Zeki SARIGIL, Ethnic Boundaries in Turkish Politics: The Secular Kurdish Movement and Islam.

• Author: Al, Serhun

Zeki SARIGIL, Ethnic Boundaries in Turkish Politics: The Secular Kurdish Movement and Islam

(New York, New York University Press, 2018)

Ethnic Boundaries in Turkish Politics: The Secular Kurdish Movement and Islam

Zeki SARIGIL

New York, New York University Press, 2018,208 pages, ISBN: 9781479882168

For more than three decades now, the Kurdish question has continued as perhaps the most pressing issue of contemporary Turkey, fundamentally influencing the ebbs and flows of Turkish democracy, authoritarianism, foreign policy, economic development, law and order and societal peace. With intermittently shifting patterns of peace and conflict, the political violence surrounding the Kurdish question continues to haunt the everyday lives of many in Turkey and neighboring territories such as Iraqi Kurdistan and northern Syria. The mainstream actors in the politics of Kurdish question have been the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK, founded in 1978) as the illegal armed group, listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, and the legal pro-Kurdish political parties since 1990 (from HEP to HDP today). (1) These two interrelated actors are collectively known as the Kurdish Movement, with a history of Marxist, leftist, and secular nationalist political agenda.

Despite the predominantly conservative and pious Muslim practices of many ordinary Kurds, the Kurdish Movement has traditionally distanced itself from Islamic discourses, symbols and culture. However, in recent years, especially after the 2000s, the Kurdish Movement in general, and the PKK in particular, have become much more accommodative and inclusive towards the Muslim-Kurdish identity. In Ethnic Boundaries in Turkish Politics: The Secular Kurdish Movement and Islam, Zeki Sargil calls this shift 'the Islamic Opening' of the Kurdish Movement, and seeks to understand and explain why, how and under what conditions the movement has adopted a peaceful and friendly attitude towards Islam in general, and the pious Kurdish identity in particular. The methodology of the book is based on discourse analysis, interviews, electoral data, and ethnographic field research in Ankara, Diyarbakir, Istanbul and Tunceli between 2011 and 2015. Theoretically, Sarigil embraces a widely-applied ethnic-boundary making approach within the instrumentalist tradition a la Fredrik Barth and, more recently, Andreas Wimmer. (2)

Sarigil lays out three different periodization in terms of the relationship between the Kurdish Movement...