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Introduction

In March 2011, Kurdish meles1 led “civilian Friday prayers” as part of a larger civil disobedience campaign (sivil itaatsizlik) in the main public square of Diyarbakır, Turkey. Organized and sponsored by the secular Kurdish movement, which was represented in Parliament at that time by the Peace and Democracy Party (Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi, BDP), civilian Friday prayers aimed to boycott regular Friday prayers at state-controlled mosques. Party officials stated that they did not want to stand behind state-appointed imams arguing that state imams propagate prostate and progovernment views as well as Turkishness among Kurds in the region. Party coleader Selahattin Demirtaş, for instance, claimed the following: “Imams are selected by the National Security Council [Milli Güvenlik Kurulu, MGK] and then sent here [the Kurdish regions]. We ask our people not to pray behind those state imams who are sent here with a special mission.… We know that some of the state imams in the region are working for the government [run by the conservative Justice and Development Party]. They are here to impose Turkishness and statism on the people.”2

Such an unexpected initiative by a secular, left-oriented political movement sparked huge controversy and heated debates in Turkish politics. The government, run by the conservative Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP), harshly criticized this initiative. Highly disturbed by the BDP-promoted civilian Friday prayers, then–prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan condemned them on several occasions. He asserted that the pro-Kurdish party was exploiting religion to gain votes. To degrade the secular Kurdish movement in the eyes of conservative Kurds, Erdoğan further claimed that Kurdish ethnonationalists consider Abdullah Öcalan (the imprisoned Kurdish leader) as a prophet.3 On one occasion, Erdoğan gratingly reacted to this initiative as follows: “Now, they organize alternative Friday prayers. But they do not really respect our sacred, religious values. For instance, there are females among those who participate in their Friday prayers.… They also consider Apo [Abdullah Öcalan] as a Prophet.… They still follow Marxist-Leninist understandings, which do not have anything to do with Islam and Islamic values.”4

Civilian Friday prayers were part of a broader transformation in the secular Kurdish movement in Turkey in the past decades: the rise of a friendlier approach and attitude toward Islam. As this book’s empirical chapters present in detail, we see many other similar initiatives by the Kurdish ethnonationalist movement, such as welcoming and co-opting conservative political figures and civil society organizations; assembling the Democratic Islam Congress in Diyarbakır and Istanbul; organizing mass meetings to celebrate the anniversary of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday (mawlid meetings) and public iftar5 dinners during Ramadan; and increasing references to Islamic ideas, principles, and practices (e.g., frequently citing verses from the Koran and proposing the Charter of Medina as a social model for contemporary Turkey).

These unprecedented initiatives constitute a conundrum because it is widely acknowledged that one of the fault lines of Turkish politics is the divide between religious and secular (e.g., see Göle 1997; Cizre 2008; Yavuz 1997, 2003, and 2009). While most rightist political formations have been associated with the religious camp and advocate and promote conservative or Islamic ideas and values in society and politics, most leftist circles have sided with the secular camp, generally skeptical toward the role of religion and religious actors and movements in sociopolitical life. This observation is also valid for the PKK-led Kurdish ethnonationalist movement, which emerged in the second half of the 1970s. As chapter 2 depicts, the Kurdish ethnonationalist movement in Turkey, rooted in strong secularism and socialist, Marxist ideology, initially adopted a strongly antireligious stance (see also van Bruinessen 2000b, 54–55; Romano 2006, 134). However, the movement has taken a much more moderate and lenient attitude in regard to Islam and Islamic actors over the past few decades, particularly since the early 2000s. As a result, Islam has become part of the movement’s political discourse, strategies, and actions. I define such a transformation or evolution in leftist, secular Kurdish ethnopolitics as the Islamic opening. The term Islamic opening in this study, however, does not mean that a secular ethononationalist movement is turning into an Islamic one. Instead, it refers to the approval and endorsement of Islam and Islamic actors by the secular, leftist Kurdish ethnonationalist movement, which is a novel phenomenon in modern Kurdish ethnopolitics in the Turkish setting.

From a broader perspective, the increasing role of religion in sociopolitical life in the Middle East and across the world in the post–Cold War context is a widely acknowledged phenomenon (e.g., see Almond, Appleby, and Sivan 2003; Roy 2004; Emerson and Hartman 2006; Meijer 2009). In line with this religious revival or resurgence (i.e., the rise of Islamic movements and political parties), several nationalist groups or movements in the region, such as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), have accommodated Islam.6 As a result, we see the entanglement of nationalist and religious identifications and attachments in various nationalist movements (see also Juergensmeyer 1993, 2006, 2008; Rieffer 2003; Smith 2008; Barker 2009; Gorski and Türkmen-Dervişoğlu 2013).

