The Naqshbandi Order as a Vehicle of Political Protest among the Kurds (With Some Comparative Notes...

Martin van Bruinessen,

The Naqshbandi Order as a Vehicle of Political Protest among the Kurds (With

Some Comparative Notes on Indonesia)

Paper presented at the International Conference ‘New Approaches in Islamic

Studies’, Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), Jakarta, 15-17 August 1986

Bruinessen, The Naqshbandi Order as a Vehicle of Protest 1

The Naqshbandi Order as a Vehicle of Political Protest among the Kurds

(With Some Comparative Notes on Indonesia)

Martin van Bruinessen

During a visit, in the summer months of 1980, to Iranian Kurdistan, where by that time much

fighting between supporters and opponents of Iran's new Islamic regime had been going on,

I found that the Naqshbandi tariqa was once again playing a political role. The aged and

venerable (or, in the eyes of many others, despicable) Shaykh Osman Naqshbandi of Tawêla,

perhaps the most influential Naqshbandi shaykh of Southern Kurdistan, had entered politics

again and established his own military organization.1

After the collapse of the shah's regime in February 1979, political organizations of many

different shades had emerged ,and all had been able to acquire at least some arms that had

formerly belonged to the army, the police force, or the gendarmerie. When the new Islamic

regime gradually consolidated its control of the central provinces, many oppositional groups

sought refuge in the Kurdish mountains in western Iran, that remained largely under the

control of Kurdish organizations fighting for autonomy. The central government had sent its

troops to fight these rebels, but these troops were not capable of controlling more than the

towns and the major roads - and sometimes not even those. A highly confusing situation

prevailed, in which the control of districts frequently shifted from one group to another.

There was a great variety of armed groups roaming about, some of which formed shifting

coalitions, while actively fighting others. There were Kurdish nationalists of various political

persuasions, a wide spectrum of left-wing political groups, remnants of the shah's army,

groups around a tribal or a local religious leader, revolutionary guards (Pasdaran, the new

regime's para-military units), regular army units, local supporters of the Islamic government.

The most recent addition to this multi-coloured mosaic of armed groups was a real dervish

army, recruited from among the most devoted followers of Shaykh Osman and commanded

by the shaykh's son, Dr. Madih. The old shaykh himself had withdrawn across the border into

Iraq, where all enemies of the Iranian revolution were then welcome.

Shaykh Osman had good reasons to dislike revolutions. He had been born, and had long

lived, in the Iraqi part of Kurdistan, and he had had to flee from that country because of

another revolution. Soon after the 1958 ‘revolution’ in Iraq, landless peasants, incited by 1 On Shaykh Osman and his influence in southern Kurdistan as it was in the mid-seventies, see:

Martin van Bruinessen, ‘Agha, Shaykh and State: On the Social and Political Organization of

Kurdistan’, Ph.D. thesis, Utrecht University, 1978, Chapter IV. [Revised version published as Agha,

Shaykh and State: The Social and Political Structures of Kurdistan, London: Zed Books, 1992.]


Communist Party organizers and encouraged by Abdulkarim Qassem's government, began

chasing away the landlords that had long exploited them. Even Shaykh Osman's reputation

for saintliness was not sufficient to protect him from the peasants' anger. He had to leave his

lands and took refuge, with a few faithful followers, behind the Iranian border, in a district

where his family had always exerted great influence. The shah welcomed the shaykh and

showed him favours, and the shaykh was interested in establishing close relations with the

court, to their mutual benefit. The political protection he enjoyed enabled the shaykh to

consolidate his influence. He could, for instance, successfully intervene with government

officials on behalf of his followers, and also dispense many other forms of patronage. In his

village he regularly received visitors and murids from far beyond Kurdistan, from the other

Sunni peoples of Iran (especially Turcomans) as well as from Arab countries. His closest and

most loyal followers, however, were almost all from Hawraman, a mountainous district in

Southern Kurdistan, astride the Iraqi-Iranian border. The tribesmen of Hawraman are sturdy

mountaineers, and are known as redoubtable guerrilla fighters. For several generations,

Shaykh Osman and his ancestors had wielded a great moral authority among the Hawramis,

and many of the latter were in fact followers of the Naqshbandi order. It was mainly from

among these Hawramis that the shaykh recruited his armed force.

One of the chief reasons, one may assume, why the shaykh established this force (somewhat

grandiloquently called Sipahî Rizgarî, ‘Liberation Army’), was defensive in nature. Because of

his close associations with the shah's court, he had little good to expect from the new

regime. Another influential Kurdish chieftain from the same area, who had also been close to

the court, had been summarily executed in Tehran, and the shaykh knew that the same

could well happen to him. Secondly, the Naqshbandi order, and especially the Kurdish

branch of it to which Shaykh Osman belonged, has always been strongly anti-Shi`i. Many

pious Kurds regarded the new regime not as an Islamic but as a Shi'i government. Thirdly,

there was not a single political force that controlled all of Kurdistan. A sort of warlordism

prevailed, and the shaykh must have felt that, if he wished to maintain his influence, he

would have to do so by force of arms, as so many Kurdish shaykhs had done in the past.

Finally the government of Iraq, where he had fled after the revolution, almost certainly

encouraged him to take up arms against Khomeini's government. Most of the arms of the

Sipahî Rizgarî were allegedly provided by Iraq.

In the first months of its existence, the Sipahî Rizgarî did in fact engage in a few clashes with

revolutionary guards (Pasdaran) in and around Hawraman. Soon, however, the shaykh's men

found themselves fighting another Kurdish organization, the left-wing Komala, which had

one of its strongest bases in a region overlapping the shaykh’s zone of influence. The shaykh

was, among many other things, a rich landowner, whereas the Komala had been organizing

land invasions and rebellions by landless peasants against landlords and tribal chieftains. The

Komala saw the shaykh as a class enemy, and did not tolerate the presence of his army

anywhere near its area of influence. It made clear that it gave a higher priority to the class

struggle than to the unity of all Kurdish organizations against the regime. The Sipahî Rizgarî,


on the other hand, regarded the Komala as godless communists, and saw the pasdaran, who

were after all fellow Muslims, as the lesser evil. One of its commanders, Shaykh Osman's

khalifa Muhammad Ziya Naqshbandi, fearing to be crushed between the Komala and the

Pasdaran, in fact turned to the latter and offered them his cooperation.2 In the following

months, the other Sipahî Rizgarî units avoided serious confrontations, but clashes with the

Komala and other Kurdish groups occurred more often than with the forces of the Islamic

regime.

In the first year of its existence, the Sipahî Rizgarî counted, according to Shaykh Osman's

own claims, a thousand armed men, most of them Hawramis.3 In the following years its

numbers rapidly dwindled. In the course of their confrontation with the central government,

it was especially the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI) and the Komala that

succeeded in consolidating their organizations and controlling large parts of Kurdistan. Both

established popular bases also in Hawraman, where prior to 1980 no political organization

had ever gained a foothold. In the Iraqi part of Hawraman, which the shaykh's men used as

a basis from which to launch patrols into Iran, they ran into trouble with an organization of

Iraqi Kurds, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). The PUK was in armed rebellion against

the Baghdad government, and it resented the shaykh's collaboration with that same regime.

It moreover blamed the Sipahî Rizgarî for fighting against fellow Kurds rather than against

Khomeini's forces. The PUK harassed the shaykh's men and largely cut off their supply lines.

As a result of political propaganda, even in Hawraman itself people's enthusiasm for fighting

under Shaykh Osman's banner subsided. In the autumn of 1982, the shaykh left Iraq, whose

government had become less friendly to him as his usefulness seemed spent. He set out on a

tour of western Europe and Turkey, where he still had numerous disciples, intending to

settle finally in Mecca or Medina. His son Madih remained in Kurdistan, but the Sipahî Rizgarî

was not heard of again.

To all appearances, Shaykh Osman's political failure cost him much of his traditional

influence in southern Kurdistan. The appearances may later prove to have been deceptive,

but it looks very much as if what still remained of the organizational force of the Naqshbandi

order in Southern Kurdistan was entirely spent in the effort of the Sipahî Rizgarî, the last

Kurdish Sufi army. The very situation of war and rapid social change that gave rise to the

emergence of the Sipahî Rizgarî, also speeded up the loosening of traditional loyalties.

Shaykh Osman's attempts to establish an army and set himself up as a warlord were but a

weak, and maybe a last, repetition of developments that often occurred in Kurdistan earlier

in this and the preceding century. For approximately a half century, Kurdish shaykhs, 2 Pro-government daily Inqilab-i Islami, 27 Mordad 1357 [18 August 1980]; pro-Kurdish weekly

Khabarnama-yi Komala no. 69, 31 Mordad 1357 [22 August 1980].

