By: Dr. Sabah A. Salih

6 February 2004

The shock, the devastation, and the sorrow aside, last weekend’s twin homicide bombings in the Kurdish city of Arbil is a reminder that political Islam is no friend of Kurdish nationalism, and that if left unchecked, its colonizing effort would eventually turn Kurdish identity upside down.

Like global capitalism, political Islam has no allegiance to nationhood. IBM doesn’t care if its workers are Irish, German, or Chinese. Neither does Islam care about the nationality of its converts. For both, borders are to be crossed, violated, and, if need be, scraped.

But while capitalism’s gospel is wealth—any kind of wealth—political Islam’s gospel is a particular kind of faith, limited and dogmatic; its domain is not the mosque alone but a whole way of life.

Moreover, while global capitalism has no cultural agenda, other than the unintended consequences the spread of consumerism brings along, political Islam always has an eye on culture, trying to bolster those values it deems Islamic and demonize those it considers un-Islamic. Therein lies the danger from political Islam to Kurdish culture.

It is, therefore, pointless to call the homicide bombers crazy or criminals or fanatics or what have you. Vocabulary of this sort may be good in inflaming the passions, but they prevent us from identifying the core of the problem. That’s why it is better to see such people as ideological creations from top to bottom—people so paralyzed by the notion of the sacred that they are willing to embrace bloodletting with perfect Stalinist fervor and blind obedience even against their own people.

Such were the homicide bombers. They killed, maimed, and destroyed—violently and savagely and indiscriminately—in the name of a belief system. What makes them so dangerous to society is not courage, for when a person ceases to think for himself/herself that person abdicates courage altogether. What makes them so dangerous is that they are deeply trapped in one of the narrowest of all dogmas—without even knowing it.

Furthermore, these are not a lonely bunch; they are part of a global network, stretching all the way from Europe to the Middle East to the Indian subcontinent to South America to Africa and south East Asia. And, thanks to Wahhabi slush funds, they are never short of cash. What is more, wherever they may be, they know exactly what they are after: putting Islam above nationalism and Arabic above all other languages. If this is not cultural imperialism, then cultural imperialism has no face.

In Indonesia, writes Christopher Hitchens in the January 2004 issue of the Vanity Fair, many have finally come to realize that political Islam is in fact nothing less than a form of Arab colonialism bent on overtaking their culture.

Isn’t it about time that Kurdish leaders started connecting the dots and came to a similar conclusion and, in the interest of Kurdish nationalism, did something about it?

Dr. Sabah A. Salih is professor of English at Bloomsburg University, USA. <Ssalih@bloomu.edu>