Ocalan's Secular Lens on a "Democratic Islam"

A Reading of Ocalan’s Message on Democratic Islam!

Omeri Kheyat | | Exclusive to iKurd.net
Translated from Kurdish Awene

A few days ago, the Mesopotamian Federation of Islamic Research, under the slogan “From Democratic Islam to Peace and a Democratic Society,” held its first ordinary congress. Abdullah Ocalan sent a message to the congress and highlighted several points, including:

[* The essence of Islam is freedom, justice, and equality.

Official state Islam or collective formations that use capitalist modernity as an instrument of domination and plunder have lost this essence.
Democratic Islam is a return to the spirit of the Medina Covenant, a covenant of coexistence among different beliefs, peoples, and cultures, by their own will and without coercion.]

This is the summary of Ocalan’s message to the aforementioned congress.

After this news was published, many people subjected it to criticism and various suspicious readings, to the extent that Ocalan was portrayed as compromising toward Islam, or claims were made that this was not truly his message and that others had edited his writings. Nationalists and their intellectuals, those who read Islam through the lens of ISIS and even identify it as an “Arab religion,” each produced superficial interpretations of the message from within their own mental frameworks. Some who consider themselves leftist or communist also hurled their own empty slogans into the debate. The following examples represent some of those comments or readings:

Islam and democracy, where, hello! What a naïve fantasy, fully aligned with Erdoğan’s rhetoric and similar Islamists!!
Islam and democracy are like mixing fire and water. These statements remind us of the Atatürk-era narratives that justified the suppression of Sheikh Said Reza and the crushing of the Ağrı uprising.
No freedom, no democracy, no women’s rights, these are incompatible with Islam. Islam is not a language of dialogue; it is the language of domination and the sword. This message legitimizes democratic ISIS-ism.
God forbid, haven’t I always said that Serok Apo is retreating from the limits of communism toward faith? After all, who ever wanted Islam to be democratic?

…and many other readings that need not be listed here.

It appears that very few of those who commented on Ocalan’s message were able to produce a proper materialist reading. Even those who identify themselves with the PKK and are active on related platforms failed to shed real light on the content of the message. As a result, Ocalan’s message has been burdened with ambiguity and obscurity, making it necessary to subject it to a different, non-partisan reading and analysis. This text is an attempt in that direction.

Different Readings

In Ocalan’s message on Islam in general, and “Democratic Islam” in particular, we encounter two distinct yet overlapping readings. Both are grounded in rejection and negation of Islam. As such, due to their idealist and atheistic character, neither can approach religion in general, nor Islam in particular, from a historical perspective. Consequently, problems of understanding are not left unresolved but instead contribute to the persistence of social fragmentation, the loss of orientation in class struggle, and submission to wars of secondary identities.

First Reading: The Nationalist Reading

This is a nationalist reading. Within it, Islam is equated with Arab religion, portrayed as a religion of killing and enslavement that weakens national consciousness. In this definition, Islam becomes a mechanism of Arab colonialism aimed at domination, preserving the backwardness of the Kurdish people, and erasing the struggle for Kurdish independence.

The rejection of Islam by some Kurdish nationalists, and its portrayal as a religion of killing, enslavement, and national stupefaction, does not arise from a purely ideological position. Rather, it is the product of a long historical accumulation of oppressive experiences in which Islam became intertwined with imperial power and later with the modern nation-state. For centuries, Kurds did not encounter Islam as an abstract spiritual or ethical experience, but as a language of political and social hegemony wielded by their enemies, whether within the Ottoman state or the nation-states formed after colonialism that inherited colonial culture.

Within this historical experience, religion, Islam, often functioned as an ideological cloak to justify denying Kurdish existence as a nation, criminalizing Kurdish language and culture, and portraying any demand for rights as sedition or rebellion against a greater Islamic society.

Within this background and Kurdish popular consciousness, particularly among radical currents, a view of Islam has emerged that treats it not as a historically constituted religion open to multiple interpretations, but as an inherently chauvinistic structure organically tied to what is called Arab or Islamic-nationalist colonialism.

Arabness and Islam are imagined as a single, unified identity in the minds of part of Kurdish society. This perception is reinforced by numerous authentic jurisprudential and historical texts that legitimize conquest, enslavement, jizya taxation, and religious supremacy. For many Kurds, these realities confirm the belief that Islam itself is the root cause of these crimes, rather than its interpretations.

