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Kurd Pitek, Emily

Description

The Kurds inhabit an area known as Kurdistan, which roughly includes the Zagros and Taurus mountain ranges, and lies along the borders of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. Traditionally, the Kurds were nomadic pastoralists or settled agriculturalists, but now mainly live in settled agricultural communities with livestock. The Kurds are predominantly orthodox Sunni Muslims of the Shafi school, however, some tribes are Shiite (Busby, 1996). This entry focuses on the orthodox Sunni Muslim Kurds living in the town and vicinity of Rowanduz, Iraq, ca. 1950. The Kurdish religious beliefs are interwoven through many spheres of life. The religious group is coterminous with the society in the sense that the Kurds are not an autonomous political group, as, “the society is politically integrated with others in a pluralistic state within which it enjoys theoretically equal status (Column 1, Tuden and Marshall, 1972).” Therefore, religion is coterminous with Kurdish society aside from the polity, which is integrated with the Iraq government.

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Attribution 4.0 International