Essay: The Impact Of Islam On Kurdish Identity

Similarly many academics have theorized about the role to which Islam played in the ethnic and nationalist formations of the Kurds. In his essay “The Impact of Islam on Kurdish Identity in the Middle East,” Hakan Ozoglu argues that Kurdish identity evolved through various, overlapping phases with Islam at the core of its formation process, a process he calls “dialectical, dialogical, and monological” (18). First, while the term “Kurd” was not ethnically associated with the modern term Kurd, nevertheless, many proto-Kurds accepted Islam early on in the Islamic expansion period after the death of the Prophet Muhammad and associated politically with the umma as a trans-tribal force (22). Through this first monological process, local Kurdish …show more content…
Whether by exposure to particular Islamic nations or attempting to establish their own nation, Islam is intricately tied to the ethnic identity of the Kurds. In fact, Martin van Bruinessen notes from his field research in Kurdistan during the 1970s that many pious Muslim Kurds do not acknowledge their fellow Yezidi and Alevi Kurds as truly Kurdish (Mullas 53). Islam to them was essential to the Kurdish identity. Likewise, he notes that the Yezidis and Alevis have often seen themselves as ethnically different from their fellow Sunni Kurds, constituting a whole different type of ethnic nationalism (Mullas 53). I will go into more detail about these other Kurdish religions’ relationship to nationalism, however, what is ultimately important is that with these divisions among Kurdish groups, again the modern questions of what is a Kurd becomes intricately tied to ones’ religious inclination, particularly Islamic. If then the Kurd is a religious and ethnic category, the establishment of their state can be framed within those same contours as