Andrew Bush’s Between Muslims provides a compelling proposal for how a life unmoored from harsh binaries of religious piety and secularism might be lived. The book unfolds from a simple paradox that proves to be ethnographically generative: Many Iraqi Kurdish Muslims turn away from piety, yet remain within Islam. This is a religious orientation which is not captured by local Kurdish referents or categories, but an “analytically unstable subject” (p. 8) that can be found in the subtle description of how lives unfold in ordinary relations. At first, the everyday non-habits (not fasting, not praying) of this religious orientation can resemble the formulation of “cultural Islam” that scholars in the 1990s and early 2000s contrasted with “political Islam.” Bush’s Iraqi Kurdish Muslims, however, do not adopt these attitudes in negotiation with a secularist state (such as Turkey) that strictly regulates public religious expression and its permissible scope. Rather, “turning away from piety” emerges as an open-ended, aspirational orientation in an Iraqi Kurdistan where public authority is fragmented, and where there is a keen awareness that both secular and religious motivations were historically used for violence and discrimination by colonizer states.
The book opens up a space to explore this religious orientation away from piety through two important analytical contributions. First, while most studies on everyday Islam tends to privilege skepticism as the facility which challenges the normative prescriptions of textual Islam, Bush’s interlocutors adopt a range of relational emotions and stances that include aversion, frustration, disappointment, and attraction. The latter, attraction, is perhaps the most thought-provoking concept in the book. Attraction appears through a lengthy description of Pexshan, a middle-class female poet and one of three characters to whom Bush devotes distinctive chapters. Pexshan expresses a lack of attraction toward fasting, but Bush encounters her fasting during Ramadan; not for pious conduct, but for “health reasons” (p. 41). She expresses an attraction toward Zoroastrianism, only as a way to express her aversion of Islam without falling into the duality of doubt and skepticism. The ebb and flow of attraction presents a possibility of conceptualizing ethics not through obligation, but from a position of non-obligation. This is indeed an attractive proposal that echoes Kant’s “reflective judgment,” and allows Pexshan to confront not “Islam” as a general category, but this Islam. The implication of this stance is perhaps obvious: For a Kurdish Muslim like Pexshan, there is nothing necessarily beautiful or violent in Islam as a general property. One therefore does not need to provide an objective proof for its critique to be legitimate, and this not-necessity can uncover ground for intersubjective coexistence.
Second, Bush proposes to expand the discursive tradition of Islam into classical Kurdish poetry. This includes a recovery of the premodern meaning of hucre (room) as an institution of learning, ritual practice, and critical discussion unlike its more contemporary dismissal as a place of dogmatic faith. Bush’s command of Sorani Kurdish and classical Kurdish poetics is impressive. He eruditely shows how the classical Kurdish poets viewed true Muslim piety as being achieved by overcoming an attraction toward non-Muslim persons and traditions. Doubting God in His presence only to return back with a stronger faith are important themes in Islam that often endowed prophets with the capacity to transform and elevate their communities. Here, Bush prefers to linger with the ambiguity of the fantasy and desire toward the non-Muslim Other. Whether it is Nawzad’s relationship with his fundamentalist brother, or Shadman’s relationship with his religious daughter, seemingly irreconcilable attitudes toward Islam are resolved by recourse to classical poetry’s capacity to voice that which cannot be articulated in ordinary speech.
In these ethnographic moments, Bush is keenly aware that in order for a person to be “between,” they have to be vexed in some way. Betweenness emerges in moments which put a great moral burden on the subjects, and can only be expounded upon with poetic language. There is a noticeable similarity here to queer theory’s insistence on the relational ambivalence as opposed to the fixed category, and Bush attends to gender ambiguities and roles that go beyond the normative horizons of the modern nuclear family. Especially men and masculinity appear not exclusively as the reservoir of the “rational” and wholly individual public self, but a demeanor with vulnerability and openness that attests to the “plurality internal to the pious Muslim self” (p. 72). Ever since Marcel Mauss, there is an anthropological attention to the plurality of dividual self which individuality as an ideology often masks. Bush expands upon this lineage by privileging not the circulation of words, things, and money, but the expression of finite desire: “Desire is conditioned by the simple willingness to go on in the face of the intractable religious difference and the promise of a future together, however unstable and uncertain” (p. 106).
Between Muslims is a much-needed invitation to conduct more studies of Muslim life in Kurdistan, which is oftentimes overlooked by methodological nationalism. Although the book’s overall argument hinges on the notion of “the ordinary,” time and time again Bush returns to instances where the ordinary must be accompanied by a not-so-ordinary; whether it is the text-based norms of poetic language, or the political theory of Mela Mekar, an exiled, ex-militant Kurdish preacher who seeks to radically transform ordinary relations, to which a chapter is devoted. Accordingly, it might be worth asking what “the ordinary” discloses or restricts in ethnographic description, as much as it reveals. Indeed, the very pluralization of positions of belief, some often hard to name with pre-given categories, is often seen as a condition of secularization—something often obscured in the anthropology of Islam’s tendency to focus on political secularism’s normative regulation through modern state sovereignty. This has generally made it difficult to conceive of intimate, ordinary relations as the domain in which secularization enacts its transformation. The search for diverse religious orientations in a Kurdistan marked by statelessness might prompt social scientists to look for complex intertwinements of religion and secularism.
Secular nationalist orientations in everyday life in Kurdistan often adopt internationalist, anti-colonial grammars, and increasingly so. But the same could be said of religious orientations that have seen strong influences of the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafism, and other religious movements that have acquired strong transnational networks that extended into Kurdistan. One would expect the sediments of their influences to seep into the domain of ordinary as much as anything else. This is neither a fully globalist nor localist analytic, but in the spirit of the argument of this book, somewhere in-between and something complex. At times, the ordinary renders some “not-so-ordinary” relations ethnographically invisible. The ethnography left me wanting to know a lot more about the debates among religious figures and authorities who do not seek radical transformation, antagonisms within their pious audience who “lend their ears” to prescriptions of Islam, the vibrant reading public that engages in “contests of interpretation” (p. 67) over classical poetry, and the very non-Muslims themselves, who do not just exist as figments of poetic imagination, who previously existed in Silemani as the key constituents of urban culture, and whose absence probably has profound implications for the conceptual loss of a grammar of coexistence. I’m sure Bush would agree that for such diverse orientations to be lived out healthily, those who adopt them would want to be ensured that they are accommodated within a Kurdish society whose principles would not be exhausted by the fleeting moments within our ordinary lives.
