ABSTRACT
The spectre of the Kurdish problem haunted the conference, as Selahaddin-i Eyyubi, like a blank cheque, was inscribed with the values informing the positions of various players in the current political struggle, and then cashed in for their respective benefit. Kurdish Islamist discourse seeks to defend both the particularity of Kurdish Muslims against their belittling by Islamism’s Muslim universalism, and also the universality of Islam against the prejudice of statist Islamism’s Turkish particularism. Tunç argues that the problem should be divided into two categories: its political, economic and administrative dimensions, and its social and cultural ones. Pamak’s insinuation that when Kurds insist on their legitimate rights it often ends in their arrest and torture suggests a more sympathetic understanding of the practice of Kurdish nationalism than that expressed by Islamist discourse. Kurdish Islamist discourse is of necessity more variegated on the issue of non-Islamic resistance to the policies of the state.
