Islam in Kurdistan: Religious Communities and Their Practices in Contemporary Northern Iraq Edith Szanto Contents Introduction ....................................................................................... 2 Constructing the Boundaries of Religion: Minorities and Heterodox Muslims in Pre-modern Kurdistan ......................................................................................... 3 Building Institutions: Or Tracing Fault Lines of Conflict ....................................... 4 The Social Makeup of Sectarianism and Ethnic Conflict Since 2011 .......................... 7 Structural Conditions and the Polarization of Identities from 2011 to 2017 ................ 7 During the Rise of ISIS in 2014: A Brief “Interlude of Unity” ............................. 9 Militias and the Militarization of Identities .................................................. 10 The 2017 Kurdish Referendum on Independence ............................................... 11 Popular Sunni Practices .......................................................................... 13 Conclusion ........................................................................................ 14 References ........................................................................................ 15 Abstract “Kurdish Islam”– what is that? The adjective is derived from a noun that names a people and their languages living in Eastern Anatolia, Northeastern Syria, North- ern Iraq, and Northwestern Iran. However, here it refers to only Iraqi Kurdistan. The noun refers to a religion. What a religion is and what Islam means is a much larger debate, which unfortunately cannot be covered here. For the purposes of this chapter “Islam in Kurdistan” actually refers to Muslim Kurdish society going back to the Tanzimat, an Ottoman set of legal reforms, which organized commu- nities along religious divides. In particular, this article will examine what prac- tices are considered outside of the scope of Islam and why. What constitutes the boundary? Unfortunately, a more detailed discussion of intra-Islamic discourses is beyond the scope of this chapter. Instead, it will focus on communal bound- aries, social structures as they relate to religious institutions and authority, shifting E. Szanto (*) Religious Studies, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA e-mail: eszanto@ua.edu © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 M. Woodward, R. Lukens-Bull (eds.), Handbook of Contemporary Islam and Muslim Lives, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73653-2_88-1 1