‘My Muslim Kurdish brother’: colonial rule and Islamist governmentality in the Kurdish region of Turkey

Abstract

This article critically examines the role of Islamist state discourse and policies in the Kurdish region of Turkey. Academic works on Islamism often address settings where Islamist movements and political parties operate as anti-colonial and oppositional entities. However, this article discusses how Islamist ideology has become an instrument of governmentality to maintain and legitimise colonial rule in the Kurdish region of Turkey under the Justice and Development Party (AKP). After contextualising the Kurdish issue as an internal colonisation process since the beginning of the Turkish Republic, the paper focuses on the AKP period to analyse the use of an Islamic discourse of unity and brotherhood and attempts to foster the rise of a loyal conservative civil society among the Kurds. Thus, it argues that the internal colonial paradigm remains fully relevant to analysis of the Kurdish issue during the last decade and that neoliberal Islamist governmentality should be understood as a strategy complementary to repression, to increase popular support for the government and marginalise opposition.

Religion and Armed Conflict: Evidence from the Kurdish Conflict in Turkey

“…Despite such rhetoric, the AKP government has utilized religion to weaken “the ethno‐political nature of the Kurdish issue” (Kurt 2019:356). The AKP has turned the Diyanet , formed to bring Islamic education under state supervision, into a party apparatus to reinforce state‐sanctioned Islam and promote Turkish nationalism at home and abroad (Öztürk 2016).…”

“…In addition to this disproportionate share of state‐run religious institutions, the Kurdish region has seen a large increase of Islamist civil society organizations in such fields as education, student housing, and humanitarian aid. Most of these organizations are affiliated with Turkish Islamist groups such as the Ensar Foundation and Ilim Yayma Cemiyeti or the Kurdish Hizbullah (Kurt 2019:359).…”

Internal Colonialism and the Discipline of Comparative Literature in Iran

“…Within the scholarship on Kurds, the Turkish sociologist Ismail Beşikçi was the first scholar, after the 1965 work by the Iranian Kurdish political activist Ghassemlou (1930Ghassemlou ( -1989 and renowned Kurdish writer, Hajhār (1921-1991, to refer to Kurdistan as an "international colony. " Such an approach to Kurdish studies, particularly Eastern/Iranian Kurdistan seems to have gained a wider acceptance in recent scholarship (see: Gambetti 2010; Yüksel, 2011;Kurt, 2019;Soleimani & Mohammadpour, 2019;2020).…”

Can non-Persians speak? The sovereign’s narration of “Iranian identity”

“…Gambetti, 2009;Yu¨ksel, 2011). Recently, Mehmet M. Kurt, a Kurdish sociologist, published a seminal paper on Islamism and internal colonialism in which he, for the first time, investigates the colonial trends of Islamism (Kurt, 2019). We too, here, subscribe to a definition of internal colonization, 'as a special form of colonization outside a context of a [classic] colonial system' (Blauner, 1969: 393).…”