Britain's Policy in Southern Kurdistan: The Formation and the Termination of the First Kurdish Government, 1918–1919

The end of the First World War and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 signalled the downfall of the old order in the Middle East. The consolidation of Britain's strategic, economic and political position in that region was bound to affect Kurdistan's political future, given its determination to re-construct a new regional order. In the absence of a well-defined British policy towards Kurdistan's future certain British officials on the ground were able to play an important part in influencing the political situation in southern Kurdistan, which came under British political control. Therefore, the examination of Britain's policy on the ground through the concepts of indirect and direct control is central to any understanding of the reasons for the establishment and the subsequent termination of the first Kurdish government in the period 1918-1919.     

Negotiating power and authority in the desert: the Arab Bedouin and the limits of the Ottoman state in Hijaz, 1840–1908

This article explores the techniques and strategies used by Ottoman authorities to control the Bedouin with a specific focus on the province of Hijaz between 1840 and 1908. Using primary sources from the Ottoman and British archives, it argues that the Ottoman Empire developed a ‘politics of negotiation’ towards the tribes in its attempt to secure cities and major pilgrimage and trade routes against tribal attack. The principal agents of the empire who made this negotiated governance possible were the amir of Mecca and the governor of Hijaz. As a result of this policy, imperial authorities had to give significant concessions to the tribes, and they thus incorporated them into the province's imperial order. When the Ottoman economy went through a crisis, as in the 1900s, negotiated governance and order faced great problems.     

Fragile frontiers: Sayyid Taha II and the role of Kurdish religio-political leadership in the Ottoman East during the First World War

At the start of the First World War the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the ruling party of the Ottoman Empire, used numerous means to ensure that the Kurdish leaders remained allies. Interpretations of Jihad became a major tool for recruitment of Kurdish soldiers by all sides in the war, including the Ottomans, Russians, British and Kurds, though the tactic had limited success. During this period, several religio-political leaders emerged among the Sufi orders in Kurdistan and created their own regiments that fought alongside the Ottomans. Other leaders sided with Russian and British forces. Among those leaders that did not support the Ottomans, Sayyid Taha II arose as a rational, yet unorthodox political figure. His political maneuvering proved that the frontiers were fragile, fluid and impermanent. The present study aims to show that in the context of the First World War the Kurdish leaders of the time, primarily Sayyid Taha II, vis-à-vis the non-religious notables in Istanbul, were transformed into political leaders by their experiences during and after the war.     

The Kurdish image in statist historiography: the case of Simko

This article focuses on the uprising in 1918–1922 of Ismail Agha of Shikak (a.k.a. Simko) in Iranian Kurdistan and how he has been portrayed in Persian historiography. Painting Simko simply as another Kurdish rebellious chief with no nationalist aspirations leaves important questions unanswered. Simko introduced a number of firsts in Kurdish political history to Iranian Kurdistan, yet his innovations have generally been overlooked. Simko was conscious of, informed by, and founded his politics upon the communal distinctions deemed to legitimize varying degrees of Kurdish self-rule. In addition to his political and military activities, Simko co-founded the first Kurdish school in Iran, published the first Kurdish–Persian newspaper, and made Kurdish the official medium of his reign. This article draws on memoirs, personal accounts, and other unexplored primary documents to show a more complex picture of Simko's resistance, problematizes some idées reçues about Simko and his ethno-nationalism, and explores inconsistencies in the existing literature on the subject.     

Urban Mobilization in Iraqi Kurdistan during the British Mandate: Sulaimaniya 1918–30

Abstract

Great Britain created ‘Southern Kurdistan’, an autonomous Kurdish entity with Sulaimaniya as its capital, under British political supervision in November 1918. Sulaimaniya became a political and social testing ground in the hands of British officers who participated in the process of building local identities by defining the arena in which the elites entered into competition, by defining the categories into which the political blocs were arranged, and by defining which leaders were recognized. Furthermore, the creation of ‘Southern Kurdistan’ allowed the extension of nationalist rethoric among its inhabitants culminating in the radicalization of Sulaimaniya's notables. Paradoxically, the peak of nationalist agitation in urban areas in 1930 coincided with the Kurdish mobilization shifting its centre of gravity to the countryside.     