One might expect that similar developments and processes have taken place in the Turkish polity. Indeed, several political formations and movements have adopted a more Islamic discourse and position in the post-1980 period, partly because of the declining influence of ideology politics (i.e., left-right divisions and polarization) in the Turkish polity and the increasingly welcoming attitude of the Turkish state toward Islam and religious orders. Within such a political environment, a shift toward Islam among right-oriented political formations is not that surprising. It is much more striking, however, to see such a transformation taking place within strictly secular, leftist formations, such as the Kurdish ethnonationalist movement. As stated earlier, the Kurdish movement, which is rooted in strong secularism and Marxism, has been flying ethnoreligious colors, especially since the early 2000s. We do not really see such a systematic effort to accommodate Islam and Islamic actors among other leftist circles in the Turkish polity. We do see some initiatives by other leftist political formations or movements to appeal to conservative or pious voters (e.g., efforts to co-opt conservative politicians from the center-right or having female party members wearing headscarves). However, as the empirical chapters of the book illustrate, such cosmetic or superficial and short-term initiatives are not really comparable with much more systematic, comprehensive, and long-term efforts of the secular Kurdish movement to reinterpret Islamic ideas, values, and principles in line with its ethnonationalist interests and objectives and to co-opt Islamic actors. This difference is probably because of the fact that the constituency of the Kurdish ethnonationalist movement has been relatively more religious (for more on this, see chapter 3).

Despite this striking change, there is a very limited number of works directly dealing with the increasing role of religion in the Kurdish ethnopolitical movement in the Turkish context, for example, works by van Bruinessen (2000a, 2000b), Houston (2001), and Gürbüz (2016). However, in addition to being outdated, the works by van Bruinessen and Houston do not really provide a comprehensive theoretical and explanatory analysis of the secular Kurdish movement’s evolving relations with Islam. Gürbüz’s study indirectly touches on pro-Kurdish groups’ relations with Islam by examining competition or rivalry among social movement organizations in southeastern Turkey (e.g., pro-Islamic groups such as Kurdish Hezbollah and secular pro-Kurdish civil society organizations). In other words, this recent work does not provide a detailed and thorough account of the Kurdish ethnopolitical movement’s Islamic opening in the past decades either. In brief, it is surprising that this intriguing development in secular Kurdish ethnopolitics and its theoretical and practical implications still remain an understudied and undertheorized phenomenon in the fast-growing scholarly literature on the Kurdish issue.

Thus, it is worth raising the following research questions: Why do we see the aforementioned, unexpected shift? What does it mean? How can we explain this interesting development in secular Kurdish ethnopolitics? For what reasons (ideational and/or material) do ethnopolitical leaders and entrepreneurs develop new attitudes and discourses toward religion and/or ethnicity or nationalism? Why and how do political elites swing between “religionism” and “nationalism”? What are the general causes and mechanisms of such swings? What might the enabling and/or constraining factors be in ethnopolitical elites’ efforts to mold ethnic categories and movements? Further, how are ethnonational boundaries affected by such elite actions and discourse? What roles do elites play in ethnic boundary-making processes? Why, when, and how do they demarcate, maintain, and transform the symbolic and social boundaries of an ethnic category or movement? What might the implications of the case of the Islamic opening of the secular, leftist Kurdish movement be for the broader theoretical debate on ethnicity and nationalism, particularly for ethnic boundary-making processes?

Methodological Approach

Focusing on the Islamic opening of the secular, left-oriented Kurdish ethnopolitical movement in Turkey in the past decades, this research project conducts a case study. Defined as “the intensive study of a single case for the purpose of understanding a larger class of similar units” (Gerring 2007, 20) or, similarly, as an “extensive and in-depth analysis of some social and political phenomenon” (Yin 2009, 4), the case study is quite useful for investigating novel phenomena, analyzing complex causal mechanisms and processes, and assisting with hypothesis generation as well as theory development and refinement (see George and Bennett 2005; Gerring 2007; Levy 2008; Brady and Collier 2010).

With regard to the units of analysis, this study qualifies as a single-case study, and so I focus on within-case variation (i.e., shifts in the Kurdish movement’s attitudes toward Islam and Islamic actors). In addition, I conduct process tracing, which is a particular type of within-case analysis. Associated with small-N, case-oriented research, process tracing is advantageous for uncovering causal mechanisms, processes, and sequences underlying observed phenomena or outcomes (see George and Bennett 2005). Process tracing is also quite helpful for analyzing the sequence of events, decisions, and steps over time that links the initial events and conditions to outcomes (i.e., the Islamic opening of the secular Kurdish ethnonationalist movement in Turkey).

To obtain more credible, valid, and persuasive results, and thus a more comprehensive and deeper understanding of the issue, I also use triangulation as a research strategy, which simply means “the observation of the research issue from (at least) two different points” (Flick 2004, 178). Triangulation is achieved by using multiple research techniques and a wide range of data sources (Rothbauer 2008; S. Hastings 2010; Stoker 2011). Such a combination (qualitative and quantitative evidence) is expected to increase inferential leverage and confidence in the ensuing results and so generate a more accurate and complete picture of the phenomenon under investigation (Bryman 2004; Cox and Hassard 2010; Tarrow 2010; Stoker 2011). I apply data triangulation, which refers to utilizing “data drawn from different sources and at different times, in different places or from different people” (Flick 2004, 178). Thus, this research project utilizes various approaches to and techniques of data collection and data sources, primarily semistructured, in-depth interviews; ethnographic field research; textual analyses (e.g., discourse analysis of key documents); and electoral data.

