The main contribution of Under the Banner of Islam by Gülay Türkmen is a much-needed discussion and critical reevaluation of the competition between identity entrepreneurs who prioritize religious (Islamic) versus ethnic (Kurdish) identity combined with an examination of the normative debates over what the “authentic” or “real” Islamic approach to managing ethnic diversity is. Perhaps most importantly, the book successfully “challenge[s] the simplistic assumptions that supranational religious identities are always bound to fail in the face of ethnic differences” (19). Appealing to Islamic fraternity as the primary bond that unites the political community despite ethnocultural and linguistic diversity was the key discourse that legitimated ethnolinguistic reforms known as the Kurdish opening in Turkey since 2004. Despite its critically central role in politics and society, the discourse and the practice of Islamic fraternity is very much understudied. Under the Banner of Islam is a rare and precious book directly addressing this topic. The book is primarily based on impressive fieldwork in Kurdish-majority provinces, including interviews with Kurdish and Turkish, religious and non-religious actors.
Under the Banner of Islam consists of an Introduction (1–23), followed by four substantive chapters, and a Conclusion (135–144). Chapter 1 (“Green Kemalism”) lays out the critique of those who propose Islamic identity as a conflict resolution resource, but it is in Chapter 2 (“Islam as Cement”) that we read more about the proposal that is criticized in the previous chapter. Chapter 3 (“Muslim Kurds”) explicates why and how most of the Kurdish religious actors Türkmen interviewed reject the way in which Islam is emphasized by the Turkish actors to downplay Kurdish identity. According to these Kurdish actors, “real Muslims… should embrace their ethnic identity without any doubt, as that is what Islam asks for,” but “in asking Kurds to privilege their religious identity the state goes against ‘authentic’ Islamic teachings” because “Real Islam never tries to assimilate” (82). In Chapter 4 (“Only Turks Can Lead a Muslim Union”), Türkmen argues that the Turkish religious actors believe Turks to have a privileged leadership role within the Islamic ummah. Such claims of ethnocultural privilege provoke religious criticism given the explicit ban on claims of hereditary, tribal, or ethnic superiority in Islam. Both Kurdish and Turkish religious actors often refer to the same religious texts in making their arguments, but they interpret them in remarkably different and even opposite directions.
The book implicitly demonstrates that Islamic religiosity works to moderate Kurdish ethnonationalism. As such, Under the Banner of Islam focuses on a central dilemma and tension that millions of Kurds and other Muslims experience in Muslim-majority societies: How do you negotiate the demands of your supraethnic and transnational Islamic identity against the demands of your subnational and allegedly “primordial” ethnic identity?
The book also has a number of shortcomings, however, regarding the main outcome, the main cause, the measurement of “resonance,” its logic of comparison, and its sample of Kurdish interviewees. What exactly is the primary outcome (“dependent variable”) that the author seeks to explain? Türkmen “claim[s] that different identity categories, along with institutional and political changes, and the ensuing transformation of power and network relations, prevent Islam from acting as a unifying conflict-resolution tool in the Kurdish conflict” (5; emphasis mine). What is the empirical measurement for this claim? How do we know that Islam failed to function “as a unifying conflict-resolution tool in the Kurdish conflict”? Some Kurdish religious actors interviewed in the book criticize AK Party’s version of Islamic fraternity, but does that mean this strategy failed to act as a unifying conflict resolution tool for other Kurds and in general? What would be the relevant comparison to probe the effectiveness of the Islamic unity strategy?
First, as an intertemporal measurement, one could compare the 1990s, when a coalition of secular parties were in government with a neo-Kemalist discourse during the “February 28th process” following the so-called “postmodern coup,” with the two decades (2002–2023) when the Islamist-rooted AK Party has been in power. The 1990s were much more violent than the 2000s in terms of deaths per year resulting from the conflict between the Turkish security forces and the PKK, despite a much smaller population in the 1990s. The only period under AK Party governments that is comparable to the 1990s in its level of violence is the one year from July 2015 until July 2016, which is amply covered in the book. Thus, the decades under Islamic governments have indeed been more pacific than the decade of secularist governments in the 1990s on average. Does this not suggest the successful function of Islam as a pacifier?
A second measurement could be to compare the resonance of the Islamic unity vision propagated by the AK Party governments with the rival understanding of “Kurdish Islam” associated with the Kurdish socialist party tradition (BDP between 2008 and 2014, and HDP since 2014), which Türkmen meticulously unpacks through her interviews and participant observation of “Civil Friday Prayers.” Did the rival Kurdish Islamic identity embodied in Civil Friday Prayers attract a larger Kurdish audience than the “official Islam” represented by the official Friday Prayers? It does not seem so. Civil Friday Prayers, the main empirical embodiment of Kurdish Islam for Türkmen, only attracted several thousand people in Diyarbakır, a city of several million inhabitants, where at least several hundred thousand people are likely to attend the regular (“official”) Friday Prayers. Does this not indicate that Civil Friday Prayers remained marginal for as long as they lasted?
