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"COMPARED TO THE UNBELIEVER, the Kurd is a Muslim" (li gora gawirê Kurd misilman e). I do not recall where I first heard or read this unflattering Kurdish saying, but it was uttered with a certain pride.1 I suspect that it was originally a Turkish or Arabic saying; it is the sort of thing people who feel that they are better Muslims than the Kurds would say. In fact, one often comes across beliefs and practices in Kurdistan that are hard to reconcile with Islamic orthodoxy. Kurdish nationalists of the 1920s and 1930s were fascinated with, and took pride in, such deviations from Islam, "the Arabian religion," interpreting them as rebellions of the Kurdish spirit against Arab and Turkish domination. During its first years the nationalist cultural magazine Hawar, published in Syria from 1932 to 1943 by Djeladet and Kamran Bedir-Khan, showed a great interest in Zoroastrianism as one of the sources of Kurdish cultural identity. With its Zoroastrian roots, the Yezidi religion, which had long been discriminated against and condemned as "devil worship," was idealized by some nationalists as the Kurdish reUgion par excellence.
But these nationalists were a tiny minority, and the followers of all heterodox sects combined form only a small fraction of the Kurds. The vast majority are Muslims, and many of them take their religion very seriously. The editors of Hawar discovered that die journal had to change its tone in order to find a wider readership. From 1941 on, each issue opened with Kurdish translations from the Koran and Traditions of the Prophet. Many other Kurdish secularized nationalists, before as well as after them, made the same discovery that in order to gain influence among the Kurds they had to accommodate themselves to Islam. This was never an easy thing to do since most of these nationalists considered Islam as one of the major forces oppressing their people.
The nationalist and poet Cigerxwin (1903-1984), who belonged to the circle around Hawar, toward the end of his life expressed his frustration with the Kurds' lasting attachment to Islam. Cigerxwin had himself in his youth pursued traditional religious studies at madrasas in various parts of Kurdistan. Later his Islamic piety gradually gave way to a strong emotional devotion to the...