Yale Turkey Webinar Series: Spreading Whose Words? The Political Theology of Turkish-Kurdish Conflict.

Monday, March 15, 2021 - 12:00pm
Speaker/Performer: 
Mehmet Kurt, Lecturer, Yale University & Marie Curie Global Fellow, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)
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Admission: 
Free but register in advance

In this talk, I explore the role of religion in the diasporic Kurdish-Turkish conflict and investigate the ways in which presentations of the political conflict has been disseminated and reproduced via Turkish mosques located in Europe and the USA. Through an extended ethnographic research, I examine the imagination of Turkish political theology and the exclusion of the Kurds from the imagined transnational Muslim ummah that Turkish Islamist discourse promotes the Turkish state as the flag-bearer of. I demonstrate that the existence of the Kurds, by virtue of their exclusion from this imaginary worldview, unravels the limitations of Turkish pan-Islamist discourse. On the other hand, I present examples of counter-hegemonic discourses emerging from Kurdish imams who expand the interpretation of religious texts in defense of Kurdish civil rights and make room for a plurality of Muslim perspectives excluded from the overly militarized and nationalist rhetoric espoused in Turkish mosques in the diaspora. Finally, I demonstrate that Kurds and Turks, who originated from present-day Turkey, act, socialize and organize as members of distinct nations with different agendas and priorities in diasporic settings.
Dr. Mehmet Kurt is a lecturer at Yale University and a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the London School of Economics (LSE). His research lies at the intersection of political sociology and anthropology of religion with a specific focus on political Islam and civil society in Turkey and among the Muslim diasporic communities in Europe and the USA. He currently works on transnational Islamic movements and mobilisations, and examines the ways in which Turkish Muslim communities experience and imagine Islam, ethnicity, identity and citizenship in Europe and the USA.
His book, Kurdish Hizbullah in Turkey: Islamism, Violence and the State - published in English (Pluto Press, 2017) and Turkish (İletişim, 2015) – offers a textured and nuanced analysis of the political theology, intercommunal conflict, and the everyday manifestation of ethnic and religious identities among the Hizbullah members in Turkey. The book follows trajectories of a once clandestine violent organization, its transformation into a social movement and a political party, and examines how this has shaped the Kurdish public and political space in contemporary Turkey. He is the author of numerous articles, book chapters and op-eds published in English, Turkish and Kurdish.

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