Anatomy of a Civil War by Mehmet Gurses

Author:Mehmet Gurses
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Islam as an Instrument of Assimilation against the Kurds

Islam has long served as a tool of oppression and assimilation at the hands of the Turkish state. It was used to distinguish Muslim masses from non-Muslim Armenians and Greeks in the early twentieth century then to justify their exclusion, deportation, or expulsion. It was also used to mobilize Muslim Turks and Kurds against Greek, French, and British invaders during the War of Independence in the 1920s. While it was relegated to a secondary position in the newly forged Turkish national identity after the formation of modern Turkey, the state employed it to assimilate Kurds into Turkish culture.

The Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet Isleri Baskanligi), which was instituted in 1924 to bring religion under state control, used an army of state-appointed prayer leaders (imams) serving at mosques throughout the country to spread a state-approved brand of Islam. While the nascent Turkish state utilized the directorate to pacify Islamist movements, it also used Islam to Turkify the large Kurdish minority in the East. Weekly sermons were delivered in Turkish regardless of whether the congregation actually spoke the language (in most cases it did not). Imams were instructed to follow the state-sanctioned Hanafi school of Islam even though the majority of Kurds adhered to the Shafi school.

This utilitarian view of Islam can be traced back to the mid-nineteenth century, when the Ottoman elites used a Turkish-Islamic discourse to justify Ottoman Turkish rule over non-Muslim Bulgarians and Armenians as well as Muslim Kurds and Arabs. As Soleimani (2016, chaps. 4–5) argues at length, such a reconstruction of Turkish identity in which Islam played an instrumental role dislodged Islam from the Arabic culture and nationalized the religion.

The establishment of a modern, secular Turkey in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk saw Islam become less visible while still maintaining an important role in creating a national identity. Ziya Gokalp, who is credited for greatly influencing the nationalist sentiments of Kemal Ataturk, underlines the significance of upbringing, language, and religion over other aspects of nationalism (Yanarocak 2014). The reduced status assigned to Islam in the new Turkish identity was also partly driven by the fact that non-Muslim subjects were almost entirely absent. By the 1930s, the population of Turkey mostly consisted of Muslim Turks and Kurds. Therefore, the new Turkish elite embarked on a nation-building project centered on Turkification with a redefined, nationalized role for religion to integrate an ethnic group that would otherwise clash with the dominant nationalist climate.

Thus, while the Kemalist state introduced radical social reforms aimed at secularization of Turkish political culture, it also emulated the Ottoman utilitarian approach to Islam in order to suppress Kurdish dissent in the East. Despite the Kemalist elites’ disdain for anything religious, the Turkish state was not only reluctant to suppress Sufi religious fraternities (tarikats) in the Kurdish region, but it also encouraged religious revival by providing Kurdish religious leaders (sheikhs) with both material and moral support (McDowall 2004, 399; also see van Bruinessen 1999, 19).

The state also gave wide

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