As an anthropological account of everyday life of Iraqi Kurdistan, Andrew Bush’s groundbreaking study entitled Between Muslims: Religious Difference in Iraqi Kurdistan offers a panoramic picture of Iraqi Kurds through religious differences embedded in ordinary relations. Bush criticizes long-held assumptions about the derivative relationship between ethnicity and religiosity, which primarily assumed that ethnic identity shapes religious behavior (Batatu Reference Batatu1978) and draws ethnographic attention on micro-level forms of everyday relations in the course of being a pious Muslim. Bush argues that overall explanations on the religious differences have derived from simplistic accounts and established basic negligent stereotypes. A predominant view, in this regard, has simplified the nexus between ethnicity and religiosity, emphasizing that a human being’s racial or ethnic identification determines or qualifies the person’s adherence to Islamic traditions. To this end, a vast scholarly inquiry tends to use Kurdish Islam as a phrase to draw an ethnic boundary across religiosity and correlates irreligiousness with the Kurdish left, which has been widely perceived as a result of marginalization of Kurds following the establishment of four major nation states (Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey) in the Middle East. Instead of this reasoning, Bush prefers the phrase of “Islamic traditions in Kurdistan” to attribute wide range of debates about what counts as Islamic and scrutinizes “Islamist movements” instead of leftist movements regarding whether these prompt the turning away from piety, a term Bush refers to the arm’s length stance to the Islam. Among three untapped patterns to deviate from the Muslim identity, Bush addresses the third group in Silêmanî and Erbil – those who still have faith (îman) but are not ambivalent for turning away from piety. Bush seeks to clarify why individual reactions to Islamic rules vary by enhancing his primary explanatory argument through “interaction with others.”
The book is composed of an introduction, five chapters, and a brief epilogue. The introduction points out the existing accounts on the Islamic orientations of Iraqi Kurds. Two competing views, in this regard, are depicted to explain varied orientations towards the Islam. The first point is that Islam is not a single normative view of the world but can instead be defined as a field to contest, experiment, and debate different customs. The second view, which examines the people who turn away from piety, attributes this turning away to secularism, which is thought of as the colonial effort of the European modern states to shape characteristics of states beyond Europe and illustrates those people with the rising secularism in the region. In order to interpret the reliability of these competing views, Bush pays scant attention to the ordinary relations between Muslims by observing them in the field. Taking account of current ethnic and religious identifications, he argues that many Muslims fulfill the religious requirements of Islam in private life while they have a commitment to the ethos of secularism in public life.
Varied facets of Islamic traditions in everyday life embedded in ordinary relations is understood through the Pexshan by whom Bush seeks to address how non-Islamic traditions affect person’s aversion to the being a pious Muslim (chapter 1). Bush reinterprets aberrant religious behavior as stemming from everyday interactions within the family and community, drawing inspiration from Pexshan’s interpretation on the tenets of founding texts such as the Qur’an and Hadith. Pexshan’s criticisms towards the Islamic duties fulfilled asymmetrically by the people have been expanded to the pilgrimage, which is another main requirement of Islam as well. Pexshan and her brother had quarreled with each other about the Saudi’s special benefits from the pilgrimage upon the Pexshan’s arguments about the real intention of the pilgrimage, which is rather different during the Prophet Muhammed’s times when Muhammed and his pursuers went there for trade. The Pexshan case illustrates how Islamic duties and main requirements for praying and worship have been perceived differently by those who have tended to adopt the third orientation of Islam. The poetry tradition is the reference point, and Pexshan legitimizes her aversion to Muslim piety and attraction to the non-Islamic traditions acknowledging that poetry, as a reminder, echoes uncertainties in founding texts. For this individualistic shift, Bush points to the nationalist tendencies that grew in Kurdish poetry and gives further examples from prominent poems such as those by Ehmed Muxtar Caf, who encourages colonized minds to be aware of national self-consciousness.
In chapter 2, Bush aims to strengthen his arguments about the effect of non-Islamic traditions on turning away from piety with a particular focus on the Kurdish poetry. Bush’s curiosity about the poetry tradition and its association with the Islamic re-orientations among Kurdish Muslims comes from his observation on the interlocutors’ negotiations about the meaning of poetry in the teahouses. Inspiring the people’s enthusiasm for the poetry, Bush collects a wide range of poetics including dîwans and pursues the Sufı poetry’s imaginations on divine unity, which metaphorizes the love that can have only one beloved. When symbiotic manner comes to fore, Bush realizes that metaphors widely preferred in the couplets create a similar analogy between Muslims and Kafir to the law of attraction that compels them to worship. Among other facets of the oral tradition, chapter 2 also focuses on the socio-political circumstances shaping boundaries of Iraqi Kurdistan. After the collapse of Ottoman rule and the ascension of British colonial effects, local uprisings led by Sheikh Mehmud have spread over the region. The colonial efforts of the missioners and the presence of British in the Northern part consolidated religious and ethnic identities, and this eventually became a problem beyond the Ottoman state. Policies aimed for keeping pluralistic religiosity under the universal citizenship, however, mitigated the regional autonomy and extended the crisis of ethnic identification. These broadest conditions have reshaped the Sorani Kurdish poetry and firmly politicized Kurdish national identity in new ways.
Based on elucidative framework outlined in the previous chapter, Bush looks to the distinctive outcome of the Kurdish poetry in the case of Newzad in chapter 3. Newzad is a rather distinct person who neither prays nor fasts but is instead drunk at a bar so often. Furthermore, he does not explicitly identify himself as a devout adherent of his religion, and instead relies solely on the official identification card issued by the state, which bears the emblem of the Islamic faith, to signify his affiliation with Islam. Similar to the pattern experienced by Pexshan, Newzad also affected changing socio-political conditions and poetry traditions that create nationalistic uprising among Kurdish Muslims. His brother’s political affiliation with the Islamist mobilization also played a major role in turning Newzad away from piety and pressured him to be “Muslim on ID.” Emphasizing the greater effect of the widespread Islamist movements across Iraqi Kurdistan, Bush extends his arguments on the relational aspects among Islamist mobilizations and turning away from piety in chapters 4 and 5. With special focus on the Mela Krêkar, Bush demonstrates that Krêkar’s call for radical transformation has purged imperialist pressure over the Kurdish society and led us to know that transformative ordinary relations can also be a matter to grasp asymmetrical behavior in staying within Islam. Utilizing the lens of Kurdish poetry in chapter 5, Bush focuses on the in-family relations of Shadman and echoes overlapping differences about the religious orientations in a household.
This book has very explanatory keys for anyone interested in the derivative relation between ethnicity and religiosity in Iraqi Kurdistan. Given the sparse amount of inquiry on contemporary Iraqi Kurdistan, this book will also be useful for researchers interested in the relation between oral history and ethnic/religious cleavages across the Middle East. So-called ordinary relations and its effect on the religious behavior of the people may bring new scholarly interest to catch everyday de-alignments in fulfilling religious duties. For the audience at broadest size, people who have less ethnographic and idiographic knowledge about poetry and socio-political circumstances of Iraqi Kurdistan may encounter a little challenge because of the lack of evidence about the sociological literature and intellectual debates in the book.
