Kurdish Women's Liberation: Behind the Feminist Revolutions Against Theocracy
Jineologî is a little-known concept outside of the Middle East that has an important role in the feminist struggles against theocracy, from the fight against ISIS to the revolution in Iran
This October, feminist journalist Nagihan Akarsel was murdered outside her home in Iraqi Kurdistan, making her the fourth Kurdish dissident of Turkish origin to be killed in this autonomous region in Iraq since September 2021. According to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), Kurdish feminists and academics are accusing Turkey's intelligence agencies of orchestrating her murder. Nagihan Akarsel's death got no attention in the West, which is unsurprising since the interventionism of Erdogan's Turkey and the Islamic Republic of Iran in the Middle East is generally ignored. "There is no international pressure on Ankara and Tehran to stop their assaults against the Kurdistan region, thus both countries are emboldened to increase their terrorist acts of assassinations, drone attacks, and bombardments," says the Kurdish writer Niyaz Abdullah.
The Journalist and researcher who was killed, Nagihan Akarsel, was the co-editor of Jineologî, a magazine dedicated to the Kurdish women's liberation movement, and the co-founder of the Academy of Jineology in Iraqi Kurdistan. Jineologî, or "women's science," is a little-known concept outside of the Middle East, but it is the origin of the Kurdish slogan "Jin, Jiyan, Azadî" or "Woman, Life, Freedom," which is now very popular due to its use in Iran and around the world in the protests against the Islamic Republic. The regime is accused of killing the 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman Mahsa Amini for not wearing Hijab in the "proper" way. The recent revolution against theocracy in Iran spread from Amini's hometown in the province of Kurdistan, with a Kurdish-majority population, to other Iranian provinces, and the protests are using the Kurdish slogan "Woman, Life, Freedom."
This is not the first time that Kurdish feminism has inspired a rebellion against murderous religious fanaticism. The armed wing of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), a socialist Kurdish party in Syria, forms the majority of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) which played a decisive role in defeating ISIS. They are the most important ally of the West in its conflict with the "Islamic State." The PYD paramilitary force has two main arms, the gender-mixed People's Protection Units (YPG) and the all-female Women's Protection Units (YPJ), it officially follows the doctrine of Jineologî, and women make up 40% of the fighters, who have joined the battles in the front lines. There is also a gender quota of 40% applied to officer corps. Kurdish female fighters along with their male comrades were the first to rescue the thousands of Yazidis trapped by ISIS on Iraq's Mount Sinjar in 2014, a minority ethnoreligious group who faced genocide and systemic sexual enslavement of its women and girls under the dystopian rule of ISIS. The extreme persecution of sexual and gender minorities by ISIS also led to the creation of what might be the first LGBTIQ militia ever in the Middle East by the name of The Queer Insurrection and Liberation Army (TQILA), but it was not an official unit of the SDF.
The SDF is the official military force of the de facto autonomous region in northeastern Syria, known as Rojava. Its constitution, the Social Contract, starts by affirming the multi-ethnic composition of Rojava by recognising Kurds, Arabs, Syriacs, Arameans, Turkmen, Armenians, and Chechens, and establishes a system of self-governance known as democratic confederalism. The Kurdish feminist doctrine of Jineologî is a foundation of democratic confederalism and one of its four pillars along with democracy, socialism, and ecologism. On every institutional level, there is a co-presidency of one woman and one man, and a gender quota of 40%. Even a women-only village named Jinwar was built in northeastern Syria. In contrast to the genocidal and totalitarian misogyny of ISIS which was once a quasi-state before its defeat, the system of the autonomous region of Rojava has been described as the "most radical experiment in democracy and gender equality in the world." While the war against ISIS was won, the brutal invasion of Turkey continues to pose a very serious threat to Rojava, and the only time this got significant attention in Western media was when former US president Donald Trump abandoned the Kurdish allies leading to around 130,000 Kurds forced to flee their homes, and hundreds dying.
