Between Muslims: Religious Difference in Iraqi Kurdistan by J. Andrew Bush (review)

This is a very different kind of book that follows Iraqi Kurdish Muslims who reject Islamic piety but remain closely engaged with Islamic traditions and pious Muslims. As the author J. Andrew Bush explains, "the tendency that is at the heart of this book: to turn away from piety yet not to leave Islam" (p. 89). Thus, Bush eschews emphasis on Kurdish national identity to explore through daily life experiences, poetry, religious sermons, and Islamic history—layers of Islamic tradition normally ignored in the existing literature when evaluating the current Iraqi Kurdish experience. He finds, "without rejecting Islam, many Muslims do turn away from piety and sustain relations with other (pious) Muslims while doing so" (p. 6).

Bush—who obviously speaks, reads, and writes fluently in Kurmanji and Sorani Kurdish—spent more than a decade in Iraqi Kurdistan, on and off from 2004, with the bulk of his fieldwork occurring in 2008/9. He developed numerous friendships that facilitated a number of detailed interviews. Bush's bibliography and documentation also indicate his familiarity with the existing literature.

In each chapter, Bush uses a particular person's experiences to explore and illustrate his subject. Chapter 1, for example, revolves around a 59-year-old woman he calls Pexshan. "She received considerable instruction in the virtues that many Kurdish Muslims prize, and she was exposed to a much longer history of debate about those virtues and practices in Islamic history" (p. 31). Nevertheless, "despite this instruction, she expressed her aversion to Muslim piety and her attraction to non-Islamic traditions, even while she continued to engage with more pious Muslims in a variety of contexts" (p. 31). Pexshan's "journey involved listening to the critique of communists, asking a Christian foreigner's opinion about Islam, and making a kind of imaginary passage through Zoroastrianism as a non-Islamic religion" (p. 52). Throughout, "the language of poetry offers a useful way of describing her orientation to Islamic traditions" (p. 32).

The author bases Chapter 2 on a study of 17 diwans or collected works of poetry to scrutinize the relationship of the Muslim lover and the beloved, who is usually a kafir (nonbeliever). Interestingly, Bush notes that the beloved is not necessarily male or female as Kurdish grammar "allows for this ambiguity since pronouns in Kurdish are not gendered" (p. 71). Poetically, he envisages, "the brightness and singularity of the face reflect divine unity, while the darkness and multiplicity of locks of hair suggest the kufir of polytheism" (p. 65).

By closely examining these texts, Bush illustrates how this imagined relationship has shifted in more recent times to a new politicization of religious identity. "Yet the figure of the beloved was not entirely abandoned. Rather, it had shifted, and the Kurdish nation was to become the new object of the poet's unflinching love and dedication" (p. 80). Along this journey, Bush identifies and praises the Baban emirs who patronized the arts, including the Pillar Poets, and founded the city of Sulaymaniyya as a leading cultural center in 1785 (fairly recently, by Kurdish stands). These Pillar Poets illustrated "that Kurdish can stand alongside Arabic and Persian as a language for Muslims' pious striving" (p. 61). The author also notes their religious tolerance, evidenced by an oral tradition among Kurdish Jews (who have largely migrated to Israel) in which the founder of Sulaymaniyya had proclaimed, "a town with no Jews is not considered a proper town" (p. 73).

In Chapter 3, Newzad, a Kurdish man married for 10 years, engages the author repeatedly through prose and poetry about love, marriage, friendship, and local politics to clarify how he turned away from piety. In contrast to the preceding chapter, "this chapter tells the different but related story of how the figure of the beloved appears in the course of everyday life in contemporary Kurdistan" (p. 88). "God becomes a lover because desire is finite, because ordinary relationships in this world are characterized...