For this study, I conducted 104 interviews with 88 participants in several provinces in Turkey (primarily Ankara, Diyarbakır, Istanbul, and Tunceli) between 2011 and 2015.7 Informants were selected from different political circles (e.g., Islamic and secular), professions (e.g., politicians, local administrators, intellectuals, columnists, activists, civil society representatives), and ethnic origins (e.g., Turks and Kurds).8 I also participated as an observer in the Democratic Islam Congress, organized by the Kurdish movement in Diyarbakır in May 2014, where I had the opportunity to sit in on and make detailed notes of discussions within the Kurdish movement about religious issues. My empirical analyses are enriched with textual analyses that include discourse analyses of the key documents and texts (e.g., publications or political programs of Kurdish organizations) and statements by Kurdish ethnopolitical elites and leading figures of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkaren Kurdistan, PKK) and electoral data (i.e., electoral performance of pro-Kurdish political parties at local and general elections).

Conceptual Issues

It has been observed that “conceptual wrangles continue to haunt” ethnicity and nationalism studies (Cederman 2002, 422). As such struggles still persist in the literature (see also Hale 2004; Wolff 2006; Chandra 2012b), it is necessary to define the key concepts used throughout this book, that is, ethnicity, ethnonationalism/ethnopolitics, nation, and nationalism. When we look at the existing literature, we see a plethora of definitions and uses of these concepts, some of which are contradictory. Instead of addressing the persisting conceptual challenges or offering the “right” definition, in this volume I simply provide a working definition of these terms. Rather than creating new definitions, I benefited from several definitions of these key terms in the existing literature (e.g., Weber 1968; Schermerhorn 1970; Kasfir 1979; van den Berghe 1981; Gellner 1983; Horowitz 1985; Anderson 1991; Olzak 1992; Cornell 1993; Connor 1994; Hutchinson and Smith 1996; Kellas 1998; Conversi 1999; Cederman 2002; Brubaker, Loveman, and Stamatov 2004; Hale 2004; Chai 2005; Chandra 2006, 2012c; Smith 2006; Cornell and Hartmann 2007; R. Jenkins 2008; Bayar 2009; Brubaker 2009; Wimmer 2013).

The existing definitions tend to treat ethnicity as a type of collective identity and/or category. In addition, we can identify three major dimensions of ethnicity as a collective identity across those definitions: hereditary/innate (e.g., common descent or ancestry, language, phenotype, homeland or region of origin); cultural (e.g., norms, values, traditions, symbols, beliefs, memories); and subjective/cognitive (e.g., self-consciousness, self-identification, imagination, recognition, classification, categorization, interpretation). Thus, borrowing from those definitions, this study considers ethnicity as a subjectively felt belonging to a collectivity or group, distinguished by a claim to a common origin or descent (real or putative),9 language, and territory (actual or mythical homelands), as well as a somewhat shared distinct culture (e.g., myths, memories, symbols, values, customs, rituals, norms) (see also Wimmer 2013, 7).

Ethnonationalism (or ethnic nationalism) refers to a political movement or a form of identity politics (see Rothschild 1981; Breuilly 1993; Lecours 2000; Romano 2006; Wolff 2006; Eriksen 2010). As Rothschild (1981, 6) states, ethnonationalism is “the transformation of ethnicity from a purely personal quest for meaning and belonging into a group demand for respect and power.” Another definition suggests that “ethnonationalism is the action of a group that claims some degree of self-government on the grounds that it is united by a special sense of solidarity emanating from one or more shared features and therefore forms a ‘nation’” (Lecours 2000, 105). For Romano (2006, 23), ethnonationalist movements “seek to heighten ethnic identification within a target population and then in turn politicize ethnic identity in order to challenge the state.” Finally, Eriksen (2010, 10) remarks that “most ethnic groups, even if they ask for recognition and cultural rights, do not demand command over a state. When the political leaders of an ethnic movement make demands to this effect, the ethnic movement therefore by definition becomes a nationalist movement.” These definitions and treatments suggest that in the case of ethnonationalist movements and processes, ethnicity is no longer an issue of cultural or social markers but an issue of politics. As a particular type of political movement, ethnonationalist movements might have quite diverse demands, ranging from the legal recognition of their distinct ethnic identities to certain cultural and political rights, such as language rights and power-sharing arrangements such as regional autonomy or total separation.

Many definitions of nation, on the other hand, associate the term with notions of self-rule or self-government, political autonomy, independence, territorial self-determination, or sovereignty and statehood (e.g., Kedourie 1960; Gellner 1983; Anderson 1991; Brass 1991; Calhoun 1993; Kellas 1998; van den Berghe 2001; Cederman 2002; Wolff 2006; Cornell and Hartmann 2007; R. Jenkins 2008; Barker 2009; Eriksen 2010; Wimmer 2013; Brubaker 2014). For example, Calhoun (1993, 229) states the following: “Certainly a crucial difference between ethnicities and nations is that the latter are envisioned as intrinsically political communities, as sources of sovereignty, while this is not central to the definition of ethnicities.” Barker (2009, 9) concurs: “What separates a nation from an ethnic group or other group identity is political ambition—specifically the goal of self-rule or self-determination.… A movement becomes nationalist in nature when its goal becomes self-determination.” Similarly, Eriksen (2010, 144) puts forward that “nationalism and ethnicity are kindred concepts, and the majority of nationalisms are ethnic in character. The distinction between nationalism and ethnicity as analytical concepts is a simple one.… A nationalist ideology is an ethnic ideology which demands a state on behalf of the ethnic group.” Finally, Wimmer (2013, 8) notes that “if members of an ethnic community have developed national aspirations and demand (or already control) a state of their own, we describe such categories and groups as nations” (see also Wolff 2006, 54).