Kurdish people are a Sunni Muslim-majority ethnic group with a population estimated between 30 and 45 million. They are the majority in a territory known as Kurdistan, but it's divided between 4 nation-states, Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Iraq, making Kurds a minority in all of them. As a minority, they have been exposed to oppressive policies such as bans on Kurdish language and culture, mass incarceration, and genocide. Kurdish women's status has long been relatively high compared to their Middle Eastern and Muslim counterparts, and some notable Kurdish women led their tribes in war even centuries ago, but the radical feminist liberationist politics of the Kurdish movement are a recent development.
Up to the late 1990s, the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) in Turkey was a typical Marxist-Leninist party. As a response to the marginalised status of Kurds, it fought against Turkey for an independent Kurdish state, with violations of international humanitarian law on both sides. Marxist analysis that reduces the understanding of women's condition to class is better than the complete erasure of women in political analysis, and very much better than an Islamist analysis which sees the subordination of women as a sacred command from God, but it's far less progressive from a feminist perspective than Jineologî that the slogan "Woman, Life, Freedom" comes from. Jineologî makes women the centre of political analysis and practice. Sakine Cansız, one of the co-founders of the PKK, was the only woman in an exclusively masculine assembly for a while. She played an important role in raising women's issues in the party and helped in recruiting and involving many women. This was years before the disillusionment of the controversial Kurdish leader and her comrade Abdullah Öcalan with Marxism-Leninism and Kurdish nationalism, and starting his advocacy for Jineologî and democratic confederalism as an alternative to a Kurdish nation-state. A development that led to a radical revisionism in the leftist Kurdish movement.
Inspired by the eco-anarchist Murray Bookchin, the Kurdish theorist and leader Abdullah Öcalan abandons Marxism-Leninism and makes a critique of the nation-state model in favor of a new version of radical democratisation called democratic confederalism, a central pillar of it is Jineologî, which means "women's science." For Öcalan, also known as Apo, the enslavement of women is the origin of all other forms of enslavement, it is gender discrimination that has opened society to slavery. He defines women as the oldest colonised group and says that no other social being has experienced such complete colonialism in both soul and body. Apo considers this a more concrete and analysable phenomenon than the concepts of the proletariat and the oppressed nation, "no race, class or nation is subjected to such systematic slavery as housewifisation," which makes him explicitly claim that the liberation of women is more important than class or national liberation and the most permanent and comprehensive component of democratisation is woman's freedom. He also thinks that capitalism and the nation-state represent the dominant male in his most institutionalised form, and the road towards liberation for both women and men is by a total divorce from the 5000-year-old civilisation of male domination. The solutions of all social problems in the Middle East should have woman's position as focus in his view.
Similar to many feminist theorists, Öcalan sees women's oppression as neither the result of the female and male sexes nor as an inavoidable historical necessity. He makes a historical analysis of the loss of freedom which is at the same time the history of how woman lost her position. "Woman's downfall and loss is thus the downfall and loss of the whole of society." According to his theory, the patriarchy has not always existed, society was matriarchal during primitive socialism which was characterised by equality and freedom when the matriarchal order did not allow ownership. Many of the methods and tools that we stil use today were most likely discovered and invented by women during the matriarchal society, "various useful applications of different plants, domestication of animals and cultivation of plants, construction of dwellings, principles of child nutrition, the hoe and hand grinder, perhaps even the ox-cart." The respect that patriarchal societies today still have for the mother as an authority originates from the hierarchy based on the mother-woman during the matricentric era, and the longevity of the mother-concept is due to the undeniable fact that the mother concretely forms the basis of the social being and the human. The image of paradise rooted in the subconscious of humans is also a reminiscence of that early matriarchal world.
