Damascus, Beirut and the Kurdish territories in northern Syria became a new center of the Kurdish nationalism following the failure of Kurdish rebellions in Turkey in 1925 and 1931. Kurdish nationalists, tribal chieftains and ordinary Kurds fled to Syria and Lebanon, then under French rule. From the early 1930s until the end of the French Mandate a Kurdish nationalist group led by Jaladat and Kamuran Ali Baderkhan embarked upon a movement for national reawakening. The primary means to spread their ideas were Kurdish-language periodicals published in Damascus and Beirut. These periodicals are valuable sources for understanding the Kurdish self-view at the time. This paper examines the key place that religion played in Kurdish national identity construction – both conflicting representations of religion as a component of Kurdism and the appropriation of Kurdish nationalism as religion. For nationalist ideologues Islamic identity appears to be a major obstacle for Kurdish national salvation. The religious bond between the Kurds and Turks, the bigotry of Kurdish mullahs and shaykhs, and the blind obedience of the Kurdish masses to the religious classes are addressed in many writings. There is also an emphasis by some intellectuals on Yezidism and Zoroastrianism as more authentic Kurdish religions, as opposed to Islam. Other nationalist writers put Islam to use as a key component of Kurdish identity, and call upon Kurdish madrasa students, mullahs, and shaykhs to join the national movement. Moreover, the nationalists tried to nationalize and rationalize Islam through translating the Quran and Hadith into Kurdish and by demystifying superstitions confused with religious truths by uneducated Kurds. In addition to such negative and positive images of Islam, there is a third tendency in the Kurdish press: to present nationalism as a religion. Kurdish nationalists do not hesitate to use religious concepts to emphasize Kurdish nationalist symbols. Based on the Kurdish press in the Levant, memoirs of the Kurdish nationalists, and the writings of the French orientalists, I will try to analyze those issues in the Kurdish nationalist discourse in comparison with Kemalist Turkish nationalist view of religion in Turkey.