Lse Middle East Centre Podcasts

Speaker: Mehmet Kurt, LSE and Yale University Chair: Robert Lowe, LSE Middle East Deputy Director Islam has returned to the Turkish and Kurdish public and political spheres, becoming an effective means to mobilise voters and recruit supporters during the AKP era. In this talk, Mehmet Kurt highlights two distinctive approaches to the Kurdish issue adopted by Kurdish Hizbullah (Huda-Par) and the wider Kurdish movement. While the former relies on an explicitly Islamist political agenda to subsume Kurdish society into part of a pan-Islamist entity, the latter pursues a secular but increasingly pluralist agenda to expand its base among religious Kurds. This in turn determines both groups’ connection to Kurdish political identity. While Hizbullah embraces a form of ‘Kurdishness’ that mainly makes reference to Islam, the wider Kurdish movement incorporates Islam into its pluralist notion of ‘the people of Turkey’. Recorded on 17 December 2018. ---------------------------------------------------------------------