However, this wholesale rejection of Islam carries a deep paradox. On one hand, it is a natural response to a long history of oppression. On the other, it falls into an essentialist reading of religion, treating religion as a fixed, timeless essence devoid of historical context or internal struggle. This is the same logic employed by Salafi and jihadist movements when they claim exclusive ownership of “true Islam.” In both cases, religion is reduced to its most violent forms, while centuries of internal debate and diverse interpretations within Islam are erased.

The claim that Islam weakens national consciousness and obstructs the Kurdish struggle for independence is grounded in real historical experience. Islamist discourse has consistently been deployed to counter national demands, framing them as threats to the unity of the ummah and as services to the enemies of Islam. Yet the problem does not lie in religion itself, but in the use of religious discourse as a tool to suppress class and national differences. Here, religion becomes a language of domination and power.

When Kurds are asked to assimilate into an “Islamic nation” without recognition of their language, land, or history, Islam becomes another form of colonial hegemony.

From this perspective, it becomes clear why some nationalists view Islam as a mechanism for keeping Kurds backward and weakening their struggle. When religion is detached from its social context and deployed as a substitute for political action, it inevitably becomes an instrument of sedation, precisely as Marx described in his critique of religion. The mistake lies in generalizing this function to religion as such and ignoring the possibility of dismantling or reorienting this role.

Islam, like other religions, has not always stood on the side of power. At certain historical moments, it functioned as the language of ethical revolt, even if those revolts did not mature into complete emancipatory projects.

From this background, traditional nationalist critiques of Ocalan’s message portray him as a “deviant” or an “executor of enemy plans,” sometimes even questioning whether the message is genuinely his. Yet Ocalan’s message and his strategic understanding of political struggle go far beyond such readings.

Ocalan’s project can be understood as an attempt to transcend the sharp polarization between a nationalism that entirely rejects Islam and a religious chauvinism that entirely rejects nationalism. He does not deny that Islam has been used as a tool of oppression against Kurds, but he rejects reducing the entire problem to religion itself.

He argues that such radical rejection ultimately serves the same forces that monopolize Islam for hegemonic purposes, because it leaves the field open for them to claim exclusive representation of religion in society.

Ocalan maintains that excluding religion from the Kurdish liberation project abandons millions of believing Kurds or pushes them toward conservative and anti-freedom forces, fragmenting consciousness and weakening collective struggle.

For Ocalan, the issue is not whether Islam weakens national consciousness, but rather which Islam, which nationalism, and what kind of relationship between them. A nationalism built on total negation of religion becomes an alienating ideology that reproduces the same logic of domination that has historically harmed Kurds. Conversely, a religion interpreted through its social and ethical dimensions can become a unifying moral force supporting liberation rather than obstructing it.

This is the intellectual and political threshold Ocalan seeks to articulate, one that requires both sides to relinquish their sacred certainties. Yet it also opens a more realistic horizon for liberation, not replacing one hegemonic form with another, but rebuilding social consciousness on pluralism, mutual recognition, and historical realism.

Second Reading: The Leftist Reading

This is a leftist reading held by some Marxists and communists regarding Islam. In this approach, there is no serious return to Marx and his historically grounded critique of religion. Instead, it retreats uncritically to pre-Marxist readings, such as Feuerbach, whose critiques of religion are primarily Enlightenment-based, moralistic, and humanistic.

What many leftists and communists possess regarding religion is not a coherent theory, but rather a critique of Islamism’s role in Kurdish society. This often leads to conflating religion itself with Islamism, what they label “political Islam.”

For Marx, religion is neither a metaphysical essence nor a deception invented by prophets. It is a historical phenomenon. To understand it, one must not descend from heaven to earth, but ascend from earth to heaven. This requires analyzing the material and historical conditions in which religion emerges and persists.

For Marx, communism’s struggle is against the state, not against religion. In that struggle, the state guarantees political freedom, individual freedom, religious freedom, and national freedom. Communism’s task is not political emancipation, but human emancipation, liberation from the state itself. Therefore, Marx abandons theological critique and turns toward analyzing the social foundations of religion rather than religion per se.

