The concept of Islamism is a loose concept that applies to a wide spectrum of organized political currents and movements which believe in Islam not as a mere religion or otherworldly belief, but rather as a comprehensive political system of government.
It is inspired by its vision of governance and politics derived from Islamic law, which we find a theoretical translation of among the Sunnis in the concept of divine governance, and also among the Shiites in the concept of Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist.
Islam is the religion of the vast majority of the Kurds – we mean Islam in all its sectarian formations: Sunni Islam, the followers of Imam and esoteric Islamists – Ahl al-Haqq, Isma’ilism, Twelvers, and others.
There is no stereotypical doctrine prevalent among the Kurds, so that it can be said that it represents the belief of the vast majority of them and fully expresses their spiritual desires.
There is no single Islamic ideology in which all sacred beliefs and patterns are represented, without differences or contradictions that can be generalized in the current Kurdish societies, that would achieve political and literary national unity represented by the Islamic religion.
Such a belief is an illusion that many Kurds who call for a Kurdish Islamist community follow. Resorting to the Islamic religion is no longer a totalitarian ideology that is valid in relation to the current era, especially those related to the Kurdish reality and its challenges.
Here we should emphasize the importance of separating Islam as a religion and a heavenly vocation from what is political and related to power. The Kurds are among the most fertile nations in terms of religious pluralism and in sectarian diversity.
If one of them calls for the Islamization of the Kurds and Kurdish societies, or for the integration of the national discourse in Islam, we ask him immediately, “Which Islam of different Islamists do you mean? Is it Shiite Islam, or Sunni, etc.?”
Of course, he must define a certain pattern for the approach to Islam which he preaches. Then this Islamism enters into a real and direct conflict upon application with the beliefs of the majority of the Kurds, in addition to Christian beliefs and Yezidi beliefs.
The vast majority of Kurds must become dhimmi (non-Muslims) from the perspective of this Islam whatever its nature. Thus, there should be a critical distinction and separation between Kurds and Islam at the level of political representation.
On the other hand, it is not logical and fair for the Kurds to call for a decisive historical break with Islam, as this is a historical fantasy. And because the Kurds have spent a long and intense part of their history in Islam, such a call is not far from arbitrariness, coercion, and a desire to twist the neck of history in response to ideological goals.
Whatever the nature of this history, it is inconceivable that you would invite them to destroy fourteen centuries of their own history in memory and abandon it simply because of the desire to prove oneself by facing this past tendency.
The Kurds, instead, need a historical awareness of Islam.
Here, the importance of distinguishing between the sacred in religion and the religion as a set of worldly dealings and relationships, and here we mean the practical reason in religion. The sacred remains largely the same for all religions.
Even the latter, we can place in the context of social and historical practice. The sacred can be involved in conflicts so that it becomes a sacred worldly nature and plays a central role in the value system.
The historical and critical awareness of the controversy of identity and Islam is, in essence, an enlightening consciousness, represented in the question of the present and the destiny. This is a question of enlightenment of the Kurds, a question that the Kurds have wagered on: what makes them up to history?
So that the Kurds rise to the level of other nations and reaches a degree of their freedom and progress, not only in self-determination but before that – as a major condition – in the ability to think freely and exercise criticism, unabated, about their past and present.
Most of the Islamism groups in the world are united around a common ideological conviction that goes beyond awareness of national belonging towards an abstract cosmopolitan awareness, based on belief in the universal and absolute truth of Islam.
In this, the Islamic groups, including the Kurdish ones, have disdain for their national idiosyncrasies and consider national identity as western ideological heresy against the spirit of Islam. Within this framework, we can understand the refusal of the Islamist representatives in the Iraqi Kurdistan Parliament to stand in appreciation of the Kurdish national anthem.
Here a note is raised regarding the historical awareness of currents of Islamism. Generally speaking, when they re-read their own national history, they begin to look at it according to a group of non-national ideological and belief confiscations, and that is why they start disbelieving and repudiating their entire pre-Islamic history and completely disavow it.
According to these confiscations, it interprets the history of peoples and civilizations prior to Islam. This interpretation is another inverted form of the Islamic view of the Arab past before Islam equipped with pre-Islamic manner as an inverted projection.
The Arab Islamism, in its construction and logic, is a condition that straightens even for its faith. Kurdish Islamism, in contrast to that, is decomposition of its identity and affiliation, and finds in this decomposition a condition for its straight faith.
The fact is that the Persians realized this equation long ago, and that is why they consider Shi’ism a threshold for the Persianization of the Islam.
Kurdish Islamism still suffers from the dilemma of awareness of identity, between belonging to a heavenly ideology that does not care about what is worldly, which is an awareness that transcends the crisis of the present by leaping back into the past, and resorting to a kind of revolutionary systemic early Islam on one hand, and between what this awareness should be, as it supposed to be a worldly awareness – secular and modernist on the other hand.
And as a result, it lives in a false awareness vacillating between the nation and the religion, that is, between Kurdishness and Islam, in the interest of the latter. It is not all Islam in general, but rather a specific Islam that is derived from a specific political and sectarian systemic pattern.
But in the end, it confirms a pattern of totalitarian claim in the awareness of belonging, a mere universal awareness of “all believers are brothers” that does not bind it with the burden of the responsibility to affirm and prove what is subjective and private, or bind it to exhausting self-assertions.