A third measurement could be the direction of change in rival political groups’ discourses: Erdoğan and Öcalan “went on to cite the same Qur’anic verses to emphasize ‘Muslim unity and solidarity’” (4). This is unsurprising for Erdoğan, an Islamist-origin politician, but for Öcalan, an avowed Marxist-Leninist and self-identified atheist, to resort to Quranic verses by the early 2010s suggests the discursive success of the Erdoğan-led Islamic political movement. The opposite would be the case if Erdoğan were to quote Marx, Engels, and Lenin as pearls of wisdom! On March 21, 2013, Öcalan famously extolled the “thousand-year co-existence [of Turks] with Kurds under the banner of Islam rest[ing] on the principles of fraternity and solidarity” (7), hence giving the title of Türkmen’s book. Instead of such comparisons, AKP’s attitude is compared to an idealized perception of the Ottomans among present-day Kurds, which is arguably an impossible rival to surpass: “how its [AKP’s] attitude toward Kurds compares to that of the Ottomans toward their Muslim subjects” (22).
What is the primary cause of the alleged failure, then? Türkmen “argue[s] that the strength of the TIS [Turkish-Islamic Synthesis] is an important explanatory factor in understanding how ethnonationalism manages to maintain its power among the Turkish religious elites and why despite the decade-long AKP propaganda, the supranational religious approach has not resonated well, even among the state-affiliated Turkish religious elites.” (110) I am convinced of the negative impact of state-propagated TIS. As the ethnoreligious nationalist doctrine popularized by the military dictatorship of 1980–1983, TIS indeed works against the supranational Islamic approach that the AK Party governments have been promoting. Türkmen succeeds in demonstrating elites’ role in “limiting the impact of Sunni Islam as a conflict-resolution tool in the Kurdish conflict” (16). This seems to be a problem of the “elites” and not of the masses, however, since Kurdish masses consistently demonstrated interest in Islamic initiatives regardless of which political faction spearheaded it, which is why elites across the political spectrum feel compelled to demonstrate their Islamic credentials vis-à-vis Kurdish voters.
Another shortcoming relates to the subsection of Kurds chosen as the research sample. Discussing “Islam as Cement” as “the policy the AKP government has been pursuing,” Türkmen notes that “this approach did not have that many followers among my respondents (only seven out of 62)” (56). As such, only 11% of the interviewees are people (Kurds or Turks) supportive of AKP’s approach, and presumably 89% not supportive and often explicitly critical of it. Such a breakdown is not representative of the Kurdish population, since at least one-third and up to one half of the Kurds (between 34% and 46% according to Türkmen’s own account on p. 133) supported AK Party in different elections. It seems that the book very much oversampled Kurds who are critical of AK Party’s discourse of Islamic unity instead of Kurds who are supportive. This may be because Türkmen conducted her fieldwork in Diyarbakır and Batman, two provinces that are bastions of the Kurdish socialist (BDP-HDP) party tradition, and not, for example, in neighboring Adıyaman, Bingöl, or Şanlıurfa, which are also Kurdish-majority and yet have been supportive of AK Party throughout the last two decades.
There are also some omissions or “absences” of substantive significance. I found it strange that it was never clearly stated by whom the ceasefire between the PKK and Turkey was broken in 2015 (4; 9) given that the PKK declared “People’s Revolutionary War” against Turkey in early July 2015. There is also no mention of Gülenists as potential orchestrators of the KCK trials (24; and/or footnote 2) or the alleged Gülenist involvement in the “Roboski (Uludere) Massacre that took place on December 28, 2011” (80) “where Turkish jets bombarded and killed 37 [sic] innocent Kurdish villagers” (84). The members of the Airforce held responsible for this infamous bombardment were put on trial after the Gülenist coup attempt of 2016, and it would make sense to at least mention that those accused of committing this massacre were put on trial for being Gülenists.
As an elderly Kurd in Diyarbakır told the author, “We want to vote for the AKP because of our religion and we want to vote for the BDP because of our language” (53). This quote epitomizes the enduring rivalry between the representatives of ethnic and religious identities in the discursive battle over Kurdish hearts and minds. It is in such ethnoreligious intersections that one encounters a multiethnic and supranational Islamic identity movement competing against multiple ethnic nationalisms for the loyalties of ordinary Muslims. For this, and many of its other contributions, Under the Banner of Islam is a very welcome addition to the growing scholarship on the interaction of religions and nationalisms. The book is most appropriate for scholars including graduate students working on these topics.