However, things started changing during the Neolithic revolution. The organised force of "strong man" that existed for the sole purposes of trapping animals and defence against outside danger took over the family-clan unit and replaced the matriarchal role of woman, and this is when the first form of slavery and organisation of violence appears in history as the slavery of housewifisation and the domination of women and children by men. Then, the "strong men" allied with elder men, who represent the proto-priest, to construct religious patriarchy. The balance started to gradually turn against women, and the dominant elements of the matriarchal culture, which are peaceful activities that do not require warfare and use emotional intelligence and humane commitment to life and nature, were being replaced by the culture of men that stems from hunting, making it a culture of war and hierarchy. The enslavement of women laid the ground for the enslavement of other men as well along with the emergence of the mythological narrative of man's divinity against woman's divinity, eventually ending up with ruling the minds of the populace and building a strict distinction between people. Öcalan, also known as Apo, says that in Sumerian mythology it was initially the goddess Ninhursag who carried out the act of creation in order to save the life of the male god Enki, but this narrative was gradually changed leading to a patriarchal story of the creation out the rib which demeaned women. From 2000 BCE onwards, the increasing decline of matriarchal concepts and the dominance of male culture became widespread, resulting in the most significant change in social life history has ever seen. Apo uses the term "sexual rupture" to describe remarkable turning points in the history of the relationship between the sexes. He describes the rise of the patriarchy in Sumer, the earliest known civilisation, and its spread as the first major sexual rupture leading to women being "wrapped in veils" and "a captive within the harem of the strong man." He considers this rupture a counter-revolution because in his view it has contributed nothing to a positive development of society.
Millenia after the first major sexual rupture that established the patriarchy, Öcalan says that the system of male domination intensified through the monotheistic religions. He considers this the second major sexual rupture. While the first rupture reinforces the patriarchy with cultural requirements, the second rupture of the monotheistic period was "the law as god commands." The inferiorisation of women became a political order from God. Apo describes different patriarchal elements in Islam, Christianity, and religious Judaism. In Christianity, instead of considering Mary a god, she is seen merely as a tool of the Holy Spirit, establishing divinity as exclusively male. While in the Sumerian, Egyptian, and even the Babylonian periods, the voice of the mother-goddess was still heard. The role of women, in the image of Mary, became primarily looking after their male children, the "son-gods," whose value had significantly increased since the first major sexual rupture. He also harshly condemns what he sees as an Islamic legitimation of the institutions of polygamy, harems, and concubines, calling harem a privatised brothel for the sole use of the privileged man. Due to the centrality of the position of women in his historical analysis, he says that these sexist institutions in Islam have had a determining role in Middle Eastern society falling behind Western society, leading Islam to regress to a state worse than the old desert tribal society in his view. He also says that the inability of Catholics to get divorce is a negative aspect that can make women treated like sexual objects, and neither the celibacy demanded in Christianity from priests and nuns nor the prioritisation of male sexual fulfilment in Islam are good.
Like historical materialism, Jineologî predicts a radical women's revolution. This revolution will be the third major sexual rupture and will lead to liberating life and freedom. Öcalan calls this metaphorically "killing the dominant male," and says masculinity must be killed. He is not talking about eliminating the male sex as does American radical feminist Valerie Solanas, but in his provocative choice of terms, he sees the dominant male and masculinity as systems that can be seen in both capitalism and the nation-state. He explains:
“The male has become a state and turned this into the dominant culture. Class and sexual oppression develop together; masculinity has generated ruling gender, ruling class, and ruling state. When man is analysed in this context, it is clear that masculinity must be killed.
Indeed, to kill the dominant man is the fundamental principle of socialism. This is what killing power means: to kill the one-sided domination, the inequality and intolerance. Moreover, it is to kill fascism, dictatorship and despotism. We should broaden this concept to include all these aspects.”
To liberate life and start a new era of freedom, Apo says that women in general, and specifically Middle Eastern women, are the most reliable social agents on the road to a democratic society. Women need to establish their own political parties, build their own non-governmental organisations, and have their own popular movement in order to make the 21st century a century of women's liberation. This view of the 21th century as the century of women's liberation is also advocated by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn in their book "Half the Sky" where they cite horrific numbers about the oppression of women and girls in the world, claiming that more girls are "killed" because of direct and indirect consequences of preference of boys in the developing world "in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the twentieth century." And speaking of sexual slavery, they say that "far more women and girls are shipped into brothels each year in the early twenty-first century than African slaves were shipped into slave plantations each year in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries—although the overall population was of course far smaller then." Because of these issues and other atrocities women and girls face especially in developing countries, Kristof and WuDunn argue that gender inequality is the most important challenge of the 21th century:
“In the nineteenth century, the central moral challenge was slavery. In the twentieth century, it was the battle against totalitarianism. We believe that in this century the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality in the developing world.”