Religion, for Marx, is a response to human alienation, an alienation that is not abstract, but produced by specific social conditions. Religion is not merely a chaotic pile of superstition; it is the “general theory” of an alienated world that drives human beings to seek meaning beyond it. Thus, Marx links the struggle against religion to the struggle against the world for which religion is the spiritual expression.

This is the essence of Marx’s position on religion.

To what extent is this Marxist perspective reflected in Ocalan’s message?

The debates surrounding Ocalan’s message do not stem from its substantive arguments, but from misunderstandings, both of Marx and of the Middle Eastern context. Many communists criticize Ocalan from an atheistic standpoint rather than from an analysis of religion’s material and social foundations. In this view, religion is treated as a metaphysical remnant to be eradicated from consciousness, rather than as a socio-historical phenomenon rooted in alienation.

This stance is paradoxical; it is less Marxist than pre-Marxist. Marx acknowledged Enlightenment critiques of religion as historically important but ultimately insufficient. From this perspective, many leftist critiques of Ocalan are fundamentally non-Marxist because they remain trapped at the level of religious consciousness rather than interrogating social and political structures.

Atheist critique often becomes a top-down elitist ideology hostile to the people, rather than a challenge to the power relations that sustain alienation. In this sense, atheism becomes the inverted mirror of theology, treating religion as a fixed, ahistorical essence, much like Salafism does. Such superficial critiques reveal a rigid, simplistic secularism.

Marxism, if it is to remain a living critical theory, cannot be reduced to ideological taboos. It must remain a tool for understanding and transforming reality.

Within this framework, Ocalan’s argument cannot be grasped by asking whether religion is “true or false” or “good or bad,” but rather by asking: how does religion function socially and politically, and who benefits from it?

Ocalan does not defend Islam as a creed, nor does he propose Islamizing politics. Instead, he seeks to dismantle the hegemonic role historically assigned to religion, whether through empires, nation-states, or global capitalism, which has found jihadist Islam to be an ideal ideological instrument for destroying societies and transforming class struggle into bloody identity conflict.

For Ocalan, the Medina model is not a theological blueprint but a symbolic reference to a historical moment in which religion participated in building a plural political community rather than suppressing difference. This is not a call to replicate a system of rule, but a symbolic invocation with political function.

This symbolism speaks to religious conscience, opening psychological space for believers while undermining Islamist monopolies over “true Islam.” It also creates a shared language between believers and secularists, reducing polarization and enabling broader social acceptance of a political project.

In this way, Ocalan aligns with the core of Marxist critique rather than its superficial interpretations. Like Marx, he does not see religion as the root of corruption but as a reflection of a distorted world. He views Middle Eastern backwardness not as the product of Islam itself, but of hegemonic and economic structures that have instrumentalized religion.

The difference is contextual. Ocalan operates in a historical space that did not pass through Enlightenment processes where religion was separated from state and law. In such conditions, a direct “war against religion” deepens alienation and pushes the masses toward reactionary forces claiming to represent “true Islam.”

The question, then, is not whether Ocalan is an orthodox Marxist, but whether he operates within Marx’s methodological horizon, one that proposes radical critique of society rather than war against belief. The answer, in my view, is yes.

He belongs to a tradition that sees religion as a contested field of interpretation and ethics, one from which lost human potential can be reclaimed without replacing class struggle or promising eschatological salvation.

Another dimension of Ocalan’s message is not merely promoting peaceful coexistence among religions and sects, but relocating social consciousness from heaven to earth and avoiding futile wars against gods. It seeks to strip religion of its numbing role without stripping it of existential meaning, and to return social conflict to its natural terrain, relations between human beings, systems, wealth, and social organization.

In conclusion, Ocalan is neither a pragmatic nationalist nor a dogmatic Marxist, but a historical materialist thinker attempting to reconstruct conditions of consciousness and liberation in a society devastated economically, socially, and ideologically. Whether one agrees with him or not, Ocalan represents one of the most serious attempts to apply critical methodology in one of the world’s most complex and volatile regions.

Agamben, in Metropolis, recounts an anecdote involving Guy Debord. He recalls a debate he thought was about political philosophy, until Debord interrupted and said, “Look, I am not a philosopher; I am a strategist.” This statement could just as easily apply to Ocalan. For his movement, Ocalan is fundamentally a political actor and a strategist.

This article was originally published in the Kurdish language in Awene Newspaper on December 31, 2025.

The opinions are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of iKurd.net or its editors.