KURDISTAN’S REFERENDUM: THE WITHDRAWAL OF THE KURDISH FORCES IN KIRKUK

Less than a month after the Kurdistan independence referendum, the Iraqi Army and units of the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) attacked the disputed province of Kirkuk on October, 16, 2017. Unlike most national defence forces, the Kurdish Peshmerga is divided along partisan lines between the two largest parties in Iraqi Kurdistan. This particular area was largely under the control of units affiliated with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which decided to make a strategic withdrawal in the face of superior numbers and firepower. The city was then retaken in short order by forces loyal to Baghdad, as were all other disputed territories previously under Kurdish control. Subsequently, the allegation that the PUK had retreated too easily has been described by the rival Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and others as a betrayal of the Kurdish people by the PUK. This has created two competing post-event perspectives: first, that the Peshmerga forces should have defended Kirkuk to the last man and should not have left their front line trenches; second that the withdrawal of the Peshmerga was a deliberate and rational military reaction to overwhelming opposition. This article critically assesses both perspectives and finds that partisan divisions in the Peshmerga critically undermined the ability of Kurdish forces to defend the disputed areas that they controlled. Instead of serving as motivation of create a unified fighting force, the loss of Kirkuk has only served to deepen those divisions.     

Was there a rule of law in the late Ottoman Empire?

The rule of law is a widely used term in scholarship on Ottoman legal reforms. Nevertheless, the actual meaning of this notion is rarely clarified in the writing on the late Ottoman Empire although theorists of law have discussed the ambiguity of this term. This article aims at examining the value of the rule of law as an analytical category when discussing socio-legal change in the late Ottoman Empire. The article demonstrates that the rule of law can be a meaningful category for historical analysis when conceived through a ‘cultural perspective’ to the law.     

Between Conformism and Separatism: A Kurdish Students’ Association in Istanbul, 1912 to 1914

This article is an examination of the ‘Kurdish Students’ Hope Society’ – a youth-led Kurdish organization founded in the Ottoman imperial capital, Istanbul, in 1912. The article contends that the foundation of this organization should not be seen simply as a reaction to the gradual ethnic polarization and ‘Turkification’ of Ottoman politics that occurred in the aftermath of the 1908 ‘Young Turk Revolution’. It also needs to be understood in the context of dynamics emanating from within Kurdish society. Specifically, to the backdrop of an increasingly fragmented Kurdish elite, the Kurdish youth were setting out their own path towards national salvation which was neither conformist nor separatist. In short, they were outlining a ‘third way’ between these two extremes.     

Islam,ethnicity and the state: contested spaces of legitimacy and power in the Kurdish-Turkish public sphere

ABSTRACT

The pro-Kurdish nationalist mobilization in Turkey was mostly built on the right to self-determination aligned with the Marxist-Leninist ideology for the insurgent Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the early 1980s and ethnic minority rights for the secular-leftist pro-Kurdish legal parties in the 1990s. The Turkish state mostly framed the legal and illegal pro-Kurdish mobilization as ‘the enemy of the state’ and ‘the enemy of Islam’ in its counter-insurgency efforts. However, in the 2000s, the PKK and the pro-Kurdish legal parties became more tolerant and inclusive toward Islamic Kurdish identity by mobilizing their sympathizers in events such as ‘Civic Friday Prayers’ and a ‘Democratic Islamic Congress’. This move aimed to function as an antidote to the rising popularity of the ruling conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the Kurdish Hizbullah in the early 2000s. In other words, Islam and pious Muslim identity has increasingly become contested among Turkish Islamists, Kurdish Islamists, and the secular Kurdish nationalists. This article seeks to unpack why, how, and under what conditions such competing actors and mechanisms shape the discursive and power relationships in the Kurdish-Turkish public sphere.     

The fundamental characteristics of the Kurdish nationhood project in modern Iraq

The protracted Iraqi-Kurdish conflict has plagued the country since the creation of Iraq in the 1920s. Iraqi-Kurdish relations are dominated by the clash of two contradictory nationhood projects: Kurdish and Iraqi. The Kurdish nationhood project was constructed with the perspective that the Kurds as a nation, could qualify for but is deprived of, achieving nation-state status. Based on the Kurdish project, Kurdistan and Iraq consist of two separate homelands: the Arab part of Iraq, which is part of the greater Arab homeland, and Iraqi Kurdistan which is part of the Greater Kurdistan region.     

