Reclaiming the Ummah from the Margins: The Case of Turkiye's HUDA-PAR.

• Author: Cakir, Ravza Altuntas

Introduction (2)

The notion of ummah has long been a source of identity for Muslims, with a strong symbolic, normative, and political appeal. In a generic sense, the ummah "denotes a cluster of believers bounded by their faith and religious and moral responsibilities, in a single borderless community." (3) Regardless of this broad understanding, reflecting a global sense of belonging to Islamic brotherhood and sisterhood, the ummah has been constructed and reconstructed theologically, ideologically, politically, socially, and strategically in different times and contexts. While it is a lexically and semantically contested concept, a quality which manifests in the plurality of understanding, for many Muslims, ummah remains a powerful source of overarching identity in the public consciousness, even after decades of nation-state experience. (4) Moreover, the concept of ummah reflects the political conditions of the modern Muslim world, which "affects, and is affected by Muslim politics." (5)

Today, "the ummah has come to constitute a primary referent in contemporary Muslim debates about identity." (6) Muslim politicians, movements, as well as scholars have made the concept of ummah central to identity claims for pursuing and propagating, religious authenticity, popular legitimacy, and political agendas. (7) One of the most discordant accounts of the role ummah plays in shaping identity concerns its relation to the issue of nation and nationalism. There are four major intellectual camps on this topic. The first category constitutes some Islamist ideologues and essentialist orientalists. The former like Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) and Ali Bulac (1951), advocates that "Muslim's nationality is his faith" and thus propagate "Islam as nationalism." (8) The latter, like Ernest Gellner, joins them in advocating the incompatibility of an ummah-oriented identity with one subject to the territorial nation-state.

The second category of nationalist Muslim thinkers like Abd-Rahman el-Kawakibi (1855-1902), Sa'd Zaghloul (1857-1927), and Ziya Gokalp (1876-1924), on the other hand, resorted to the ethnic perception of ummah, while accepting Islam as a crucial aspect of identity, cultural heritage, and social solidarity. They saw no innate conflict between Islamic identity and ethno-nationalism. (9) The third category is mainstream Islamist movements, like the Muslim Brotherhood and Milli Gorus, which, while proclaiming the existence of a global ummah unity, are nevertheless nationalist in orientation. Although they do not produce an antithesis to the nation-state paradigm, they aim to Islamize the state, with the goal of creating an Islamic nation-state. The final category, radical Islamists like ISIS, advocate for a non-territorial, borderless Islamic political unit, or a Caliphate, on combative and expansionist methods. (10) All these trends have articulated different forms of identity politics, institutional schemes, and political agendas with their utilization of the ummah within the context of the nation.

In these trends, an ummah-oriented identity is juxtaposed to a homogeneous nation-state. However, this juxtaposition is complicated by involving additional factors, such as the existence of an ethnic minority identity within a nation-state. The relationship between ethnicity, nationhood, and religion is always complex, yet when it comes to minority Muslim groups in Turkiye, this complexity is often understudied. At a time when drastic changes are occurring to the spectrum of ideas on religion and politics in Turkiye, Kurdish actors that engage with Islamic identity politics are often consigned to the margins. While a great deal of academic work has focused on contemporary Kurdish actors who engage with ethnic and secular identity politics, Kurdish political Islam remains an understudied realm.

In this paper, I am interested in how HUDA-PAR, espousing "a platform of Islamic values and greater rights for Turkey's... mainly Sunni Kurds" (11) approaches the notion of ummah in their political discourses. HUDA-PAR views "Islam as nationalism" while they locate their advocacy for Kurdish rights within a framework of Islamic justice. Unlike other mainstream Islamist movements, HUDA-PAR is not necessarily nationalist in orientation. They employ the notion of ummah to challenge what they deem to be divisive secular nationalisms, both Kurdish and Turkish, in favor of a common cause with their perceived co-religionists on the regional stage. A Pan-Islamist, rather than nationalist, advocacy for transnational ummah unity is present. The ummah provides the grounds for HUDA-PAR to critique the nation-state through Islamic argumentation as well as a mechanism to voice the aspirations for greater Kurdish rights and demands.

