this book is particularly relevant in the light of the ongoing negotiations over Turkey’s membership to the European Union, and will be of interest to scholars interested in Turkish studies, Kurdish studies and Middle Eastern Politics.

Can Islamism, as is often claimed, truly unite Muslim Turks and Kurds in a discourse that supersedes ethnicity? This is a volatile and exciting time for a country whose long history has been characterized by dramatic power play. Evolving out of two years of fieldwork in Istanbul, this book examines the fragmenting Islamist political movement in Turkey. As Turkey emerges from a repressive modernizing project, various political identities are emerging and competing for influence. The Islamist movement celebrates the failure of Western liberalism in Turkey and the return of politics based on Muslim ideals. However, this vision is threatened by Kurdish nationalism and the country's troubled past.Is Islamist multiculturalism even possible? The ethnic tensions surfacing in Turkey beg the question whether the Muslim Turks and Kurds can find common ground in religion. Houston argues that such unification depends fundamentally upon the flexibility of the rationale behind the Islamist movement's struggle.

The current agenda of international politics is full of headline-grabbing conflicts. This book focuses on one such conflict, namely the Kurdish question in Turkey, with recent peace negotiations between Turkey and the PKK having apparently failed. The pro-Islamic ruling party of Turkey (the AK Party) and the ideologically leftist pro-Kurdish parties are the key determinants of this conflict. Their historical development since the inception of modern Turkey is discussed here to demonstrate the similarities and differences between these oppositional social and political groups. In this sense, the book claims that ideological rigidity is one of the core factors shaping the relationship between these parties. As such, the book provides a detailed investigation of the ideological perspectives of the key actors in the conflict in order to gain a better understanding of why the last initiative ended negatively.

Turkey's enthusiastic embrace of the Arab Spring set in motion a dynamic that fundamentally altered its relations with the United States, Russia, Qatar, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Iran, and transformed Turkey from a soft power to a hard power in the tangled geopolitics of the Middle East. Birol Başkan and Ömer Taşpınar argue that the ruling Justice and Development Party's (AKP) Islamist background played a significant role in the country's decision to embrace the uprisings and the subsequent foreign policy direction the country has pursued. They demonstrate that religious ideology is endogenous to—shaping and in turn being shaped by—Turkey's various engagements in the Middle East. The Nation or the Ummah emphasizes that while Islamist religious ideology does not provide specific policy prescriptions, it does shape the way the ruling elite sees and interprets the context and the structural boundaries they operate within.

Exploring a new political phenomenon in the Middle East, this book studies the reconciliation of nationalism and Islamism by Islamic political parties in the context of nation states. Islamism in Kurdistan has become significantly framed by the politics of nationalism. Although the concept of religious nationalism has been discussed substantially before, this work highlights a new brand of religious nationalism that has emerged as a result of intertwining nationalism and Islamism. The focus of this study is on the development of religious nationalism in the continuously tumultuous region of the Middle East. The volume investigates whether Islamism in Kurdistan is limited by the politics of nationalism – which is an accentuated example for the whole Middle East region. By looking at the Kurdistan Islamic Union (KIU), the research studies Islamism in the Kurdistan Region to elaborate on this new type of politics. This is essentially due to the absence of a politically recognised nation state, which renders Kurds to be particularly susceptible to various manifestations of nationalism. Offering an account on the spread of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Kurdistan Region, this original research on Kurdish nationalism will be a key text for students and researchers interested in nationalism, Islamism and Middle East politics.

Islam, Populism and Regime Change in Turkey explores the role of religion (Sunni, Hanefi Islam) in the transformation of Turkey under the reign of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP). The chapters argue that the Turkish understanding of secularism was also one of the building blocks and the constitutive elements of Turkey’s modernization until the rise of the AKP. Currently, however, it seems that religion has become a new or re-born element of the new Turkey and has been transforming many areas such as: the media, the Kurdish issue, implementation of the rule of law, foreign policy and gender issues. This book therefore aims to scrutinize the question: how does a religion-based transformation in Turkey influence the raison d’etat of the state, and effect in various ways different areas such as gender, foreign policy, economy and socio-political relations of various power groups within the society? Islam, Populism and Regime Change in Turkey will be of great interest to scholars of Religion and Politics, and governance in Turkey. It was originally published as a special issue of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies.

"How do religious, ethnic, and national identities interact in religiously homogenous ethnic conflicts? Is it possible for religion to act as a resolution tool in such conflicts? Why? Why not? In search for answers to these questions, Under the Banner of Islam focuses on the ambivalent role Sunni Islam has played in Turkey's Kurdish conflict-both as a conflict-resolution tool and as a tool of resistance-in the last two decades. Relying mainly on participant observation in Civil Friday Prayers and 62 interviews conducted in three different cities in Turkey (Istanbul and the majority-Kurdish Diyarbakir and Batman) between June 2012 and June 2013, it demonstrates that Sunni Islam has had a very limited impact as a conflict-resolution tool in Turkey. Blending interview data with a detailed historical institutional analysis that goes back as early as the nineteenth century, it argues that the strength of Turkish and Kurdish nationalisms, the symbiotic relationship between Turkey's religious and political fields, religious elites' varying conceptualizations of religious and ethnic identities, and the recent political developments in the region (particularly the establishment of an autonomous Kurdish region, Rojava, in Syria) have all contributed to this outcome. The resulting narrative is not only a record of religion, ethnicity, and nationalism in Turkey's Kurdish conflict, but also an investigation of how ethnic and religious identities are negotiated in conflict resolution and how symbolic boundaries are drawn in ethnic conflict zones"--