3 Interview with Shaykh Osman by Halkawt Hakim, during the shaykh's visit to Paris, autumn 1982. I

wish to thank Halkawt Hakim sharing the main points of the interview with me.


especially of the Naqshbandi tariqa, surfaced as the most powerful and influential political

leaders of the Kurds. The first great Kurdish nationalist rebellions were, in fact, led by

shaykhs. In the past fifty years, the political leverage of these religious leaders has seriously

declined. It is no accident, however, that the two rival leaders of Iraq's Kurdish movement in

the 1960s and 1970s, Mulla Mustafa Barzani and Jalal Talabani, both belong to long-

established families of shaykhs.

The tariqa and political rebellion, 1880 – 1925

In 1880, a Kurdish Naqshbandi shaykh, `Ubaydullah of Nehri, in what is now the extreme

southeastern tip of Turkey, rose in rebellion. At the head of an army consisting of many

different tribes, all acknowledging his authority, he entered Iran and conquered a large part

of Iran's Kurdish-inhabited territories. The local population enthusiastically supported him.

Ostensibly, this was an act of protest against the greediness of Persian tax-gatherers and

mismanagement of the region by the venal Persian bureaucracy. As his correspondence

shows, however, his real design was the establishment of some form of Kurdish self-

government between the Ottoman Empire and Iran, breaking away large portions from both

empires. The shaykh was ultimately defeated by the Persian army and, after his escape

across the border, captured by Ottoman troops and sent into exile.4

This was the first Kurdish rebellion of an explicitly nationalist character. In spite of its failure,

the desire for a separate Kurdish state remained, and the following decades saw many more

Kurdish rebellions, some purely local in scale, some involving vast regions, always with

nationalist overtones. Almost all of them were led by Sufi shaykhs, most of them

Naqshbandis. The last rebellion of this type took place in 1925, in what had then become the

Republic of Turkey. Kurds and Turks had been united in fighting for the independence of the

last remaining parts of the Ottoman Empire, under the banner of Islam. Their military

successes received international recognition in the Treaty of Lausanne, and in the same year

(1923) the Republic was proclaimed. Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) soon alienated both the

Muslims and the Kurds by the radical measures he took. He set out on a course of rapid

secularization, abolishing many traditional Islamic institutions, In order to weld all citizens of

the Republic into one nation, he took also measures designed to assimilate the Kurds, to

destroy their separate identity and turn them into Turks. Being mostly pious Muslims, many

Kurds felt doubly hurt and discriminated against. In 1925 the Kurdish shaykh Sa'id of Palu

rose in rebellion, aided by many shaykhs of the same area, all of them Naqshbandis. The

population of a vast region almost unanimously supported, and took active part in the

uprising. The young Republic was shaken; the government had to send tens of thousands of 4 On Shaykh `Ubaydullah and his rebellion, see: Wadie Jwaideh, ‘The Kurdish Nationalist Movement,

Its Origins and Development’, Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 1960; and John Joseph, The Nestorians

and their Muslim Neighbours, Princeton: University Press, 1961.


troops as well as the air force in order to quell the rebellion, and even then it took several

months.5

The rebellion represents an important breaking point in the history of the Republic. The

repressive measures taken ushered the country into a period of dictatorship, in which

Ataturk's modernizing measures could be taken with greater speed. One of the well-known

consequences of the rebellion is the ban of all Sufi orders (tariqa), which is formally still in

force. After Shaykh Sa'id's rebellion there were only a few, very minor rebellions in which

tariqa shaykhs played a part. Leadership of the Kurdish movement passed to another type of

leader. Similarly, before 1880 there were few or no rebellions or large-scale political

movements in which shaykhs played a leading role. For many centuries, various tariqas had

existed among the Kurds, but we have to go back a century and a half from 1880 before we

find another instance of a shaykh leading a rebellion, and only in the 1640s do we find a

shaykh whose political influence may be compared with that of Shaykh `Ubaydullah.6 The

period 1880-1925 thus stands out as one of unusual political activism by Kurdish Naqshbandi

shaykhs. In this article I shall explore various answers to the question why these shaykhs

became political leaders, and why precisely in that period.

Indonesian parallels

It is worth noting that in Indonesia, too, this was the period in which the tariqa (the

Naqshbandiya and, more militantly, the Qadiriya wa Naqshbandiya) were most successful in

mobilizing the masses. A large-scale uprising in Banten (Western Java) in 1888 shocked the

Dutch into a sudden awareness of the influence of the tariqas among the population. Many

of the participants in this rebellion were followers of the Qadiriya wa-Naqshbandiya, a

recently established tariqa that was led by a Bantenese shaykh residing in Mecca, Shaykh

Abdulkarim.7

5 Bruinessen, op.cit., Chapter V.

6 This shaykh, `Aziz Mahmud Urmawi, was executed on the orders of Sultan Murad IV, who was

worried by the shaykh's great influence (he reputedly had over 40,000 militant followers) and feared

the shaykh might set himself up as an independent ruler. A century later, another shaykh proclaimed

himself to be the Mahdi. He too met a premature end at the hands of the Sultan's troops. See:

Martin van Bruinessen, ‘The Naqshbandi Order in Kurdistan in the 17th and 18th Centuries,’ to

appear in the Proceedings of the ‘Table Ronde sur les Naqshbandi’, held in Paris, May 1985. [M.

Gaborieau, A. Popovic and T. Zarcone (eds), Naqshbandis: cheminements et situation actuelle d'un

ordre mystique musulman, Istanbul: Isis, 1990, pp. 337-360.]

7 Sartono Kartodirdjo, The Peasants' Revolt of Banten in 1888, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1966.


In the following decades, Dutch officials all over the archipelago reported on increasing

tariqa activities in their districts, often in alarming tones. The Naqshbandiya spread rapidly

all over Java and Sumatra, inspiring the native population with what colonial administrators

regarded as dangerous ‘fanaticism.’ In most cases this simply meant that people more

strictly followed the canonical obligations of Islam and devoted more time to supererogatory

prayers and the recitation of wirids, pious formulas. In some cases, such as in Riau, the

Naqshbandiya may have played a role in resistance to the establishment of Dutch rule. There

were also a few rebellions in which tariqas were involved. In the village of Samentara, not far

from Surabaya in East Java , peasants rose against the native elite and the Dutch

administration, under the leadership of a charismatic religious leader associated with the

Qadiriya wa-Naqshbandiya.8 The driving force behind a rebellion against the Dutch in Jambi

(South Sumatra) in 1916 was a local tariqa, called Tarekat Abang.9 The last anti-colonial

rebellions in which tariqas played a (minor) role were the ‘communist’ uprisings in Banten

and West Sumatra in 1926. The chief leader of the Banten rebellion was related with, and

owed his prestige and influence to, the major shaykh of the Qadiriya wa-Naqshbandiya

there,10 and in West Sumatra there was at least one Naqshbandi shaykh among the

‘communist’ leaders.11

We see thus in two widely distant parts of the Islamic world the almost simultaneous

emergence and decline of one particular form of political Islam, associated with the tariqas.

With due acknowledgement of all the differences, a closer · look at these developments

might possibly also yield insights relevant to an understanding of later waves of Islamic

radicalism.

A first attempt at explanation: global political and economic factors

If this simultaneous emergence of tariqa activism in Kurdistan and Indonesia is not purely

coincidental, there are two possible causal mechanisms that should be explored: the

8 Sartono Kartodirdjo, Protest Movements in Rural Java, Kuala Lumpur, 1973, p. 80-86. Sartono (or his

sources) incorrectly identifies the tariqa involved as Naqshbandiya; the rebel leader was a disciple of

Kyai Ngabdulrasul of Krapyak, who taught the Qadiriya wa-Naqshbandiya, as his grandsons told me

during a visit in August 1985.

9 Algemeen Rijksarchief (The Hague), Koloniën, Verbaal 17-1-18-1, containing reports bij Dr. Hazeu,

Adviser for Native Affairs, on the backgrounds of this rebellion.

10 M.C.Williams, Sickle and Crescent: The Communist Revolt of 1926 in Banten, Ithaca: Cornell

Modern Indonesia Project, 1982.