Jineologî sees the history and society of the Middle East primarily as the history of the oppression of women and the society of male domination, which makes it a women-centered theory. This is different from earlier ways of thinking about feminism in both the West and the MENA. "The woman question" in the West was seen as part of a broader liberal project such as in the thinking of Marry Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, and Harriet Taylor Mill in Britain, or part of a larger socialist project and analysis like with Friedrich Engels. In the Middle East and North Africa, women's issues were seen as part of a broader nation-building project such as with the Egyptian Turco-Kurdish poet Aisha Taymur from the Ottoman era, or part of national liberation against European colonisation like with the Moroccan writer Malika El Fassi, and after her in Morocco as part of class struggle such as the Marxist revolutionary and poet Saida Menebhi. Since the "second wave" of feminism, the emergence of radical feminism led women from Autralia like Germaine Greer to Egypt like Nawal El Saadawi to start thinking about women not only as one question within a much bigger project, but the woman question became the fundamental concern, or even the starting point of theory that the other questions can be seen as parts under it instead of the other way around. In this sense, Jineologî is indeed a radical feminist theory due to the very clear centrality of women in it. Despite the fact that Kurdish feminism shares some similar features with Western radical feminism, Abdullah Öcalan and other Jineologîsts make an explicit critique of Western feminism that is connected to the critique of the nation-state model. There are indeed major feminists in the West who heavily rely on the nation-state. In her feminist theory of the state, radical feminist Catharine MacKinnon explains some of her views by analogy to Marxism, something that can be seen in the work of Apo as well. She says:
“Sexuality is to feminism what work is to marxism: that which is most one’s own, yet most taken away ... As the organized expropriation of the work of some for the benefit of others defines a class, workers, the organized expropriation of the sexuality of some for the use of others defines the sex, woman.”
MacKinnon provides a critique of the limitations in both liberalism and Marxism to defend her radical vision of feminism and to make the case for a feminist jurisprudence. As one of the most widely-cited legal scholars ever, she has spent most of her career finding ways of using the tools of the nation-state and the international community to defend women and victims of sexual exploitation, sometimes very successfully. She is among the first to argue the legal view of sexual harassment as sex discrimination, and she represented Bosnian and Croatian women against Serbs accused of genocide creating the international legal claim for rape as an act of genocide. Her most controversial views, shared with her radical feminist friend Andrea Dworkin and have created very intense divisions within Western feminism lasting to this day, can be found in her work on anti-pornography and her neo-abolitionist model of prostitution. The latter is also known as the "Nordic model," that she proposed in Sweden in 1990 and later passed as law in several countries where it is defended by some feminists but firmly opposed by other feminists. The tension that Jineologî has with such views is that the tools of the nation-state, which are seen as inherently masculinist under the theory, are never fundamentally rejected. However, Western feminism is not a monolith. For instance, there is a long history of anarcha-feminism that can be traced back to the 1890s, starting in Latin America and spreading to the "core countries" of the West. Western anarchist feminists share many similar concerns about the nation-state that Kurdish feminists have. I would argue that the critique of Western feminism in Jineologî is a critique of only some forms of Western feminism. The Western feminist tradition is incredibly diverse, and it doesn't seem to me that MENA feminism and other feminisms around the globe are very significantly less dependent on the nation-state model than Western feminism. Instead of drawing a strict distinction between Western feminism and Kurdish feminism as some academics do, I see Kurdish feminism as part of a transnational feminist discourse that shares similarities and differences both within and between its different regional varieties, which makes even the distinction between Western feminism and non-Western feminism not very useful to me. At the end of the day, Western feminism and feminism of the so-called Global South don't exist in two separate universes, and conversations between different feminists around the world have been going for decades, if not centuries, before the emergence of the "third wave" feminism in United States and its critique of White-centrism and Western-centrism in feminism. The anthology "Sisterhood Is Global" was published years before the term "intersectionality" was even coined.