Regarding nationalism, the literature treats it as a political ideology/principle/doctrine or as a political/ideological movement. For Kedourie (1960, 9), nationalism is constituted by three propositions: “that humanity is naturally divided into nations, that nations are known by certain characteristics which can be ascertained, and that the only legitimate type of government is national self-government.” According to Gellner (1983, 1), nationalism is a political principle, which “holds that the political and national unit should be congruent.” Breuilly (1993, 2) treats nationalism as a political movement with three basic assertions: “a) There exists a nation with an explicit and peculiar character, b) The interests and values of this nation take priority over all other interests and values, [and] c) The nation must be as independent as possible, which usually requires at least the attainment of political sovereignty.” Considering nationalism as an ideological movement, Smith (2006, 175) suggests that nationalism advocates “the attainment and maintenance of autonomy, unity and identity on behalf of a population, some of whose members deem it to constitute an actual or potential ‘nation.’”

Given these definitions or conceptualizations, how should we conceptually treat the case of the Kurdish movement? Following the foregoing definitions and the general orientation in the existing literature on the Kurdish issue (e.g., see Entessar 1992, 2010; van Bruinessen 2000a, 2000b; White 2000; Natali 2005; Romano 2006; Marcus 2007; Watts 2010; Gürbüz 2016), this study treats Kurdishness and the Kurdish movement as typical forms of ethnicity and ethnonationalism, respectively. Although the origin of the Kurds is still disputed, there is a general consensus that they are the descendants of the Medes, an Indo-European tribe (see Entessar 1992, 3; White 2000, 14). The Kurdish language is regarded as a member of the Iranian languages, which stem from the Indo-European family (Entessar 1992, 4; van Bruinessen 2000a; White 2000, 16; Jwaideh 2006, 11). The most widely spoken dialects are Kurmanji, Zaza, Sorani, and Gorani (van Bruinessen 2000a; Romano 2006, 3). Kurds, who inhabit a land divided among Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, are regarded as one of the largest ethnic communities in the world without an independent state of their own (e.g., Gottlieb 1994; van Bruinessen 2000a; Gunter 2004). In the Turkish setting, Kurds constitute the second-largest ethnic group after Turks. Since the Turkish state has not collected data on ethnicity since 1965, there has since been no clear consensus on the size of the current Kurdish population in Turkey; estimations, however, correspond to 15% to 18% of the total Turkish population (see also Romano 2006, 24; Marcus 2007, 3; Watts 2010, xi; Yeğen, Tol, and Çalışkan 2016, 16).10 The results of our public opinion surveys (conducted in 2011, 2013, and 2015) are in line with this estimate: on average, 16% of survey respondents identified themselves as Kurdish.11 Despite massive migration to major western and central cities such as Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir, at least half of Kurds still live in the eastern and southeastern provinces of Turkey (see Koc, Hancioglu, and Cavlin 2008, 450).12 Regarding religious characteristics, our survey results suggest that the vast majority (around 90%) of the Kurds in Turkey, similar to their Turkish compatriots, subscribe to the Sunni mezhep or madhab (a Muslim school of law or fiqh [jurisprudence]).13 The majority of Sunni Kurds (around 70%) adhere to the Shafi school, while 30% practice within the Hanefi school.14

The term Kurdish movement in this study refers to secular, left-oriented pro-Kurdish groups, which constitute by far the largest, most powerful Kurdish ethnonationalist or ethnopolitical movement in the Turkish setting (Marcus 2007, 267; Watts 2010, 22). Since the mid-1980s, this movement has posed a major challenge to the Turkish state (see Gunter 1997; Özbudun 2000; Kramer 2000; Moustakis and Chaudhuri 2005; Somer 2005; Marcus 2007; Watts 2010; Aydin and Emrence 2015).15 As a culturally and politically self-aware ethnic group, Kurds have been demanding certain cultural rights such as speaking, publishing, and broadcasting in Kurdish, public education in Kurdish, and political rights such as constitutional recognition of Kurdish ethnic identity, political representation, and power-sharing arrangements such as decentralization, self-rule (özerklik, öz yönetim), or regional autonomy.