11 B.J.O Schrieke, ‘The Causes and Effects of Communism on the West Coast of Sumatra’, in: idem,

Indonesian Sociological Studies, Part One, The Hague/Bandung: W.van Hoeve, 1955.


developments in both regions may be directly linked, for instance through international

tariqa networks, or they may represent reactions to similar new conditions. For both

possibilities there is some supporting evidence. In Indonesia, the strong growth of the

tariqas was clearly connected with improved communications with Mecca and an increase in

the number of pilgrims visiting the Holy Cities and remaining there several years for study.

This led to a greater awareness among Indonesian Muslims of developments in other parts

of the Muslim world. Moreover, as I shall show below, the Indonesian Naqshbandis

belonged mostly to a new, activist branch of that order that had recently emerged in

Kurdistan and from there spread over the Ottoman Empire.

Many Dutch officials, correctly or not, tended to attribute the political activity of the tariqas

to Pan-Islamic propaganda sponsored by the last great Ottoman Sultan, Abdulhamid II (1876-

19090.12 Both among the Kurds and among Indonesian Muslims, this sultan's claims to the

title of Caliph (Khalifa) were widely recognized. Officials in various parts of the Archipelago

reported about hajis bringing Turkish flags back from the Holy Land. None of the rebellions

mentioned above can be said to have been directly incited from outside, by the Sultan's

propagandists. Pan-Islamic propaganda did, however, contribute to an atmosphere

conducive to rebellion against the enemies of Islam. This is also true of Kurdistan: the

shaykhs who rebelled against the Ottoman government usually made it abundantly clear

that they remained loyal to the Sultan as the Caliph and that they only opposed the

bureaucracy, which was then considered the spearhead of Western influences. Shaykh Sa'id

himself gave as one of the major reasons for his 1925 rebellion Ataturk's abolition of the

Caliphate in the previous year.

Pan-Islamic propaganda could take root, of course, because the threats to Islam were only

too obvious. The half century under consideration is precisely the period when the

competition of Russia and Britain for control of the Middle East was at its most intense.

Consuls, explorers, missionaries and traders, and soon also the armies of these two imperial

powers, came to Kurdistan and brought unprecedented changes . In most of the Kurdish

rebellions we easily detect resentment of, and resistance against these infidel advances.

When these revolts were directed against the Ottoman state, this was because the Turkish

reformers were seen as tools of the infidels, and the Sultan as besieged and powerless.

In Indonesia, this period of tariqa activism is precisely the era when the Dutch were

establishing their effective control over the entire Archipelago, a period of transition from

exploitation by trade to more direct forms of resource extraction. Until then, only the island

of Java had been really colonized and subjected to various systems of forced cultivation.

12 Cf. A. Reid, ‘Nineteenth Century Pan-Islam in Indonesia and Malaysia’, Journal of Asian Studies 26

(1967), 267-283.


It can hardly be doubted that the expansion of the Naqshbandi order in the late nineteenth

century was at least in part a reaction to the increasing encroachments on the Muslim world

by European powers. In other regions, too, the Naqshbandiya tariqa seemed to receive new

impulses in reaction to direct threats to the Muslim lands. When, a few decades earlier, the

Russians gradually conquered the Northern Caucasus, popular resistance against the

invaders was, there too, led by a Naqshbandi, the famous Shaykh Shamil. This shaykh was,

incidentally, affiliated with the Khalidiya branch of the Naqshbandiya, which had emerged in

nineteenth-century Kurdistan.13 In India too, the call for jihad against the infidel colonial

power originated in Naqshbandi circles (although it cannot easily be associated here with a

change in colonial policy).14

An explanation at this level of abstraction offers some attraction, but only as long as we do

not go into details. If we study the cases mentioned so far more closely, and especially if we

adduce a few others as well, the similarities begin to fade. Both the impact of European

imperialism and the socio-political roles played by the tariqas vary so much from place to

place and from time to time that it hard to fit them into a few ready-made categories and an

abstract causal scheme.

One of the earliest instances of political activism by Naqshbandis in Indonesia, for instance,

took place in a region that was not yet colonized by the Dutch, and where Dutch influence

was as yet marginal. The island of Lombok, whose native population, the Sasaks, were partly

Islamised, had long been ruled by a (Hindu) Balinese raja. In· 1891 the Sasak aristocracy,

many of whom had become Naqshbandis, revolted against Balinese rule, allegedly at the

instigation of the major local Naqshbandi teacher, Haji Ali.15 Although this rebellion was also

directed against infidel rule (which was, in this case, more resented by the aristocracy than

by the commoners), the Balinese domination of Lombok can in no way be associated with

European imperialist expansion, and it was certainly not anti-Islamic. The raja even had

dormitories built in Mecca for his subjects who made the pilgrimage.16 The Naqshbandi

rebellions of the period therefore cannot exclusively be attributed to the external factor of

European expansion.

13 Personal communication from Moshe Gammer, who is writing a dissertation on Shaykh Shamil.

14 See the chapter on the jihad of Sayyid Ahmad Shahid in S.A.A. Rizvi, Shah 'Abd al-'Aziz: Puritanism,

Sectarian Polemics and Jihad, Canberra, 1982.

15 Alfons van der Kraan, Lombok: Conquest, Colonization and Underdevelopment, 1870-1940,

Singapore etc.: Heinemann, 1980; J. van Goor, Kooplieden, Predikanten en Bestuurders Overzee,

Utrecht: HES, 1982, Chapter 2; C.J. Neeb & W.E. Asbeeke, Naar Lomhok, Soerabaja, 1897, p. 227-229.

16 Two early Dutch visitors were told this in 1874 by Arabs living in Lombok. Dr. van Rijckevorsel,

Brieven uit Insulinde, 's Gravenhage, 1878, p. 126.


The history of colonial expansion is even less convincing as an explanation of why tariqa

political radicalism rapidly declined after 1925 in Indonesia as well as Kurdistan and gave

way to modern associations of a more or less explicitly nationalist character. A serious

explanation will have to take a variety of factors into account, some of them global and

general, others more specific to place, time and social context. Remaining, for a while, on

the same global level, we shall now investigate whether there are factors internal to the

tariqa (and more specifically to the ‘Kurdish’ branch of the Naqshbandiya, which seems to be

one of the most radical), that might contribute to an explanation.

Mawlana Khalid and the Khalidi branch of the Naqshbandiya

It is unlikely that the Naqshbandi tariqa would ever have attained its prominent position in

Kurdistan (and Indonesia) had it not been for the person of Mawlana Khalid al-Kurdi (or al-

Baghdadi). Mawlana Khalid introduced several reforms in the order, and infused it with a

sharià-minded militancy. His great charisma attracted many disciples; he appointed in his

lifetime more than sixty khalifas (of whom about half were Kurds), an extraordinary number.

Almost all present Naqshbandis in the Middle East (as well as those in Indonesia) trace their

spiritual pedigrees (silsila) through Mawlana Khalid. By virtue of his large number of khalifas,

most of whom appointed several khalifas in turn, Mawlana Khalid laid the foundation of a

network of communication across the length and width of Kurdistan and reaching the

farthest corners of the Ottoman Empire.

Mawlana Khalid was a Kurd of modest origins, born in the district of Shahrazur. in Southern

Kurdistan, that had given the Islamic world many famous ùlama but that is also known for

its inclination towards ecstatic, and sometimes heterodox forms of mysticism.17 He pursued

a common religious education with the local ùlama, and continued his studies with the

greatest ùlama of Southern Kurdistan. The pilgrimage to Mecca further extended his

17 Ùlama from Shahrazur with a world-wide reputation include Ibrahim al-Kurani, the 17th-century

mystic who had a great influence on Indonesian Islam, and his disciple Àbd ar-Rasul Barzinji, the

mufti of Madina. Both were initiated in several tariqas, and propounded Ibn al-Àrabi’s speculative

metaphysics. Al-Kurani's Indonesian disciple,Àbd ar-Ra'uf of Singkel, introduced the Shattari tariqa

to his native Acheh, whence it spread all over the archipelago. Al-Kurani himself wrote several short

treatises for his Indonesian disciples, to explain certain Shattari concepts to them. The Barzinjis are a

famous family of sayyids in Shahrazur. Another member of this family wrote a Mawlud that became

very popular in Indonesia (where ‘Barzanji’ has become a general name for all Mauluds).

The best known of the syncretistic and heterodox mystical sect flourishing in Shahrazur is that of the

Ahl-i Haqq (see Encyclopaedia of Islam, q.v.); a more recent phenomenon is the Haqqa sect, an

antinomian movement originating in Naqshbandi circles half a century ago (see Bruinessen, op.cit.).

