ISLAM AND KURDISH NATIONALISM: A THEORETICAL AND EMPIRICAL APPROACH TO THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RELIGION AND NATIONALISM

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2023-2-6

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ÇAĞLAYAN, MUTTALİP

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This study attempts to understand and explain the intricate relationship between Islam and Kurdish nationalism. It first provides a framework in which the nexus between religious and national identity is relativistic, with varying degrees of conflict and coexistence. Then, it reduces this complexity to a bifurcation in terms of interaction between Islam and Kurdish nationalism. In doing so, it develops a binary approach by which a competitive and symbiotic relationship between nationalism and religion occurs simultaneously. In this configuration, Islam averts the awakening of the Kurdish national consciousness by promoting a transnational identity building on one side, breeding the attainment of Kurdish political aspirations on the other. The competitive interplay presents religion and nationalism as virtually equivalent but contradicting order-creating systems while postulating Muslim nationalism as a distinctive religious nationalism. Islam, on the contrary, ceases to be an obstacle to slowing down Kurdish political mobilization by playing a supportive role, albeit not a leading one, in the symbiotic or intertwined relationship. It serves as a source of motivation for legitimizing and reinforcing the Kurdish national cause through spiritual words, images, and symbols based on the discourse of egalitarian justice. Islam is thus no longer a barrier for ethnically conscious pious Kurds to correlate religious identity with national self-consciousness.

Subject Keywords

Islam, Kurdish Nationalism, Secularization, Political Mobilization, Collective Action.

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/101982

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Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis

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Citation Formats

M. ÇAĞLAYAN, “ISLAM AND KURDISH NATIONALISM: A THEORETICAL AND EMPIRICAL APPROACH TO THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RELIGION AND NATIONALISM,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2023.