There are many controversies surrounding Jineologî, Abdullah Öcalan, and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) led by him. Rojava which is built on the principles of Jineologî is not a utopia either. During the Marxist-Leninist phase of the PKK, it engaged in actions of terror and war against Turkey leading it to be designated as a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the US, the EU, and several countries. Öcalan was also captured by Turkey and sentenced to death, in a trial that the European Court of Human Rights said didn't meet basic standards of due process. Capital punishment was later converted to life imprisonment. The designation of the PKK as a terrorist organisation was also ruled both in 2008 and 2018 as a classification without due process by the EU Court of Justice. That being said, I'm not personally a supporter of the PKK, especially during its Marxist-Leninist phase, and it goes without saying that I condemn all forms of terrorism, including state terrorism. I'm also optimistic about the potential of nonviolent resistance. In their book "Why Civil Resistance Works," political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan show that most of the successful cases of resistance are nonviolent, compared to only 25% of the violent cases in their data set that have succeeded. Nonviolent campaigns are more likely to attract higher levels of participation than violent campaigns because the barriers to participation are lower, and high levels of participation in resistance campaigns can activate numerous mechanisms that improve the odds of success. They also show that nonviolent resistance leads to fewer civilian casualties and higher levels of democracy after the conflict than does successful violent resistance, and say "the notion that nonviolent action can be successful only if the adversary does not use violent repression is neither theoretically nor historically substantiated." Likewise, feminist philosopher Judith Butler makes the case in their last book "The Force of Nonviolence" for nonviolence as a guiding principle in political struggle, they give an argument that is rooted in a critique of individualism, recognition of our social relatedness, and defence of social justice. In a recent interview, Butler makes a clear distinction between forceful nonviolence and passive pacifism, nonviolence in their view can be aggressive and angry and still nonviolent. They accept that nonviolence is not an absolute principle and say that Ukrainian people are legitimately defending themselves. They also think positively about the practice of feminist self-defence, but the question for them is about whether we reproduce the violence or we're blocking it by stopping an illegitimate aggression. In fact, Öcalan's prison reading list includes Judith Butler and his feminist concepts are influenced by Butler despite the very profound differences in the way both of them theorise gender. In his Jineologîst theory, he sees violence as a patriarchal value, but he makes an exception for self-defence and fighting against colonisation while arguing that the oldest and longest form of colonisation is the patriarchy.
In Rojava, the Kurdish-majority People's Protection Units (YPG) was accused by both the Turkish government and Amnesty International of ethnic cleansing of the non-Kurdish population, but the United Nations' Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic refuted these claims. Virtually all sides in war-torn Syria have been accused of of human rights violations, not only by groups engaging in disinformation warfare but also by independent sources. However, Rojava is still recognised as the most democratic example in all of Syria. The British-Syrian writer Leila Al-Shami warns us about what she calls "the anti-Imperialism of idiots." While it's important to condemn violations everywhere, including when they come from the West or its allies like the YPG, as the scandal of Abu Ghraib prison shows us that very extreme violations of human rights and humanitarian law can indeed come from the West. It's also important to understand that not every geopolitical conflict is the same, and "Imperialism" is not exclusive to the United States. Assad's brutal dictatorship backed by Imperialist Russia in Syria has gone as far as attacking his own people, including children, with chemical weapons, something that the OPCW-UN Joint Investigative Mechanism, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, the Human Rights Watch, and the Global Public Policy Institute all confirm. The Turkish invasion also poses a very serious threat to Syria's Kurdish population and to the democratic system they are working on building.