Shaykh Osman, the hero of the introductory paragraphs of this article, also had great influence in

Shahrazur; Hawraman, his major power base, in fact belongs to wider Shahrazur.


horizons; he received there a ‘revelation’ that, in order to complete his education, he should

travel to India. Delhi was in those years one of the major intellectual centres of the Islamic

world, and many of the leading ùlama there were affiliated with the Naqshbandi tariqa.

Khalid studied with Shah Ghulam Àli (known to Mawlana Khalid's disciples as Àbdullah

Dihlawi), who was probably the greatest Sufi among them, and he soon distinguished

himself as the most remarkable of Shah Ghulam Àli's disciples.18 After only a few years of

study he returned in 1811 to Kurdistan as his master's khalifa, authorized to teach the

tariqa. He settled in Sulaymaniya, the major city of Southern Kurdistan, but also spent much

time in Baghdad, the major administrative centre. In both towns he soon acquired large

personal followings, among Arabs and Turks as well as Kurds. Many, including the highest

political authorities and members of other shaykhly families (affiliated with other tariqas),

asked to be initiated into the Naqshbandiya by Shaykh Khalid. Because of a political conflict,

he had to leave Sulaymaniya in 1822; he moved to Damascus, where he died five years later,

leaving behind a well- oiled network of communication and contacts.19 Its only weakness

was, perhaps, that the network was highly centralized, and that, out of over sixty khalifas,

none was capable of assuming his central position. The charismatic Mawlana Khalid infused

the Naqshbandiya order with a new, more militant spirit. Strict adherence to the sharià had

always been a distinguishing feature of this order; under Mawlana Khalid this was given even

stronger emphasis. His sojourn in India must have given him an acute awareness of the

threat to Islam posed by the European colonial expansion. Vigilance against laxness in

religious observance and against all other threats to Islam became conspicuous elements of

the Naqshbandi teaching under Mawlana Khalid and his successors. One may even call

Shaykh Khalid bigoted in certain respects. While still in India, he attempted to mobilize his

fellow murids against certain ‘syncretistic’ Indian Muslim practices; on his return journey

through Iran, he engaged in fierce debates with Shiìs, which resulted in a lasting mutual

enmity. The Naqshbandiya-Khalidiya (as the branch of the order originating with Mawlana

Khalid came to be known) has been outspokenly anti-Shiì.20

Shaykh Khalid also introduced some minor changes in the Naqshbandi ritual. The most

important of these was that he demanded that his khalifas' murids perform the rabita not 18 On Shah Ghulam Ali and the Delhi Naqshbandis in general, with some observations on Mawlana

Khalid's appearance in Delhi, see Rizvi, op.cit.

19 Albert Hourani, ‘Shaykh Khalid and the Naqshbandi Order’, pp. 89-103 in: Islamic Philosophy and

the Classical Tradition, ed. by S.M. Stern, A. Hourani and V. Brown, Oxford, 1972; Butrus Abu-

Manneh, ‘The Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya in the Ottoman Lands in the Early 19th Century’, Die

Welt des Islams 22 (1982(1984]), 1-36.

20 An anti-Shiì attitude was not something new in the Naqshbandiya, which has generally been

known to be the most anti-Shiì of all tariqas. The attitudes of earlier shaykhs, however, showed

considerable variation in this respect. See the chapter on the Naqshbandiya in: S.A.A. Rizvi, A History

of Sufism in India, vol. II, New Delhi, 1983.


with the khalifa who initiated them (as is usual) but with Shaykh Khalid himself. The rabita

(more precisely: rabita bi 'sh-shaykh) is a spiritual exercise preceding the dhikr in the

Naqshbandi ritual: the Sufi visualizes the master (i.e., Mawlana Khalid) and by this way

attempts to establish a spiritual contact between himself and the master, and through the

latter with the Prophet and ultimately with God. The practice of the rabita greatly

contributes to the emotional dependence of the murid on his master; the murid willingly

offers the absolute obedience to his master that is' demanded of him, because in the rabita

he actually feels how the shaykh leads and strengthens his spiritual experiences. Whatever

an outsider may think of it, most practising Naqshbandis claim experiencing a real rapport

during the rabita, and feeling how the shaykh directs and helps them during the following

dhikr (and reprimands them if they are not serious enough). Mawlana Khalid's demand that

all murids perform the rabita with himself alone allowed him to keep the order centralized in

spite of the large number of khalifas he appointed. Even after his death this practice

continued. In a risala by Sulaiman Zuhdi, a Naqshbandi shaykh in Mecca, who had many

Indonesian disciples in the 1880s (more than half a century after Khalid's death), we find a

description of Mawlana Khalid's looks, to facilitate visualization by the murids who had never

been able to meet him in the flesh.21

The personality and the teachings of Mawlana Khalid undoubtedly brought a great change in

the Naqshbandi order. He effectively replaced almost all of the earlier Naqshbandi lines of

affiliation in the Middle East. At present, virtually all Naqshbandis in Kurdistan and the other

lands that once belonged to the Ottoman Empire are Khalidis, even where there were other

affiliations before. The Indonesian Naqshbandis too are, with the exception of only one line,

Khalidis. Nevertheless, Mawlana Khalid's charisma and his reforms by themselves can hardly

explain why half a century after his death, and not much earlier, Naqshbandi shaykhs had

become the major political leaders of the Kurds. This can only be understood, I believe, from

an analysis of Kurdish society in that period, and especially of the social and political changes

taking place in it.

The role of the shaykh in Kurdish society

When I carried out my first fieldwork among the Kurds, in 1974-1976, I was already aware of

the important political roles Naqshbandi shaykhs had played in the past, and therefore I

spent a good deal of time interviewing shaykhs and their followers, and observing their

interactions. Twice I spent a couple of days in the summer village of Shaykh Osman

21 This risala was brought back from Mecca by an Indonesian pilgrim in 1889 and was confiscated by

the suspicious Dutch authorities. It describes Shaykh Khalid as ‘of tall stature, stout, with a beard that

is white in the middle and black on both sides, of broad chin and wide chest’ (E. Gobée and C.

Adriaanse, eds., Ambtelijke Adviezen van C. Snouck Hurgronje 1889-1936, vol. II, 's Gravenhage:

Nijhoff, 1959, p. 1182).


Naqshbandi, whom I introduced in the first paragraphs of this paper. It was apparent that

the days of the shaykhs' glory were over, but traces of their old influence were still

perceptible. Every day up to a hundred persons, in certain seasons even several hundreds,

would come and request the privilege of seeing the shaykh. Some of them came from

nearby villages, others had travelled several days teach him. Their object was to seek the

shaykh's blessing. Some brought sick relatives, or asked for a cure for a sick child or parent

left at home. Others just demanded an amulet for good luck, as a protection against poverty

or natural disaster. Guerrilla fighters from Iraqi Kurdistan, where a war was going on,

requested (and were given) protective amulets against bullets and shrapnel. Others again

asked the shaykh's permission to embark on a voyage or seek work in the city. Some also

explained about a conflict in which they were embroiled and asked the shaykh's mediation

or intervention. Several also requested the shaykh's help and intercession in their dealings

with government officials: postponement of, or exemption from military service, leniency in

the punishment of an offense, etc.

The shaykh never gave no for an answer. He dispensed herbs, sweets, and an occasional

letter to the pharmacy in town to those who came for a medical cure, and he healed the

madmen brought to him by the sheer force of his presence. Others were given a little coin

carrying his blessing, believed to bring them prosperity, and the guerrilla fighters challenged

me to test their newly acquired bullet-stopper. Where his authority was strong enough, the

shaykh imposed solutions to the conflicts brought before him; in others he promised his

mediation. Photographs of the shaykh being received by the shah were prominently

displayed, showing that Shaykh Osman was indeed very well-connected and suggesting he

could indeed arrange his followers' affairs with the government. (It never became clear to

me to what extent he could actually prevail upon the civil and military authorities of the

region; several officials spoke rather derisively about him behind his back, but they always

maintained a polite face in his presence).

The shaykh's hospitality was proverbial, although sometimes a burden on the guests: Once

in the village, one could not leave before having received the shaykh's permission to do so,

and this was often refused. Many people were thus obliged to stay there for four, five, or up

to eight days, each day hearing of the miracles performed by the shaykh and seeing more

influential people come and go. Government officials and tribal chieftains were treated

differently from the commoners, of course. They were almost immediately admitted into the

shaykh's presence (whereas many of the common folk had to wait for more than a day), and

the permission to leave was only a formality for them. The shaykh impressed them, on the

other hand, by the large number of common villagers always attending upon him. Tribal

chieftains took care not to incur his anger (they could not be certain which side their

tribesmen would take in the case of a conflict), and the government officials recognized that

it was much easier for them to deal with the villagers after having consulted with the shaykh

or, even better, to approach them through the shaykh.