Regarding the state attitude, a politics of denial, suppression, and assimilation dominated Turkey’s Kurdish policy from the mid-1920s until the 1990s (Imset 1996; van Bruinessen 2000a). In this period, the state simply denied the ethnopolitical nature of the problem, defining it instead as an issue of socioeconomic underdevelopment or backwardness (i.e., the prevalence of feudalism, ignorance, and poverty in the southeast) and a security concern (banditry and terrorism incited and sponsored by foreign powers) (see also Yeğen 1996, 2007, 2011; Romano 2006; Marcus 2007; Romano and Gurses 2014; Aydin and Emrence 2015). As a solution, the state primarily relied on military measures to enhance national and regional security and exterminate the PKK (e.g., declaring a state of emergency in the region; updating military technology; increasing the number of troops deployed in the region; recruiting local people as armed village guards; empowering border protection and security; engaging in cross-border operations; depopulating the region through forced village evacuations, mass arrests, extrajudicial executions, etc.) and socioeconomic policies to promote modernization and development in the area (e.g., efforts to raise income and education levels; transferring economic resources; facilitating and encouraging investments and improving infrastructure).

Beginning in the early 2000s, however, the Turkish state moderated its attitude vis-à-vis the Kurdish issue and recognized the ethnopolitical aspect of the problem and so initiated democratization efforts in addition to socioeconomic and security measures. In this new era, Turkish governments have implemented major legal and institutional changes and granted some cultural rights to Kurds, such as legalizing publishing and broadcasting in Kurdish and learning the Kurdish language, allowing parents to give their children Kurdish names, allowing political party campaigns in Kurdish, and introducing elective Kurdish courses. Since 2009, the Turkish and Kurdish sides have also been negotiating for a final peaceful settlement of the three-decade-long armed conflict. Some major initiatives in this new period have been the 2009 Kurdish Opening and the 2009–2011 Oslo Talks with the PKK leadership. In late 2012, the government launched a new initiative to find a peaceful solution to the armed conflict and started direct talks with imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan (also known as the Peace Process). In March 2013, Öcalan sent a message from prison on İmralı Island (in the Sea of Marmara) and called for the end of armed struggle against the Turkish state and declared a cease-fire. Following Öcalan’s historic message, the PKK leadership in Northern Iraq declared a cease-fire and announced that the PKK would withdraw its militants from Turkey. However, in the aftermath of the June 2015 general elections, the cease-fire and the peace process collapsed, and the severe armed conflict between security forces and the PKK resumed.

Rather than providing a general survey of the Kurdish issue in Turkey, this study focuses on the dominant wing of the Kurdish movement (i.e., the secular, leftist, ethnonationalist formations) and examines its relations with Islam, which have shown interesting shifts and transformations in the past decades.16 As I analyze the shifting attitude of the Kurdish movement toward Islam, I focus on both the legal and illegal wings of the movement. On the illegal side, we have the PKK as the main actor. As a secular, leftist, and armed movement, the PKK emerged out of the revolutionary left in Turkey in the late 1970s and became the dominant political formation of Turkey’s Kurds (see also N. Özcan 1999; Yavuz 2001, 9–10; Taspinar 2005; Romano 2006; Marcus 2007; Tezcür 2009, 2015; Jongerden and Akkaya 2011). Initially, its ultimate goal was to establish a united Kurdistan based on Marxist-Leninist principles. For that purpose, the PKK initiated an armed struggle against the Turkish state in the first half of the 1980s. Since then, the fighting between Turkish security forces and PKK members has resulted in over 35,000 casualties, the destruction of about 3,000 villages, and the internal displacement of at least 3,000,000 people.17 By the mid-1990s the PKK had started to distance itself from separatist and Marxist ideas. Instead, the PKK-led Kurdish movement proposed a peaceful solution to the Kurdish conflict and appropriated a discourse of democratic rights and freedoms for Kurds (Imset 1996; White 2000; Yavuz 2001; Romano 2006; Gunes 2012b).18 Especially since the early 2000s, the PKK has rejected claims for national liberation and statehood and instead put increasing emphasis on Kurdish rights and demands, such as the constitutional recognition of Kurdish ethnic identity, language rights (e.g., education in one’s mother language), and political and administrative decentralization and power-sharing arrangements. For instance, rejecting secession, PKK leader Öcalan proposed “democratic autonomy” (demokratik özerklik) for Turkey and “democratic confederalism” (demokratik konfederalizm) for the region.19

On the legal side, there were several pro-Kurdish, secular, ethnic political parties that appeared on the Turkish political scene in the early 1990s (Watts 1999, 2006, 2010).20 These parties operated in a format that could be called issue parties: their primary concern was the Kurdish issue. In general, they argued that the Kurdish problem could not be reduced to a security issue; it was instead a complicated problem with ethnic, political, psychological, and socioeconomic dimensions. Hence, they advocated a peaceful and democratic solution to the Kurdish conflict and further democracy in Turkey. As a result, these parties have articulated several demands, such as the constitutional recognition of Kurdish ethnic identity, cultural rights (e.g., publishing, broadcasting, and education in Kurdish), decentralization and empowerment of local government, ending the state of emergency in southeastern Turkey, investigating extrajudicial killings, removing the village guards system, and a general amnesty for PKK members. They also demanded socioeconomic development in the southeast, where Kurds constitute the vast majority of the population (see also Watts 2010). However, these parties were accused of involvement in separatist activities and propaganda against the indivisible integrity of the Turkish territory and nation and of helping the “separatist,” “terrorist” PKK. As a result, most of the successive pro-Kurdish political parties were banned by Turkey’s Constitutional Court. Currently, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (Halkların Demokratik Partisi, HDP), which was formed in 2012 and succeeded the BDP in summer 2014, represents the Kurdish movement in legal party politics in Turkey.