The doctrine of Jineologî in itself can also be very controversial. Abrahamic religious groups obviously disagree with its harsh critique of Abrahamic religions, and Marxists on the other hand might be very disappointed to hear Apo stating that the "role the working class have once played, must now be taken over by the sisterhood of women." Intersectional feminists and "Black feminists" are reluctant to accept any theory that doesn't see the inherent connectedness of different identities and oppressions as the starting point of any analysis, but it's interesting that Kurdish feminists, despite facing a long history of severe ethnic persecution, still argue that the enslavement of women is the most important of all forms of domination. And while many scientists describe early hunter-gatherer societies as gender egalitarian, they don't describe them as particularly "matriarchal" in the Jineologîst sense. Furthermore, even when Öcalan says, in the typical feminist stance of "biology is not destiny," that gender relations are not the result of biological differences and their construction is not historically inevitable, he still makes claims such as "the female body is more central than that of man. This is the root of man's extreme and meaningless jealousy," and even "The natural consequence of their differing physiques is that woman's emotional intelligence is much stronger than man's is." But claims about the "nature" of women and men continue to generate a debate, sometimes heated, both within the scientific community and between feminist theorists.
I'm not writing this as a full endorsement of Jineologî, and I'm definitely not claiming that this doctrine is the only force in the fight against ISIS or the revolution against the Islamic Republic of Iran. The protests in Iran, that I certainly fully support, even when they use the Kurdish slogan "Woman, Life, Freedom," it's still used by different groups of women in Iran with different backgrounds and very different politics, joined by men, and all united in their brave opposition to the Islamic Republic. It is clear that the theocratic system in Iran oppresses everyone living under it. Kurdish feminism and Kurdish women obviously play an important role in the revolution, and it's crucial to acknowledge this and to acknowledge that Kurds in Iran can face oppression not only from the theocratic system but also from secular-leaning reactionary nationalist forces, but at the same time, I'm not trying to give a politically biased portrayal of the protests. The Kurdish movement is also diverse, and it has conservative segments such as in Iraqi Kurdistan where LGBTIQ people face increasing threats.
I hope to draw attention to the Kurdish feminist journalist Nagihan Akarsel who was killed this month and that I mentioned earlier. Her death is rarely even mentioned in Western media. Like Shireen Abu Akleh who was killed by Israel, and Jamal Khashoggi who was cut into pieces by Saudi Arabia, Akarsel's life matters, her name should be known, and her death has to be properly investigated. And in all these three cases, people responsible for the crimes must be held accountable. Journalists who risk their lives so the rest of us can get access to the truth in our comfort zones, including Ukrainian journalists documenting the brutality of Putin's Russia, deserve to be honoured. I also want to make it clear that the Middle East is not only home to brutal theocratic regimes and terrorist groups, it is also home to practical and creative liberationist politics such as Jineologî and democratic confederalism that defy all stereotypes about the region. Radical critique of religion and radical gender politics are part of MENA politics. There is a long history of MENA feminist critique of toxic modesty, and as Egyptian radical feminist El Saadawi repeatedly says, feminism is not a Western invention, it is embedded in the history of each country. Kurdish feminists remind their Arab counterparts that it's also embedded in the history of stateless and indigenous groups' struggles. We can find radical critics of religion in the region as early as the 9th century with the scholars Abu Isa al-Warraq and Ibn al-Rawandi from the Abbasid era, and these critics are still alive in the 21th century such as in the work of the Lebanese feminist poet Joumana Haddad where she openly and unapologetically talks about her atheism and criticises organised religions. Wherever you go, there are progressives working on changing things, conservatives defending the status quo, and fascists who want to send us to what's worse than the "Dark Ages." It is up to each person to decide whether they want to join a global struggle for liberation or instead defend the status quo and reactionary politics in the rest of the world in the name of an insulting understanding of diversity.
“In our rapidly changing society we can count on only two things that will never change. What will never change is the will to change and the fear of change. It is the will to change that motivates us to seek help. It is the fear of change that motivates us to resist the very help we seek.”—Harriet Lerner, The Dance of Intimacy
Jin, Jiyan, Azadî
Brilliant