Migration,memory and mythification: relocation of Suleymani tribes on the northern Ottoman–Iranian frontier

This article indicates that Suleymani tribes, which were relocated from Diyarbekir region en masse to the newly conquered territories of northern Ottoman-Iranian frontiers after the mid-sixteenth-century, created a shift in the administrative and ethnic structure of the region. Although the roles of tribes were mostly seen as subordinate to the power of the Kurdish emirs, this study shows that the chiefs of Suleymani tribes, more specifically Besyan and Heyderan, became the rulers of the newly captured Safavid territories and they did not recognize the authority of their own Suleymani emirs. The writer focuses on this migration and discusses that the relocated Suleymani tribes preserved the collective memory of their migration during the nineteenth-century and their perception shaped the creation of a tribal myth, Mil-and-Zil, after the Ottoman central government disinherited the Kurdish emirs during the mid-nineteenth-century. Suleymani tribes' migration, collective memory and mythification of their own identities show that tribes were not passive subjects but they were in fact at the center of the developments of the Ottoman eastern frontier.     

Some studies in Russian on the Ottoman empire

Turcologica 1986, a Festschrift presented to A.N. Kononov on his eightieth birthday (Leningrad: Nauka Press for the Institute of Oriental Studies in the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, 1986; 303 pp.).

I. Ye, and Yu A. Pyetrosyan, on the periodization of the ‘era of reforms’ in the Ottoman Empire (pp.219–24).

Yuri A. Pyetrosyan, Director of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Soviet (now Russian) Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, also contributes a brief, but useful paper on the Turkish emigrant press in the early twentieth century (pp.225–9).

Kh. M. Ibragimbyeyli and N.S. Rashba, entitled Osmanskaya Impyeriya v pyervoy chyetvyerti XVII vyeka: sbornik dokumyentov i matyerialov, The Ottoman Empire in the First Quarter of the 17th Century: A Collection of Documents and Materials (Moscow: Nauka Press, 1984; 214 pp.).

A.A. Vitol's Osmanskaya Impyeriya (nachalo XVIII v.), The Ottoman Empire at the Beginning of the 18th Century (Moscow: Nauka Press for the Institute of Oriental Studies in the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, 1987; 136 pp.).

V.P. Grachyev's Balkanskiye vladyenya Osmanskoy Impyerii na rubyedzhye XVIII‐XIX vv. (vnutryennyeye polodzhyeniye, pryedposilki natsional'no‐osvobodityel'‐nikh dvidzhyeniy), The Balkan Domains of the Ottoman Empire at the Meeting Point of the 18th and 19th Centuries: Internal Situation, the Preconditions of National Liberation Movements (Moscow: Nauka Press for the Institute of Slavonic and Balkan Studies in the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, 1990; 200 pp.).

M.T. Boddzholyan has written on Ryeformi 20–30‐kh gg. XIX vyeka v Osmanskoy Impyerii, The Reforms of the 1820s and 1830s in the Ottoman Empire (Erevan: Academy of Sciences of Soviet Armenia Press, 1984; 156 pp.).

Osmanskaya Impyeriya: systyema gosudarstvyennogo, upravlyeniya, sotsial'niye i etnoryeligiozniye problyemi. Sbornik statyey, The Ottoman Empire: System of Government, Administration, Social and Ethno‐Religious Problems. A Collection of Articles (Moscow: Nauka Press for the Institute of Oriental Studies in the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, 1986; 253 pp.).

Osmanskaya Impyeriya: gosudarstvyennaya vlast’ i sotsial'no‐politichyeskaya struktura, The Ottoman Empire: State Power and Socio‐Political Structure (Moscow: Nauka Press for the Institute of Oriental Studies in the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, 1990; 338 pp.).     

The Quest to Understand Global Jihad: The Terrorism Industry and its Discontents

In the 1840s Sarantis Archigenes, an Ottoman Greek citizen, wrote a book on political economy called Tasarrufat-? Mülkiye. The book contained both political-economic knowledge and developmentalist policy recommendations for the Ottoman Empire. The emphasis given to human capital, trade and transportation, industrialization and property relations is noteworthy. Since it did not reach large numbers of people, the importance of Tasarrufat-? Mülkiye has not been appreciated. The goal of this article is to provide an account of Archigenes' views on political economy as presented in his long-neglected book. Had the policy makers in the Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century taken Archigenes' views seriously, a sound development strategy could have been formed.     