Findings/Arguments

This study analyzes the shifting attitude of the secular, leftist Kurdish movement toward Islam and Islamic actors in the past decades through the lens of the boundary approach, which is primarily concerned with boundary-making or construction processes such as the emergence, reproduction, and transformation of the symbolic and social boundaries of an ethnic group or movement (e.g., see Barth 1969a; Lamont 2000; Lamont and Molnár 2002; Alba 2005; Wimmer 2008a, 2013; Jackson and Molokotos-Liedeman 2015). As the empirical chapters illustrate, Kurdish ethnopolitics since its inception in the late 1970s has involved striking boundary processes (e.g., contesting or challenging the official understanding of national identity and of the state’s discourse on the Kurdish issue, as well as making, unmaking, and remaking the boundaries of Kurdishness and of the Kurdish movement itself) and so offers us an excellent laboratory for exploring ethnic boundary-making processes and dynamics.

It is, however, unfortunate that the boundary approach has so far not been employed in a comprehensive way in studying the Kurdish case.21 One recent study (Aydin and Emrence 2015), which analyzes the organizational, ideological, and strategic aspects of Kurdish insurgency and counterinsurgency, attempts to utilize this approach. However, that study focuses on the territorial zones of armed conflict between the PKK and Turkish security forces. Due to its conscious focus on physical or territorial borders of the conflict between the Kurdish armed groups and the security forces, it neglects boundary-making processes and dynamics at symbolic and social levels. Thus, as one of the initial studies utilizing the boundary approach in the Kurdish context, this work not only will shed light on the recent shifts within the Kurdish movement with respect to its relations with Islam and Islamic actors and so help us gain insights into Kurdish ethnopolitics but also will contribute to our understanding of ethnic boundary processes, particularly boundary-making strategies and boundary contestations.

This study divides the evolving relations between the secular Kurdish movement and Islam into three different stages or periods: (1) an indifferent/apathetic and/or antagonistic/aggressive attitude in the 1970s and 1980s, (2) a sometimes ambivalent but increasingly friendly approach in the 1990s, and (3) an accommodative attitude and the rise of a Kurdish-Islamic synthesis since the early 2000s. Approaching such a trajectory from the perspective of boundary-making theory, this study treats the Kurdish movement’s Islamic opening as a major case of boundary work and suggests that each of these periods is associated with a different boundary-making strategy: boundary contraction, boundary expansion, and boundary reinforcement or empowerment, respectively. Thus, with a hostile attitude toward Islam and Islamic actors and movements in the 1970s and 1980s, the Kurdish ethnonationalist movement contracted both symbolic boundaries of Kurdishness in its ethnonational imaginary and the social boundaries of the movement itself. By developing an increasingly friendly approach toward Islam and Islamic circles in the 1990s, secular Kurdish ethnopolitical elites expanded the contracted symbolic and social boundaries of the movement. Since the early 2000s, we have seen even more systematic and comprehensive efforts by secular Kurdish ethnopolitical elites to accommodate Islam and Islamic actors. These efforts might be interpreted as the reinforcement or empowerment of expanded boundaries.

Regarding the causes of the Kurdish movement’s boundary expansion (i.e., its Islamic opening), I demonstrate that a group of strategic and ideational factors at global, national, and regional levels encouraged and/or forced Kurdish ethnopolitical leaders to redraw symbolic and social boundaries of the movement. First, the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s undermined support for Marxist ideas in Turkey in general, and as a result, the PKK-led movement began to distance itself from Marxism (for instance, in 1995 it removed the hammer and sickle from its flag). Ideological shift (i.e., the declining influence of Marxism) created more favorable conditions for the rise of a more positive approach toward religion within the movement. In other words, the declining influence of Marxism facilitated the Islamic opening of the Kurdish movement in the post-1990 period.

We should also take into account of the role of movement’s need to expand its social basis and increase its popularity in Kurdish society. As is well known, the Kurdish movement, led and dominated by the PKK, emerged as a small-scale armed struggle in the late 1970s. However, the movement’s survival and success in its struggle against the central state necessitated expanding its popularity and support among the Kurdish masses. This effort required developing a friendlier approach to the traditions, values, and norms of Kurdish society, such as Islamic beliefs, values, and attachments. Indeed, by the early 1990s, the Kurdish struggle had gained mass character (i.e., turned into a mass movement). Such a transformation prompted the movement to expand its activities into the legal political arena. As a result, the People’s Labor Party (Halkın Emek Partisi, HEP), established in June 1990, became the first legal pro-Kurdish party. Kurdish ethnopolitical leadership expected that such lawful formations would give new voice to the movement and so expand its legitimacy and influence among the Kurdish masses. The expansion of the movement’s social basis further incited the ethnopolitical leadership to be more accommodative vis-à-vis the values, beliefs, and norms of Kurdish society. In other words, as the PKK-led Kurdish movement diffused into Kurdish society, Islamic ideas, values, and circles gradually made their way into the movement. In brief, the need to expand the group’s popular support base forced the secular Kurdish leadership to have more respect for Kurdish culture, which has been characterized by a religious, traditional, and conservative lifestyle.