It was clear that this had thus been going on for several generations at least, and that the

shaykh and his ancestors had derived much of their influence from their roles as brokers

between the government and village society and as intermediaries between local contenders

for power. Even before his political failure of the 1980s, however, Shaykh Osman had

already experienced that his traditional political role was not universally accepted anymore.

During the last years before his flight from Iraqi Kurdistan, a modern political organization,

the Kurdistan Democratic Party (not to be confused with the party of the same name in Iran)

had successfully started to appropriate the role of supra-tribal authority and power-broker

in the region. This led to a fierce rivalry between the shaykh and the party. The shaykh's men

killed two of the party's activists, so that a violent feud ensued. The most powerful leader of

the KDP, Mulla Mustafa Barzani, was in 1958 and 1959 still in league with Qassem and the

communists, and Shaykh Osman saw himself forced to flee across the border. In 1974, when

the political circumstances had changed considerably and Barzani was allied with the Shah of

Iran, the shaykh had tried to appease his former rival with the gift of a valuable horse, but

Barzani had snubbed him and sent the animal back. Barzani, though from a shaykhly family

himself and a traditional man, was always opposed to those traditional authorities – mostly

shaykhs and tribal chieftains – who might conceivably become rivals. The popularity of

Barzani and the KDP provided an effective check on the shaykh's political influence.

Shaykh Osman had tried to regain some of his political leverage through contacts with the

court, which had its own reasons to be friendly to him. One of his sons lived permanently at

the court, but one did not know whether he should be called a guest of honour or a hostage.

The local government officials also regularly paid their respects to the shaykh, no doubt on

instructions from above, but behind his back they often laughed about him and called him a

fraud. Most of the educated Kurds were strongly inimical to him and accused him of

exploiting the poor villagers' gullibility. Numerous stories circulated about the shaykh's

shrewd and treacherous ways of deceiving the credulous peasants. His faithful followers, of

course, could never be convinced by such tales; in their view, the shaykh's opponents were

materialists, who did not understand true spirituality. Many of them claimed to have

witnessed themselves some of the miraculous deeds of the shaykh; others could quote

reliable witnesses, or mention acquaintances miraculously cured of a disease. Those who

took part in the dhikrs unanimously praised the shaykh's great spiritual powers, to which

they felt their own spiritual experiences were due.

In these observations, there is little that is specific for Kurdistan or for the Naqshbandi order.

In many parts of the Islamic world shaykhs of various tariqas still perform similar roles, and

are surrounded by devotees who are convinced of their saintliness and supernatural powers.

The pattern is perhaps most conspicuous in the Indian subcontinent, where most of the

traditional `ulama are still affiliated with one tariqa or another; in Indonesia too, there are

still shaykhs whose social roles parallel that of Shaykh Osman. In Banten, West Java, there is

for instance the aged Ki Armin, affiliated with the Qadiriya, who has a wide reputation as a

miracle-worker, and whose authority is still acknowledged all over southern Banten. He has


a middle-sized pesantren, where a basic Islamic curriculum is taught in the traditional style,

and once a month he instructs some hundred visitors, often f:uom far away, in the Qadiri

dhikr. Every day he is visited by people who request amulets or other objects with magical

power, for Ki Armin is reputed to have great occult knowledge and powers. Most of his

visitors are petty tradesmen and peasants, but Ki Armin also receives many visits from

middle-level or even higher officials. Some others of the latter come out of curiosity only,

because they hope for some sort of supernatural assistance, others again in order to

smoothen their relations with Bantenese society. Especially among the latter visitors, but

also among some of the ‘common’ people who come to spend a Friday night in Ki Armin's

pesantren, I noticed a curious mixture of credulity and scepticism. Even those who most

openly voiced their doubts about the miracles attributed to the shaykh, or mocked certain

things said or done by him, were nevertheless not certain whether some miracles were not

possible after all.

A century ago, there was much less scepticism with regard to the miraculous powers

attributed to shaykhs, and it may safely be assumed that the devotional attitude of the

common Kurdish people towards their shaykhs was more intense, more widespread, and

less critical, than I found it to be in the 1970s. This accounts, at least in part, for the great

influence and political power wielded by many shaykhs. But it cannot explain why it was only

in the 1880s that the shaykhs emerged as the strongest political leaders.

Political and economic changes in the 19th century

The sudden emergence, and later the gradual decline, of the shaykhs on the political stage

can only be explained with reference to the political and economic developments affecting

Kurdish society in the first half of the 19th century. I do not refer now, as I did above, to the

general advances of European imperialism, but to the more concrete forms in which its

effects manifested themselves in Kurdish society. One of these developments consisted of

the administrative reforms gradually carried out in the Ottoman Empire, which were largely

imposed by, and sometimes a reaction against, the Western powers. These reforms upset

the political balance in Kurdistan, and changed much in the political and social structure. The

other important development was the arrival, also in the beginning of the 19th century, of

Christian missionaries, from France, England, Germany and America, all of whom tried to

convert the local Christians to their own national churches. These missionary efforts among

the Christian minorities had dramatic effects on Muslim-Christian relations in the area.

Around 1800, before these developments had begun to make their mark, Kurdish society

consisted of peasants and shepherding tribesmen. By no means all of the tribesmen were

nomadic. Many of them combined their animal husbandry with some agriculture, and lived

in permanent villages. During the summer months, the animals would be brought to the

summer pastures; if these were close enough, all the villagers might go there too and live in


tents, otherwise they would stay behind in the village and send only some shepherds with

the flocks. Some of the tribes even owned hardly any animals at all and were completely

settled agriculturalists. The Kurdish tribes were (and are) essentially political units, held

together by loyalty to a powerful chief, an ideology of common descent and a strict moral

code including concepts of manliness, bravery and honour, authority relations, prescriptive

marriage rules (endogamous), and rules for alliance and opposition in feuds and other

conflicts. In the small tribes, most of whose members were actual relatives, the relations

were more or less egalitarian, but the larger tribes usually had an aristocratic ruling stratum

that provided an authoritarian leadership. The tribesmen formed a military elite dominating

a lower stratum of peasants and craftsmen, appropriately called ra`yat (which literally

means ‘flock’). The ra`yat could be either Kurdish-speaking Muslims, or Christians (and a few

Jews) of various denominations and languages. To make matters more complicated, the

Christians of certain areas were also organized in militant tribes and carried arms (which was

officially forbidden to Christians in the Muslim Ottoman Empire), meeting with the Kurdish

tribes as equals.22

For several centuries, the Ottoman state had not dealt with this tribal and peasant

population directly but used a regional Kurdish elite as an intermediary. Some of the areas of

the greatest strategic or economic importance were, it is true, governed by centrally

appointed military governors, but as a rule a system of indirect rule prevailed. Large parts of

Kurdistan were governed by Kurdish dynasties, who maintained a large degree of

independence vis à vis the central state. These Kurdish emirates had existed prior to their

incorporation into the Ottoman Empire; the position of their ruling families had been

consolidated by their recognition by the central government. They only had certain military,

and relatively minor tax obligations towards the central state. Most of the revenue was

appropriated by the local rulers (emirs) themselves, who could in this way maintain a court

life of no mean standing. Each of the emirates encompassed a number of tribes or tribal

confederacies (in some cases even a very large number), and the emirs took care to balance

these against each other, so that their rule was not easily challenged. These emirs and their

court and retinue were the only form of government with which most of the tribesmen and

ra`yat ever had to deal. The emirs' rule was, generally, very severe but it was perceived as

just, and their legitimacy was rarely contested. Besides legitimacy and justice, their position

also depended upon their being able to contain and to manipulate tribal conflicts.

Conflicts were (and are) an essential aspect of the existence of a tribe: a tribe only acted as a

unity when confronting an external rival or enemy, and an ambitious young man could only

acquire power by distinguishing himself in military confrontations. The code of honour,

requiring revenge and counter-revenge for the slightest insult, and the wish of young men to

distinguish themselves by bravery led to perpetual conflicts between tribes, within tribes, or

22 A more detailed analysis of the social structure of Kurdistan is to be found in chapter II of

Bruinessen, op.cit.


between tribesmen and ra`yat. One of the major functions of the emir therefore was to

contain these conflicts within acceptable limits, and if necessary make an end to the fighting

and impose a settlement acceptable to both parties. On the other hand, his position

depended on his maintaining a certain amount of rivalry between the major tribes, so that

he could divide and rule. If he was not clever enough in manipulating tribal conflict, the

emirate might fall apart or he might have to yield his position to a more skilled pretender

usually one of his relatives, for only these enjoyed sufficient legitimacy.