Lost in Historiography: An Essay on the Reasons for the Absence of a History of Limited Government in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire

This article tackles the question of why an attempt to uncover an indigenous history of limited government in the early modern Ottoman Empire has not been undertaken in twentieth-century Turkish historiography despite the obvious existence of several constituents for such a history, such as the political power and prestige of jurists (ulema), the political role of the janissary corps, and the many depositions and other revolts that they staged in cooperation with the jurists, which, in practice, limited the political authority of the sultan. The answer suggested by the article focuses on the political concerns of the early republic, the socio-economic concerns of the Muslim democrats currently in power, and the theoretical concerns of contemporary western historians who have been influenced by Edward Said's critique of Orientalism.     

The De Rossetti Affair: Legal Pluralism and Levantine Identity at the Crossroads of Empires

In the nineteenth century, changes to Ottoman legal and financial structures upset the familial interests of the large Levantine clans that were an integral part of the Ottoman Empire from its centre in Constantinople to its peripheries. Many legal and political disputes involved influential individuals who were not strictly ‘European’ or ‘foreign’; rather they were long-term residents of the empire with strong ties to the Mediterranean basin. A forgotten part of Egyptian history, the De Rossetti family presented here exemplifies those families and individuals who transcended the ‘imperialist’ tag as part of a wider Levantine network. This article argues that extraterritorial legal claims had the direct, and generally unintended, effect of an imposed legal order that ensnared both Ottomans and non-Ottomans in disputes over juridical pre-eminence, a creeping institutional imperialism which case by case sought to undermine the Egyptian regime’s capacity to govern.     

Female Cousins and Wounded Masculinity: Kurdish Nationalist Discourse in the Post-Ottoman Middle East

This article scrutinizes a highly gendered nationalist discourse shaped by a group of Kurdish nationalist men who sought to break with their Ottoman past while exiled in Syria and Lebanon in the 1930s and 1940s. Based on a critical reading of publications edited by Jaladet and Kamuran Bedirkhan, this study elaborates how the vision of Kurdish nationalism put forward by the Bedirkhan brothers, despite its emphasis on the emancipation of women, held the same patriarchal aspects of their rival Kemalist Turkish counterparts. A gendered approach is clearly discernible in Kurdish nationalists' views regarding major issues such as the failure of recent Kurdish nationalist rebellions and the prescribed national duties of women and men. Their reflections on the Second World War during the war years reveal another aspect of the Kurdish nationalist discourse. Kurdish nationalists, admirably watching the Allied European soldiers' sacrifices and victories, unwittingly expressed a crisis of masculinity emanating from their perceived inability to do anything for their own country.     

Princes,Pashas and Patriots: The Kurdish Intelligentsia,the Ottoman Empire and the National Question (1908–1914)

Abstract

This article surveys the attitude of the Ottoman-Kurdish intelligentsia and the nascent Kurdish movement towards the issue of nationality in the period between the 1908 Constitutional Revolution and the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. The existing academic literature has tended to regard the Kurdish movement in this period as being primarily cultural and apolitical in orientation. However, while the majority of the Kurdish intellectual and professional classes were committed to the Ottoman polity, their activities were far from apolitical. This is not to suggest that the emergent Kurdish movement was unified. On the contrary, the often varied relationship between the Ottoman polity and different elements of the Kurdish elite resulted in a significant degree of factionalism. However, while some of this elite began to think of the Kurds as an oppressed 'minority' locked inside the Ottoman (read Turkish) 'prison house' of nations, most tended to regard the Kurds as both a distinct people and an integral part of the Ottoman 'nation'.     

The Limits of the State: Student Protest in Egypt,Iraq and Turkey, 1948–63

Student youth have been at the centre of social and political unrest in the Middle East since the era of reforms under the Ottoman Empire. However, although nationalist and revolutionary leaders encouraged students to actively participate in politics ‘for the sake of the nation’ during the first half of the twentieth century, revolutionary regimes progressively sought to ‘depoliticise’ them, once again ‘for the sake of the nation’, throughout the second half of the century. This article explores both dynamics while seeking to account for the failure of attempts to depoliticise the student body ‘from above’ in Egypt, Iraq and Turkey between 1948 and 1963.