This paper analyzes primary sources, such as semi-structured interviews and the party program, alongside scholarly literature. Furthermore, the paper uses the existing scholarship on HUDA-PAR to explain the historical background of the party. However, due to the mostly journalistic nature of the resources that do exist on HUDA-PAR, which at times lack the rigour of academic endeavor, primary research to explore how HUDA-PAR defines its political and ideational outlook was necessary. At times, this primary data supplements source material and at others contradicts the existing literature. Accordingly, this paper's examination of how HUDA-PAR treats the concept of ummah within its approach to modern socio-political questions fills a lacuna in primary research-based academic analysis of HUDA-PAR, through interviews with the leading executives of the party headquarters in Istanbul and Diyarbakir. It also contributes to the existing literature on Kurdish political Islam and minority politics in Turkiye.

Through my analysis of these primary sources, there are identified three broad areas where the concept of ummah affects, and is affected by, HUDA-PAR's political positions:

(i) HUDA-PAR's identity and foundational tenets, as they both include an overtone of Islamic identity.

(ii) HUDA-PAR's support for the resolution of the Kurdish issue through employing an ummah-loyalty over ethnic-loyalty approach.

(iii) HUDA-PAR's Pan-Islamic attitude and ummah-oriented solidarity in Muslim politics and international relations.

Before moving on to examine these three interlinked points in more depth, I provide a general overview on HUDA-PAR.

General Overview on HUDA-PAR

HUDA-PAR was established as a political party in 2012, as the first officially non-secular, Islamic party in Turkiye, as declared by the party manifesto. (12) With the advent of HUDA-PAR, as Z. Asli Elitsoy observes, the conservative Sunni Kurdish population found a political platform reflecting their religious identities and transmitting their social-political demands. (13) For religiously conservative Kurds, HUDA-PAR provides an alternative to the socialist People's Democratic Party (HDP) and the conservative Justice and Development Party (AK Party):

Kurds need more than just the PKK to speak for them.... Political pluralism in Kurdish politics is the key to any sustainable peace.... And that might pave the way for groups such as HUDA-PAR to act as an opposition party in a new stage of more vibrant and competitive politics. (14) In Turkiye, HUDA-PAR's foundation is typically defined as "the final phase of the evolution of Hizbullah [in Turkiye], from an illegal armed Islamist group to a legal political party" with an unprecedented degree of influence. (15) Rusen Cakir, a leading journalist on Islamist movements in Turkiye, suggests that the year 2000 differentiates the "first Hizbullah" (under Huseyin Velioglu), which was "the most important radical [and underground] Islamist organization in Turkiye," from "the second Hizbullah" (after 2000), which engages in legal activities through civil society organizations and the press, and most importantly which does not resort to violence as did its predecessor. (16) HUDA-PAR, as an offspring of Hizbullah, today becomes involved in the democratic political arena, promoting a pro-Islamic and pro-Kurdish agenda in politics. Meanwhile, HiT (Hizbullah in Turkiye) continues its public appeal as an organization and chooses to be unofficial, rejecting the legalization of the movement. (17)

In the mid-2000s, at a time when Islamic forces were given the public opportunity to mobilize under the democratization processes of the AK Party governments, former Hizbullah members also made the most of this political opening. (18) During this period, Cakir suggests, a segment within the former Hizbullah movement became involved in the public and civil realm and examined "its past in a critical manner," which was "a sign of a significant and radical change." (19) According to Elitsoy, following the example of the Muslim Brotherhood, a change in public image manifested itself in total disarming in favor of civil activism, such as fundraising and social welfare projects. This new civic activism was primarily conducted through an association known as Mustazaflar Dernegi, Mustazaf-Der, (20) (Association of the Oppressed), improving the group's distorted and violent image among the Kurdish masses. (21) The Turkish public did not know about the existence and scope of public support for the movement until 2006, when Mustazaf-Der organized mass meetings that gathered as many as 100,000 people in Diyarbakir. Cakir interprets this situation as Hizbullah's unexpected adaptability "despite its past failures," renewing itself "to become one of the key actors in Turkiye, especially in the Southeast" within the changing context of the Turkish socio-political atmosphere. (22)

In 2012, the Supreme Court of Appeals approved the court's verdict closing the association for "providing services and actions on behalf of the terrorist organization Hizbullah." (23) Several months after, HUDA-PAR was established as a legal party. It is argued that "Mustazaf-Der...