The degree of autonomy vis à vis the state that the emirates enjoyed was subject to

fluctuations; under a weak sultan they might be more independent than under a strong one.

The long-term tendency, however, was towards increased central control. Even before 1800,

several emirates had already been abolished and their replaced by a centrally appointed

governor. The really great changes, however, came with the first wave of major

administrative reforms in the 1830s, during which most of Kurdistan was brought under

direct central control. Several of the greatest and most powerful emirs refused to accept this

infringement upon their traditional privileges and rebelled. Challenging the central

authorities, they actually expanded the areas under their control and asserted virtual

independence. In the end, however, they were all brought to heel, and killed or sent into

exile.

The result of this was a sudden upsurge of tribal in-fighting. Whereas previously the emirs

had been able to contain conflict and to impose peaceful settlements or at least truces, the

government officials who had come to replace them missed at once the legitimacy, the

necessary insights, and the power to do so. Some of these officials, in fact, established again

some form of indirect rule, delegating power to tribal chieftains; But this only exacerbated

the rivalries between these chieftains and the ones not chosen, and it forced the latter often

into rebellion. It was not only tribal conflicts that proliferated; robbery, theft and arson also

were rife, and people all over Kurdistan complained of unprecedented insecurity. Kurdish

society obviously needed political leaders whose authority transcended the boundaries of

the single tribe, who knew the society well, and who were widely respected, as the emirs

had been. The government officials were not capable of playing that role. There was only

one type of authorities who more or less answered all requirements: the shaykhs. These

were generally Kurds themselves, and knew the society, with all conflicting interests, very

well. Being religious authorities, they had moreover much stronger legitimacy in the eyes of

the, generally very devout, Kurds than any secular authority.

There was an additional reason why it was especially to religious leaders rather than to any

other authorities that the Kurds turned in this period of transformation. This was the

increasing activities of Christian missionaries from Western Europe and America among the

Christian minorities in Kurdistan. Both the latter communities and the Kurds saw these

missionaries as the vanguards of more direct and open interventions by the Christian nations

in the Middle East, that were likely to drastically change the regional balance of power


between Christians and Muslims. Some of the missionaries did in fact very little to allay

these suspicions and even further encouraged them by their attitudes and behaviour.

Through their consuls and ambassadors in Constantinople (Istanbul), they put pressure on

the Ottoman government to take special measures for the protection of the Christian

minorities against their Muslim neighbours. Two missionaries built a hospital that looked

rather like a fortress, strategically located and overlooking an entire valley. Others

encouraged the local Christians to stop paying their traditional annual tributes to their

Kurdish overlords. As a result of these and similar acts, the tension between Muslims and

Christians steadily increased, and reached its first violent climax in the 1840s. A punitive

action by one of the last remaining Kurdish emirs against Christian subjects who refused to

pay him their taxes turned into a full-blown massacre. This in turn made the Europeans put

heavy pressure on the Sultan to punish this emir. The abolishment of the last emirates by

the Ottoman government, which soon followed, was perceived to be the doing of the

Europeans, and the local Christians were regarded as the accomplices of those foreign

enemies. The political chaos and anarchy of the following period was compounded by

Muslim apprehensions that the Christian powers were scheming to destroy the traditional

Islamic order. All this did much to strengthen the Kurds' Islamic awareness and to make

them unite behind religious leaders. The Naqshbandi shaykhs, with their strong emphasis on

orthodoxy and their rejection of non-Islamic traditional practices, were more militant and

more outspoken against concessions to the Christians than those of the other important

order in Kurdistan, the Qadiriya. It was therefore they especially who, by the middle of the

19th century, gradually grew into the role of the natural political leaders. This was most

conspicuously so in Central and Northern Kurdistan, the areas where the missionary

activities had been most intensive.23

In Southern Kurdistan there were but insignificant Christian minorities, and hardly, if any,

missionary activity. The Christian communities of Central Kurdistan, on the other hand,

attracted missionaries of several different churches, and so did, although to a lesser extent,

those of Northern Kurdistan. There is a quite convincing correlation between the locations of

missionary activity and those where Naqshbandi shaykhs acquired a large popular following.

In Southern Kurdistan there was, in fact, never a rebellion led by a Naqshbandi shaykh. The

first such rebellions took place precisely in the parts of Central Kurdistan where the

missionaries' activities had created the greatest disturbances, in Nehri (Hakkari) and in

Barzan. This correlation does not mean that these rebellions were primarily anti-Christian. In

fact, the two shaykhs concerned (Shaykh `Ubaydullah and the shaykhs of Barzan) had good

reputations even among missionaries, and were known as tolerant and just persons.

Shaykh `Ubaydullah was in the 1870s universally regarded as the most influential person of

all Central and Northern Kurdistan. Contemporary authors observed that he was held in

even higher esteem by the Kurds than the Sultan himself – although the latter was then 23 This is a summary of the argument in chapters III and IV of Bruinessen, op.cit.


recognized as the Caliph! He was extremely wary of the political ambitions of Armenian

nationalists, and highly discontented with Turkish and Persian misrule of the entire area. This

at least is what he wrote to an English missionary with whom he corresponded. The latter

complaint probably refers to conflicts of authority between the shaykh and centrally

appointed, ‘reformist’ bureaucrats'. The Russian-Turkish war of 1877-78, during which

Russian armies penetrated far into Ottoman territory (including parts of Kurdistan), brought

much misery, disorder and insecurity to the Kurdish provinces. The defeat of the Ottoman

Empire in this war shook the little confidence in the Ottoman government that the Kurds still

had, and strengthened their fears of European and Armenian domination. These were the

conditions in which Shaykh `Ubaydullah contemplated the establishment of a separate

Kurdish state, probably in order to forestall similar Armenian designs. He diplomatically

informed the British of his intentions, through a missionary with whom he was acquainted,

and even tried to enlist European support, attempting to play the British against the

Russians. His relation with the Sultan remained ambivalent: he tried to establish the first

nucleus of his Kurdish state on Iranian territory, and offered the Sultan, as Caliph, suzerainty

over it. It is almost certain, however, that he intended in a later stage to incorporate large

parts of Ottoman Kurdistan into his state as well. The shaykh's attempts, as said above,

ended in failure, and he spent the rest of his life in exile. His authority and that of his

descendants among the Kurds, however, remained undiminished, and the family continued

to play a prominent role in the Kurdish movement until quite recently.

Decline of the political influence of the tariqa shaykhs

In order to explain the emergence of Naqshbandi shaykhs as the major supra-tribal political

leaders of the Kurds and the first spokesmen of their national aspirations, we had to take

recourse to a series of factors of different levels of abstraction. Some were structural and of

a general nature, others contingent but no less crucial (the personality of Mawlana Khalid;

the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878). The rapid decline after 1925 can even less be

attributed to one or two structural factors only. The political and socio-economic conditions

of Turkey, Iran and Iraq varied a great deal, and the causes of the decline are, at least in part,

different in each of the three parts of Kurdistan.

In Turkey, the banning of all Sufi orders and their activities immediately after Shaykh Sa'id’s

uprising was the most obvious factor. Many Kurdish Naqshbandi shaykhs were physically

removed: a few were executed, others exiled, while many fled abroad, especially to Syria.

Those who remained behind in Turkish Kurdistan henceforth abstained from political

activities. They did not lose all their influence, but could rarely afford to even interfere in

tribal affairs. Even their religious teaching had to be in secret; they and their followers

turned quietist. This process proved to be not entirely irreversible. When Turkey's political

system became a multi-party democracy, after the Second World War, several Kurdish

shaykhs were drawn into party politics, because they could still command large numbers of


votes for the party that enlisted them. Due to the system of political patronage that soon

developed, some shaykhs (among whom one of Shaykh Sa'id's sons) in fact succeeded in

recapturing much of their earlier political leverage. Without any exception, however, they

remained accommodating towards the government; none of them associated himself openly

with the Kurdish or any other dissident movement.