Another factor that facilitated the adoption of a more positive stance toward Islam and Islamic actors was electoral pressures (i.e., the rise in popularity among Kurds of pro-Islamic political parties). In the 1990s, pro-Islamic National Outlook Movement parties (i.e., the Welfare Party, Refah Partisi [RP], and the Virtue Party, Fazilet Partisi [FP]), and in the 2000s, the AKP gained substantial electoral popularity in the Kurdish region. As chapter 3 shows, the main political rivals of the secular Kurdish movement in regional electoral politics have been conservative or Islamic political formations. Electoral competition with Islamic or conservative political actors further urged the Kurdish ethnopolitical leadership to accommodate Islam and Islamic actors.

Related to electoral pressures and dynamics, we should also acknowledge the distinct role of legitimacy struggles between Kurdish ethnopolitical elites and their rivals. Both legal and illegal Islamic or conservative groups (e.g., the AKP and Kurdish Hezbollah) and the Turkish state have constantly attempted to delegitimize the secular Kurdish movement in the eyes of the Kurdish masses, particularly among conservative Kurds, by calling Kurdish ethnopolitical actors “Marxist,” “atheist,” “infidels,” “heretical,” or “un-Islamic” and therefore “illegitimate.” In other words, conservative political circles and the state have attempted to contract religious boundaries with an intention to delegitimize the secular Kurdish movement and marginalize pro-Kurdish parties in the electoral contest. My in-depth analysis of the Kurdish case indicates that such boundary-making efforts and boundary struggles or contestations can become intense and antagonistic especially during electoral periods. Facing such labels and accusations, the Kurdish ethnopolitical leadership felt the need to substantially shift its attitude toward religion. Put differently, such boundary work by Kurdish ethnopolitical leadership was also a counterstrategy against its political opponents’ efforts to contract Islamic religious boundaries.

The boundary expansion in the Kurdish case was not without any tension, however. This study shows that the boundary work by Kurdish ethnopolitical elites involved both internal and external tensions and contestations. Internally, Alevi Kurds, who are relatively more liberal and secular than Sunni Kurds, raised some concerns and attempted to contest the rise of the movement’s Islam-friendly approach. Alevi Kurds’ contestation of the boundary work by the Kurdish ethnopolitical leadership suggests that an ethnic group’s internal heterogeneity increases the likelihood of internal boundary contestations. In this case, the Alevi Kurds’ contestation of the Islamic opening failed due to the highly centralized and hierarchical structure of the Kurdish movement. As the book’s empirical chapters show, one notable feature of the Kurdish movement has been its centralized and hierarchical organizational structure, led and dominated by its unchallenged leader and theoretician, Abdullah Öcalan. This situation suggests that although intragroup heterogeneity increases the likelihood of boundary contestation by coethnics, such internal contestations may have limited impact in hierarchically organized ethnonationalist movements. Externally, conservative, Islamic, and nationalist rival political actors (e.g., the ruling AKP) have tried to delegitimize the movement’s efforts by claiming that it still subscribes to Marxist-Leninist and atheist ideas and understandings. In other words, as a response to the Kurdish movement’s boundary expansion, they attempted to shrink religious boundaries. Thus, the Kurdish case provides us a rich laboratory in which to conduct an in-depth analysis of the processes of boundary contestations (internal and external) that are likely to arise when such major boundary work takes place.

This particular case has major theoretical and practical implications for ethnicity and nationalism studies in general and for Kurdish ethnonationalism and Turkish politics in particular. The ramifications of the study will be discussed in detail in the conclusion. Briefly, this study will add to the several theoretical debates within ethnicity and nationalism studies. First, by examining the role of ethnopolitical elites in ethnonationalist processes (e.g., boundary making), this study sheds light on the basic theoretical rivalry between primordialist and circumstantialist/constructionist/instrumentalist perspectives. The in-depth analysis of the case of the Islamic opening of the secular Kurdish ethnonationalist movement suggests that we need to transcend such dichotomous understandings and instead give due attention to both structural and agential and given/durable/fixed and flexible/contingent/constructed aspects of ethnicity and nationalism.

Second, by analyzing the shifting attitude of the secular Kurdish movement toward Islam from the perspective of the boundary approach, this study shows that the theory has much to offer in enhancing our understanding of ethnicity and nationalism phenomena. The book contributes to the research on ethnic boundary making in several ways. By investigating boundary processes in the Kurdish case, the book illuminates how ethnopolitical elites make and remake symbolic and social boundaries of an ethnic movement, what strategies boundary makers follow, and how boundary contestations (internal or external) take place. The Kurdish case particularly helps us generate or extract some specific hypotheses about the processes of boundary contestation. Unfortunately the existing studies of ethnic boundary making offer us little insights about boundary contestation, and so it remains an undertheorized issue in the existing literature. This study suggests that boundary making is inherently a political process, which might involve both internal and external struggles or contestations over symbolic and social boundaries. Regarding when and under what conditions boundary contestation is more likely to take place, this study shows that electoral periods increase the likelihood of external boundary contestation; in relatively more heterogeneous ethnic groups or movements, internal boundary contestation (i.e., struggle over symbolic and social boundaries among coethnics) becomes more likely; and in the case of ethnonationalist movements characterized by a hierarchical organizational structure and unified leadership (i.e., the absence or weakness of elite competition or rivalry), internal boundary contestations is less likely to succeed.

