The background of Entessar is academic (professor at Spring Hill College, in Mobile, Alabama), and he does a good deal of book-review work in the academic literature. If there is a bias in his approach, it is toward close analysis, and this is the most useful aspect of the book. If this bias points toward a weakness, it is that there is a reluctance to ground in the power-centered articulations of Islam itself problems associated with resolutions of conflict in the Islamic culture of the Middle East. That is, while Entessar acknowledges the power of Islam to encompass nation-state consciousness, he seems to shrink back from following the consequences of (for example) Islamic universalism to their ultimate conclusion, in favor of emphasizing the growth in use of political structures and referents on the part of the Kurds. In this regard, it may be noted that while the Kurds are Islamic in orientation, they are not as a group militantly Islamist. Nor, it seems, are they particularly disposed toward subsuming their nationalistic goals to (for example) the Iranian Umma project. Kurdish ethnonationalism is thus a different exercise from Islamic universalism, and the fact is that the confrontation between these forces has not been sufficiently played out to settle once for all the issues surrounding the creation of Kurdistan as a realistic enterprise."Rival Kurdish Parties Sign Peace Pact." Middle East Reporter, 26 November 1994, 6. This consciousness, says Entessar, has exercised influence on the political environments of Turkey, Iran, and Iraq. That is, government policies in each nation-state have had to take account of significant and missional Kurdish minority presence. In the wake of the Gulf War of 1991, for example, Turkey made concessions to governance autonomy and publicly sided with Allied criticisms of Iraqi programs of chemical-warfare genocide against the Kurds. Iran, for its part, appears to have been obliged to assess and reassess its own all |