In Iraq and Iran, the tariqas were never banned; nevertheless, the shaykhs had to yield their

political prominence to other leaders there as well. One interesting phenomenon is that,

from the 1920s on, several influential political leaders of the Kurds belonged to shaykhly

families but were not shaykhs themselves. Using their families' traditional prestige and

influence as a starting capital, they set out to build up a wider following by purely political

means, seeking their legitimacy in nationalism rather than religion. Shaykh Ùbaydullah's

grandson Sayyid Taha was one such leader; during the 1920s he was politically active in Iran

as well as Iraq, and was affiliated with various nationalist groups and organizations.24 The

most striking leader of this kind was Mulla Mustafa Barzani, the younger brother of Shaykh

Àbdussalam and Shaykh Ahmad of Barzan. The eldest brother was hanged by the Ottomans

in punishment of a rising, his successor Ahmad was frequently embroiled with the British

authorities in Iraq. Mulla Mustafa began his career as a young man leading raids by the

family's loyal supporters against enemy tribes and the British, in the early 1920s. In the

course of time, he established himself not only as a successful guerrilla commander and the

leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, but even as the greatest national leader of the

Kurds tout court. Among his family's traditional followers he was at first only regarded as the

younger brother of Shaykh Ahmad, but for all other Kurds Shaykh Ahmad is mainly known as

Mulla Mustafa's elder brother, who happened to be a shaykh of the Naqshhandiya.

Kurdish nationalism thus appeared to have become a factor of greater importance in these

leaders' careers than religion, whereas earlier the two could not be separated. In all parts of

Kurdistan we see that during the 1920s nationalist associations and parties take over from

the shaykhs.25 This is related to socio-economic developments taking place in all three

countries more or less simultaneously, and the emergence of a new middle class of military

officers and civil servants, doctors, lawyers, engineers and teachers. Both the Ottoman

Empire and Iran experienced constitutional revolutions during the first decade of this

century. The Young Turks and their Iranian counterparts belonged to this new middle class,

24 On the political activities of Sayyid Taha and other descendants of Shaykh Ùbaydullah, see:

Bruinessen, op.cit., Appendix to Chapter IV.

25 Martin van Bruinessen, ‘Nationalismus und religioser Konflikt: Der kurdische Widerstand im Iran’,

p. 372-409 in: Religion und Politik im Iran, ed. by Kurt Greussig. Frankfurt a.M.: Syndikat, 1981; idem,

‘Vom Osmanismus zum Separatismus: Religiöse und ethnische Hintergründe der Rebellion des

Scheich Said’, p. 109-165 in: Islam und Politik in der Türkei, ed. by Jochen Blaschke and Martin van

Bruinessen. Berlin: EXpress Edition, 1985.


that had been exposed to European ideas. It was they who organized the first modern

political parties. Some of the Kurds belonging to the same stratum continued to cooperate

with their Turkish and Persian political friends; others gradually turned to Kurdish nationalist

politics and associated with the more enlightened membersof the traditional Kurdish elites

(shaykhs and tribal chieftains), establishing Kurdish political parties.

The political developments of this period – the First World War, the Turkish War for

Independence, the establishment of the mandated states of Iraq and Syria, the sponsoring of

the idea of an independent Kurdish state by the British (be it during a few years only), the

establishment of increasingly dictatorial westernizing regimes in Turkey and Iran – all

concurred to stimulate the spread of Kurdish nationalist ideas among ever wider circles of

the Kurdish population. Nationalist parties and organizations found a following not simply

because of the traditional prestige of their leaders but also because of their ideology itself.

Whereas some of the shaykhs were among the first to formulate Kurdish national demands

(alongside socio-economic demands and demands of a more purely religious nature), it was

the general spread of nationalism in Kurdish society that caused them to be gradually

replaced by nationalist parties.

To some extent, these developments have their parallels in Indonesia. There too, the

emergence of a new class of intellectuals (teachers, doctors; to some extent also civil

servants) with a Western education provided society with a new leadership. Among the

nationalist organizations established by this new elite, it was especially the Sarekat Islam

that proved capable of mobilizing the same social strata that had hitherto looked to the

tariqa shaykhs as their natural political leaders.26 Just as was the case in Kurdistan, the

leaders of this organization were not an entirely different class from the shaykhs: some

shaykhs or their relatives became active members of the Sarekat Islam. The Sarekat,

however, opposed some of the ‘superstitious’ practices in which some shaykhs indulged, and

it incurred the wrath of several Naqshbandi shaykhs.27 The conflict between the Sarekat and

these shaykhs was clearly related to a competition for leadership of the local or regional

Muslim community.

There is, however, another factor that also contributed much to the decline of the influence

of the tariqa shaykhs in Indonesia, and that does not have its parallel in Kurdistan. The rapid

expansion of the Naqshbandi tariqa in the 19th century represented one wave in an ongoing

26 A.P.E. Korver, ‘Sarekat Islam, 1912-1916’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Amsterdam, 1982;

J.Th.P. Blumberger, ‘Sarekat Islam’, in: Encyclopaedie van Nederlandsch-Indië; Sartono Kartodirdjo et

al. (eds), Sarekat Islam Lokal, Jakarta: Arsip Nasional, 1975.

27 Th.W. Juynboll, ‘Die “Sarekat Islam”-Bewegung auf Java’, Der Islam 5 (1914), 154-159, refers to the

vehement opposition of certain Naqshbandi shaykhs to the Sarekat Islam (p. 157). In the 1916 Jambi

rebellion and the 1926 Banten revolt (see notes 9 and 10), however, tariqa leaders co-operated with

the local Sarekat Islam branches or, rather, brought them partly under their control.


series of Middle Eastern influences that gradually made Indonesian Islam more sharià-

oriented and purged it of local practices. The Naqshbandiya, as the most sharià-minded of

the tariqas, came to replace Shattariya and other tariqas that were more syncretistic and

had incorporated many pre-Islamic Indonesian (or Indian) practices. Not long after the

Naqshbandiya had begun its victorious campaigns on Java and Sumatra, it met opposition

from a following wave of even more sharià-minded reformers, who criticized several

Naqshbandi practices as bid'a. It is especially the great Minangkabau àlim Ahmad Khatib

who should be mentioned in this connection. During the years 1906-08 he issued, from his

Meccan residence, three fatwas against the Naqshbandiya, one of which was recently

reprinted.28 Due to his enormous prestige, the expansion of the Naqshbandi tariqa was

gradually impeded, especially in the Minangkabau area (West Sumatra), and the shaykhs

there lost field to ‘modernist’ ùlama.

As the number of Indonesian hajis went on increasing, so did the influence of Middle Eastern

Islamic thought. The great Egyptian reformers, Muhammad Àbduh and Rashid Rida, had

perhaps a greater impact on the Indonesian Muslim community than on any other. Their

anti-imperialist attitude, which did not reject the many useful things that the West had to

offer to the Muslim world, was much more sophisticated than that of the Naqshbandiya, and

had a strong appeal to educated Indonesians. Leadership of the anti-colonial struggle,

among those Indonesians who primarily defined themselves as Muslims, soon passed to the

‘modernists’.29 All this does not mean that the Naqshbandiya and other tariqas lost all their

influence among the Indonesian masses. They lost, however, an important political function

that they had performed during a few decades, as the point of crystallization of political and

socio-economic grievances. They received a further blow when in 1924 the Holy Cities in the

Hijaz were conquered by Ibn Sa'ud, whose Wahhabi persuasion forbade the traditional

tariqa activities. The Indonesian Naqshbandis were cut off from what had once been the

major source of their order's dynamics. Their impetus subsided, there was little further

expansion and little or no activism on their part. Like their Kurdish brethren, they became

quietist and only indulged in private devotional exercises.

28 Ahmad Khatib bin Abdul Lathif, Fatwa tentang: Tharikat Naqasyabandiyah. Medan: Firma

‘Islamiyah’, 1978 (4th edition). A good survey of the pro- and contra-Naqshbandiya polemics in:

B.J.O. Schrieke, ‘Bijdrage tot de bibliografie van de huidige godsdienstige beweging ter Sumatra’s

Westkust’, Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (TBG) 59 (1919-1921), 249-325. See

also: Werner Kraus, Zwischen Reform und Rebellion. Über die Entwicklung des Islams in

Minangkabau. Wiesbaden, 1984.

29 Deliar Noer, The Modernist Muslim Movement in Indonesia, 1900-1942. Kuala Lumpur, etc.: Oxford

University Press, 1973.


Conclusion

In order to make a few points of methodology in the study of Islamic movements, I have

deliberately compared two cases of Islamic, or Islam-inspired, political activism that not only

coincided well in time but also showed a number of other similarities. It was not difficult to

isolate a few structural factors that, at least partly, accounted for the emergence and decline

of the movement in both cases: the breakdown of indigenous political systems under the

impact of European expansion, and the emergence of a new middle class, with western

education, that established modern political organizations, respectively.