This study also enhances our understanding of the interplay between religion and ethnicity and nationalism in the context of a Muslim society. From that perspective, the study enhances our knowledge and understanding of the role of religion in Kurdish ethnopolitics. For instance, assuming a mutually exclusive relationship between religious and ethnic identifications and attachments, many people within conservative or pro-Islamic circles claim that promoting Islam and Islamic values in society would contain or constrain Kurdish ethnonationalism (also known as the “Islamic peace hypothesis”). Can Islam really serve as an antidote for Kurdish ethnonationalism? This study expands our comprehension of the recent developments and shifts within Kurdish ethnopolitics with respect to religion and shows that it is problematic to expect Islam to contain ethnonationalist orientations or aspirations. In other words, the findings of this study challenge the Islamic peace hypothesis.

This study also discusses the implications of the Islamic opening of the secular, leftist Kurdish movement for Turkish leftist politics and the debates on political Islam. As has been widely acknowledged, most of the Turkish leftist circles have been strongly secular and antireligious. The shift toward religion in the Kurdish case implies that such boundary work may trigger similar debates and possibly transformations in Turkish leftist circles.

Finally, this particular case study also has major ramifications for the debates on political Islam. The empirical analyses show that while Kurdish ethnopolitical elites have expanded the symbolic and social boundaries of the movement to incorporate Islamic ideas and actors, they have also attempted to promote a more liberal, democratic interpretation of Islam. Given that the rise of relentless violence by radical jihadist Islamic groups (e.g., Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria—ISIS or Daesh) across several parts of the world in the past decades has revived the conventional debate about whether Islam is really compatible with secular, liberal, democratic values, such an initiative by the secular Kurdish movement becomes quite significant and deserves further scholarly attention.

Organization of the Book

The book is organized as follows: Chapter 1 focuses on theoretical issues. The chapter first presents the main assumptions and arguments of ethnic boundary-making theory. Next, it introduces key terms such as the notions of boundary and symbolic and social boundaries. Then, the chapter discusses main boundary-making strategies and internal and external boundary contestation processes, which are likely to be triggered by major boundary work. Finally, the chapter advances some specific hypotheses about boundary-making processes, particularly about boundary contestation.

Chapter 2 presents the evolving relations between the secular Kurdish movement and Islam since the late 1970s and interprets the movement’s shifting attitude toward Islam from the perspective of the boundary approach. This chapter shows that the movement, which initially adopted a secular, Marxist outlook, distanced itself from Islam and Islamic actors and movements during the 1970s and 1980s. In other words, the Kurdish movement showed a strong secular ethnonationalist character in its initial period. To put it in more theoretical terms, by dissociating themselves from Islam, the Kurdish ethnopolitical leaders contracted the symbolic boundaries of Kurdishness and the social boundaries of the movement itself. Then, the chapter documents the rise of an increasingly positive and welcoming attitude toward Islam and Islamic actors within the secular Kurdish movement in the post-1990 period, arguing that Kurdish ethnopolitical leaders were expanding the social and symbolic boundaries of the movement. Finally, the chapter shows that in the 2000s the movement initiated much more systematic and comprehensive steps to accommodate Islam and Islamic actors, reinforcing the expanded boundaries.

Chapter 3 analyzes the causes, mechanisms, and consequences of Kurdish movement’s boundary work. The chapter addresses the following questions: Why, how, and with what consequences has the secular Kurdish movement adopted a much more Islam-friendly attitude? How can we theorize the Islamic opening of the secular Kurdish movement? What can we learn about ethnic boundary-making processes from this particular case? The chapter draws attention to the role of four causal factors behind Kurdish boundary expansion: ideological shift (i.e., the declining influence of Marxism); the need to expand the movement’s social basis and popularity; electoral politics; and legitimacy struggles. The chapter then scrutinizes internal and external boundary contestations activated by the Kurdish ethnopolitical leadership’s boundary work and analyzes whether such contestations had any impact on boundary-making efforts of the Kurdish leadership. The chapter finally engages with some possible alternative considerations.

Finally, the conclusion first summarizes the key arguments of the book and then focuses on the broader theoretical and practical implications of the study, particularly for the boundary approach (e.g., ethnic boundary-making and boundary contestation processes), for ethnicity and nationalism studies (the ramifications for structural, e.g., the primordialism and sociobiological approaches, and agential, e.g. constructionist, instrumentalist, and elite theory, perspectives in the field), for the nexus between religion and nationalism, for the evolution of Kurdish ethnopolitics, and for the debates on secularism and political Islam in the region.

Given such a structure of the book, readers who are not really interested in the theoretical discussion on the processes of ethnic boundary-making and boundary contestation might skip chapter 1 and move to the remaining chapters for the analyses of the Islamic opening of the secular, leftist Kurdish movement in the past decades and the broader implications of the case of Kurdish boundary work.