Who will free the Kurds, and how?

We said that the Islamists' interest in the Kurds can be regarded as inadequate only from a Kurdish nationalist point of view. Of course, this does not mean that all the thoughts and practices put forth in the name of Islamism are perfect in every respect, including this one. And of course, criticism of Islamists does not mean criticism of Islam.

Just as it cannot always be said that Islamists understand even Islam fully, neither can it be claimed that they always pursue the most accurate politics on any issue. That is why the Islamist movement is always a movement of interpreting Islam; in this respect it is human, and it has as much chance of erring as of hitting the mark.

What I am saying is a decreed human condition of the Muslim in his search for a path in matters where he has options, that is, in the act of ijtihad. Moreover, it may also be that not all the attitudes and behaviors of the Islamist movement are based on following an interpretation made according to proper method. That is, there may be other ideological and cultural influences apart from Islam, and these influences may keep Muslims from a Muslim-like politics. Furthermore, in all these contexts Islamists are not homogeneous. The different influences of state, history, culture and tradition can diversify Islamists.

On the Kurdish question, although there are different tendencies, mainstream Islamism has an anti-nationalist approach. But this approach is not only against Turkish nationalism. As much as it is critical of the racist approaches of Turkish nationalism and its denial of other elements, it holds that setting up another nationalism against it is no remedy either. Yes, this attitude may be regarded as inadequate, but only from another counter-nationalist point of view.

Yet those who accuse Islamism or Muslims today of remaining indifferent to the problems of the Kurds, instead of making this accusation, have very fundamental lessons that they need to hear and take from Islam. Because Islam has its own approach toward these issues.

Islam condemns people's boasting of superiority over one another on account of characteristics they bring with them from birth, that is, to whose formation they have contributed nothing. Since it is impossible for anyone to choose his own race, his parents, the place he was born, his color, his language, Islam describes, in a single word, as "jahiliyyah" people's boasting of superiority over one another on account of these characteristics, and exalting these characteristics and making them a cause for themselves.

Islam saves people from taking these characteristics, which are an unchangeable fate, as an identity and a cause for themselves and from being diminished in pursuit of this cause, and frees them from the dungeons into which that cause throws them. Since these characteristics are fate, causes that put these characteristics at the center can promise people not the determination of their own destiny but, at best, becoming victims of fate. Islam, on the other hand, points to a path that opens a human being, fully, from being a victim of his fate toward the horizons of freedom. It saves him from the hands of the taghuts who pull a human being toward the lowest of the low (asfal al-safilin) and try to make him their servant through these identity causes. In every kind of nationalist movement there is a narrow and base horizon offered to the human being. Against this horizon Islam has a deeply critical stance.

A people who are victims of a tyrannical nationalism are always an oppressed people whom Muslims must stand by. Every wrong that oppressed people suffer on account of being a people concerns the Muslim. Standing against that wrong and its wrongdoers is the very condition of standing against gods other than God. One who does not do this cannot even say "illa Allah," that is, he cannot have truly believed in God, cannot complete his tawhid. This is certain. But when he stands against one taghut, he does not do so to make way for another tughyan (transgression). The counterpart of a tughyan is not another tughyan but the rejection of every kind of tughyan. That nationalisms give birth to other nationalisms is a sociological reality. But Islam's intervention is to put forth its own life-giving alternative against this barren reality. That is why the Prophet tramples both racism and the blood feud underfoot as customs of jahiliyyah.

The oppression of the Kurds throughout the history of the Republic of Turkey is an indisputable reality. Their being brought to the freedom they deserve from this oppression is also an indisputable responsibility of Muslims. However, today a counter-nationalism has dominated the discourses on the oppression of the Kurds. This nationalism draws from the real oppression they have been subjected to not a freedom for the Kurds but a grudge peculiar to jahiliyyah that will drag them into an even greater quagmire, a Kurdish chauvinism based on opposition to Turks, Arabs and Persians. This grudge does not liberate the Kurds; it only makes them follow the pioneers of this grudge.

The PKK is trying to produce a people for itself to govern, and for this it produces its own nationalism. For that reason, since from the beginning it knew that the denial and assimilation oppression done to the Kurds was not enough to make the Kurds rebel, it used violence as a tool to invite the state's physical oppression against the Kurdish people. As the state lost the difference between the organization and the people in the face of PKK actions, the PKK used the Kurdish people as a shield and pushed them further in front of the state. With each push, more Kurds died, more were subjected to oppression, and an amount that can no longer be ignored became "the PKK's people."

What the Islamists have remained indifferent to has never been the oppression suffered by the Kurds, but the counter-nationalisms of the PKK or of earlier Kurdish leftist movements. On the contrary, while on the one hand being subjected to oppression because they were Muslims, Muslims went on making a deep critique of oppression that also encompassed nationalism.

Sibel Eraslan, thanks to her, has given a broader list of references to the history of this critique and resistance in her article in the Star newspaper. But what is really important now, I think, is that those who come from that tradition of critique have, in their period in power, set about a renovation of the system that gave rise to the Kurdish problem, in order to solve this problem at its root. People coming from that tradition today are trying to correct the hundred-year-old error without ever engaging in ethnic nationalism. What we really need to look at now are those who are trying to be a wedge against the solution of the Kurdish problem within this broad framework, a solution that would free the Kurds without sinking them into the very same chauvinist swamp the Turks wrestled with for a hundred years. Why and how are they obstructing a solution that would truly liberate the Kurds?

Islamists may have made, or be making, many mistakes, but on this matter in particular they are in the seat of criticism, not self-criticism.