On this superficial level, the two cases are quite comparable. As an explanation this is not

incorrect but still very unsatisfactory. It cannot explain why developments took place

precisely at the time they did, nor why similar circumstances did not give rise to similar

developments in other places. In my opinion, too many scholarly attempts to explain the

present Islamic radicalism in various corners of the Islamic world remain stuck at this level. It

is true, the mass migration from villages and small towns to the metropolises of the Third

World; the existence of large numbers of half-educated youth who will not be able to find

proper employment; the glaring inequalities resulting from Western-inspired development

policies, aiming at. increase of the GNP rather than of social welfare; the failure of the

various socialist roads to development; and other global factors that have repeatedly been

mentioned, certainly have to be a central part of an explanation. They can, however, never

be more than only a part of the explanation.

The examples in this article have shown, I hope, how essential an analysis of the concrete

social, economic and political conditions of the societies concerned is, and how great the

importance of accidental factors. Different causes may lead to the same effects, as is well

known and as is illustrated again in the examples given above. In order to rescue the

scientific pretensions of the discipline, functionalist sociologists and anthropologists have

taken recourse to the concept of ‘functional equivalent’. In such a view, certain specific

effects are to be expected when a certain combination of contributing factors or their

functional equivalents are present. In most cases, however, this is nothing more than a

circular reasoning, for it can only be established in retrospect which condition or event

·constituted a functional equivalent of a postulated causal factor. Rigorous explanation as in

the natural sciences, with recourse to universal or quasi-universal laws, is not possible in the

study of human society. Attempts in that direction can only lead to uninteresting statements

of a pompous and boring banality. I have therefore opted for an interpretative approach,

describing the cases to be explained in their social and historical context (or at least those

elements of the context that I thought most relevant), and paying attention to the

perceptions of the participants and to ideologies as well as to objective factors. I had to take

account of factors of various levels, from that of global political economy to that of social

and individual psychology, as well as to factors that seemed purely accidental. Such an


approach may be blamed as eclectic and a-theoretical, but I do not believe that better

alternatives exist.

Postscript: Kurdistan of Iran after the Revolution

When I rejected the idea of ‘functional equivalents’, I meant this cannot be of any help in

constructing a rigorous theoretical system of predictive power. I did not wish to deny that

between two different sets of circumstances and the resulting developments there cannot

be striking parallels. Much of the parallelism, however, depends on our selective perception

and our interpretation of both the circumstances and the developments. As a final

illustration, I wish to return to where I started, the situation of Iranian Kurdistan immediately

after the Islamic Revolution. The rise and eclipse of Shaykh Osman and several other Kurdish

ùlama will be seen to show some similarity to that of the Naqshbandi shaykhs in the period

with which the central part of this article deals.

Twice, during the past half century, did central government authority suddenly fall away in

the Iranian part of Kurdistan: during and immediately after the Second World War, and again

after the fall of the Shah's regime in February 1979. The situation then resembled, in some

respects, that of Ottoman Kurdistan in the mid-19th century. Tribal conflicts were no longer

held in check, socioeconomic conflicts proliferated, tribal chieftains and other pretenders set

themselves up as semi-independent warlords, violent clashes took place. There were no

traditional supra-tribal indigenous authorities present; in both cases, religious figures were

soon propelled into this role. In 1945-1946 it was the leading àlim of Mahabad, Qazi

Muhammad, who became first the president of the Kurdistan Democratic Party and then of

the autonomous Republic of Mahabad. His prestige and commanding personality made him

the proper person to unite the competing and quarrelling chieftains of the surrounding

districts.

The events of 1978 and 1979 threw another àlim into the limelight, Ìzzaddin Husayni, the

Imam of the Friday Mosque of Mahabad. Within weeks of the fall of the Pahlavi regime,

delegates from all over Kurdistan, representing various political tendencies and local

interests, met in Mahabad to establish a common political platform (based on

democratization, autonomy and an equitable share in the state budget for the Kurdish area).

They designated Husayni as their spokesman in all negotiations with the new central

authorities. At the local level, too, various ùlama, suddenly surfaced as political leaders.

Shaykh Osman, who, because of his tariqa network, could count on a large following, was

one of them. The religious aspect of the revolution all over Iran, the formulation of political

issues in religious terms by many of the revolutionary media, no doubt were one of the

reasons why many people looked first to their ùlama for leadership (although most of the

Kurds are Sunnis, not Shiìs like most other Iranians). But another factor was, I think, of

greater importance: there were, in the first months after the revolution, no other leaders


whose authority was sufficiently widely recognized. The two Kurdish parties, KDPI and

Komala, had only just emerged from hiding. The latter was small, its influence still localized

and its leaders not well-known to the public; the leaders of the former had only just

returned from prison or foreign exile. These parties were not yet capable of offering the sort

of leadership the situation demanded; moreover, they had to compete with a plethora of

small, radical parties of various persuasions as well as tribal chieftains and former landlords

eager to reappropriate their old power and possessions (some of which they had lost under

the shah). The ùlama, on the other hand, were known to, and trusted by, the unorganized

peasants and townspeople, and the stronger among them were capable of resolving tribal

conflicts and of inducing petty chieftains in their region to co-operate. In fact, most of these

ùlama received a strong backing from tribal chieftains and landowners, who were anxious

lest power might fall into the hands of the more radical political groups.

It was thus that Shaykh Osman could re-enact the role played almost a century earlier by

some of the great Kurdish Naqshbandi shaykhs. It was, however, not he who most

resembled the great shaykhs of the past but Ìzzaddin Husayni. Very much like Shaykh

Ùbaidullah and his descendants had united the tribes by giving them a common purpose

and by balancing one against the other, Husayni engaged with the various political forces in

the present situation from a position of recognised moral authority. He consciously modelled

himself on Qazi Muhammad (who had been executed by the shah and was therefore

considered a national martyr by the Kurds), and appealed to nationalist as well as religious

sentiment. As a mullah, he had the trust of the villagers and the poor townspeople as well as

of the more conservative religious strata; his nationalism made him popular among the

shopkeepers, petty traders and craftsmen. Most remarkable was his popularity among the

radical youth: Ìzzaddin Husayni professed being a religious socialist (he told me he was an

admirer of Mahmud Talaqani),30 and he had better relations with the radical left groups than

with the more moderate KDPI. The latter party resented Husayni's political ambitions, but it

saw itself forced to maintain friendly, though cool, relations with him because of his great

popularity.

The political influence of Ìzzaddin Husayni, and a fortiori that of the other ùlama, lasted

only for a short time. The KDPI and the Komala lost no time organizing party branches all

over Kurdistan, forming armed militias and committees supervising economic affairs, setting

up political education courses, etc. In the armed confrontations with the central

government, which began as early as August 1979, these parties were much better able to

hold their own than the badly organized personal following of Husayni. The organizational

and military effectiveness of the KDPI and Komala gradually began to count more than

Husayni's charisma. Within two years, he was completely eclipsed by these two parties. He is

still active, with a small group of guerrilla fighters loyal to him, but this is only possible

30 Ayatullah Mahmud Talaqani (d. 1979) was the one Shiì cleric known to be sympathetic to the Left. In his book Islam and Property (Islam wa Malikiyat) he sketches the outline of an Islamic socialism.


because these parties tolerate him. Shaykh Osman, as said before, lost much of his

influence, and finally had to flee, because of his confrontations with these parties.

The rapidity with which the Kurdish `ulama lost their leading position shows that their

emergence as leaders did not reflect strong religious sentiment among the Kurds but was

due to other, social and political factors. The KDPI's political programme is explicitly

secularist, and the party has always opposed the idea of an Islamic Republic (only recently, in

what seems an attempt at conciliation with the central government, has it softened its stand

and accepts the status quo). The Komala, always more radical, has felt so little need to

accommodate religious sentiment that it actually renamed itself, after the fusion with

another small left organization, the Communist Party of Iran. This patently un-Islamic name

does not seem to have caused it a loss of popularity.31 Although the Kurds are, generally

speaking, pious Muslims, political leadership among them does not need religious

legitimation ( this may partly be a reaction against the Islamic phraseology used by the

central government, which is very unpopular among the Iranian Kurds). The `ulama

temporarily acquired power when there were no other widely trusted candidates; they lost

it as soon as more effective rivals appeared. This may also caution us against overestimating

the role of religion in the sheikhs' rebellions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

31 The reader interested in the political developments in Kurdistan during the years 1979-85 is

referred to: Martin van Bruinessen, ‘The Kurds and the Gulf War’, MERIP-Middle East Report, August

1986.

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