The Northern Mosaic: Peoples and Faiths of North Iraq

AINA Assyrian International News Agency - Modesto,CA,USA
Saturday, January 20, 2007

Although the US appears to be initially facing somewhat greater challenges from various Shi`ite groups in southern Iraq (See the Lead Story) [go to AINA website, link above], the complexity of peoples in northern Iraq remains a long-term challenge that could prove extremely volatile, particularly given the longstanding ambitions of the Kurds and the possibility of Turkish intervention.
In Part 1 of this Dossier, we examined the ethnic groups of northern Iraq -- Kurds, Arabs, Turkmen, and smaller groups -- and noted that these sometimes overlapped with religious community. Part 2 looks more closely at the religious mosaic in northern Iraq, and at the potential for outside intervention.

As noted in Part 1, most of Iraq's Kurds are Sunnis (though a few are Shi`ite); yet they come from a different legal school (madhhab) of Sunnism than do Iraq's Sunni Arabs, since the Kurds are Shaf`i and most Iraqi Arabs who are Sunni belong to the Hanafi school. But Kurdish Muslim identity is more closely linked to Sufi mystical orders than to orthodox legal schools, and some of these Sufi mystical orders may include members who are not Muslims at all but members of one of the syncretistic sects of northern Iraq. For like many mountain regions of the Middle East, northern Iraq is one of those areas where small, almost fossilized communities continue to exist, with their roots veiled deep in history and their beliefs often secret to protect them from persecution by the majority.

There is some overlap, and there is considerable room for argument about how to categorize the religious groups of northern Iraq. Almost no one has ever considered the Yazidis, for example, to be Muslims, since they have a very distinct set of religious beliefs and since many Muslims denounce them as "devil-worshippers"; yet other small groups, such as the `Ali-Ilahis, have very similar beliefs to the Yazidis but are sometimes classed as extremely heterodox Muslims.

This Dossier does not seek to get into such debates about classification, but the very fact that sometimes a given group can be considered one thing and other times another may have something to do with the confusion about how many belong to each group. Are there 100,000 Yazidis? That would seem to be on the high end of most estimates, but some Yazidi authors have claimed they number 800,000, though not entirely in Iraq. Numbers will not be cited very frequently in this Dossier precisely because it is so hard to come up with reliable statistics.

Muslim Groups for northern Iraq, most mainstream Muslims (leaving out some of the small syncretist groups) are Sunnis, though there are some Shi`ites, either Kurds (particularly along the Iranian border), or Arabs resettled from southern Iraq as part of the Arabization program. As noted, Sunni Arabs and Sunni Kurds belong to difference legal schools of Sunnism.

But among the Kurds in particular, the fact that one is a Sunni of the Shaf`i legal school is usually of importance only to religious scholars. Far more important are the traditional identification of tribal groups with one of the major Sufi mystical orders.

Sufism is not a sect -- there are Sunni Sufis and Shi`ite Sufis -- but an approach to religious practice and devotion, often associated with membership in a particular "order" (tariqa) following certain specific ceremonial practices and faithful to the teachings and rituals of a (sometimes hereditary) chain of sheikhs. In a few areas of the Islamic world, Sufism and specific Sufi orders have had profound impact; among these areas are Central Asia and the Caucasus, plus Kurdistan. Often, in all these areas, the sheikh of a Sufi order was also the military leader of tribes which might resist the power of the central government. We are not speaking of remote medieval events here: the Barzanis who have led the Kurdistan Democratic Party in the past century are hereditary sheikhs of the Naqshbandi order.

There are Sufi orders among the Shi`ite Kurds as well as the Sunnis, and the Nurbakhshi order is one of the most influential there. But among Sunni Kurds, the two major orders are the Qadiri and the Naqshbandi. The Qadiri take their name from their founder, the 12th century sheikh `Abd al-Qadir al-Gailani (Gilani, Khaylani). The other order, the Naqshbandi, was founded at Bukhara in Central Asia in the 14th Century by Baha' al-Din Naqshband, and introduced into Kurdistan more recently, really taking hold only in the early 19th century under the influence of a particularly charismatic leader.

The two orders tend to divide geographically: to the northern and western parts of Iraqi Kurdistan one finds mostly Naqshbandis; to the east and south, Qadiris. These divisions also follow tribal lines. As already noted, the Barzani family, leaders of the KDP, are hereditary Sufi masters as well as political leaders. The Talabani tribe of Jalal Talabani, head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), are Qadiris, though the Talabani leadership of the PUK, unlike the Barzanis in the KDP, is not itself from a line of Sufi sheikhs.

It needs to be emphasized that the real distinctions here are not doctrinal, but involve religious practices and a sense of belonging to a larger organization; the practices may include dancing and chanting, meditation, and the like, with some rituals characteristic of the particular order. The fundamental structure of a Sufi order, in which the murid or follower is loyal to a sheikh or master, fits neatly into a basically tribal society, and has often been the reason that Sufi masters could become powerful rebel chieftains, since they have a following of loyalists already in place. If those loyalists also happen to belong to the same tribe, the bonds of loyalty are reinforced.
Thus the Barzanis -- Ahmad, Mustafa, and now Mas`ud have been both religious and political/military leaders of their region.

Thus, too, the longstanding split between the KDP and the PUK has multiple levels of identity: it is a split between rival political organizations, and between the personalities of Mas`ud Barzani and Jalal Talabani; but it also reflects the division between Naqshbandi and Qadiri, tribal divisions, and even dialect areas of Kurdish.
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This two-part Dossier has not by any means exhausted the complexities of northern Iraq. There are few real experts (one would need, at a minimum, a knowledge of both Arabic and Kurdish, while Turkish and even Aramaic would help). But the new occupying power may be wishing very soon that it could find a few.