Agha, Shaikh and State

Agha, Shaikh and State
Author: Martin van Bruinessen
Publisher: Zed Books
Total Pages: 392
Release: 1992
Genre: History
ISBN:

Exacerbated by the Gulf War, the plight of the Kurds is one of the most urgent problems facing the international community. This authoritative study of the Kurdish people provides a deep and varied insight into one of the largest primarily tribal communities in the world. It covers the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the great Kurdish revolt against republican Turkey, the birth of Kurdish nationalism and the situation of the Kurdish people in Iraq, Turkey and Iran today. Van Bruinessen's work is already recognized as a key contribution to this subject. Tribe by tribe, he accounts for the evolution of power within Kurdish religious and other lineages, and shows how relations with the state have played a key constitutive role in the development of tribal structures. This is illustrated from contemporary Kurdish life, highlighting the complex interplay between traditional clan loyalties and their modern national equivalents. This book is essential to any Middle East collection. It has serious implications for the study of tribal life elsewhere, and it documents the history of what has until recently been a forgotten people.

Kurdish Notables and the Ottoman State

Kurdish Notables and the Ottoman State
Author: Hakan Ozoglu
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2012-02-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0791485560

Kurdish nationalism remains one of the most critical and explosive problems of the Middle East. Despite its importance, the topic remains on the margins of Middle East Studies. Bringing the study of Kurdish nationalism into the mainstream of Middle East scholarship, Hakan Özogálu examines the issue in the context of the Ottoman Empire. Using a wealth of primary sources, including Ottoman and British archives, Ottoman Parliamentary minutes, memoirs, and interviews, he focuses on revealing the social, political, and historical forces behind the emergence and development of Kurdish nationalism. Contrary to the assumption that nationalist movements contribute to the collapse of empires, the book argues that Kurdish leaders remained loyal to the Ottoman state, and only after it became certain that the empire would not recover did Kurdish nationalism emerge and clash with the Kemalist brand of Turkish nationalism.

The Kurdish Question in Iraq

The Kurdish Question in Iraq
Author: Edmund Ghareeb
Publisher: Syracuse, N.Y. : Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 1981
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

This work first briefly examines the history of the Kurdish question in Turkey and Iran, then concentrates on the Kurdish question in Iraq - specifically, the Iraqi Baath government's attempts since 1968 to achieve a political understanding with the Kurds concerning their status in northern Iraq.

The Cambridge History of the Kurds

The Cambridge History of the Kurds
Author: Hamit Bozarslan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 1027
Release: 2021-04-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108583016

The Cambridge History of the Kurds is an authoritative and comprehensive volume exploring the social, political and economic features, forces and evolution amongst the Kurds, and in the region known as Kurdistan, from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century. Written in a clear and accessible style by leading scholars in the field, the chapters survey key issues and themes vital to any understanding of the Kurds and Kurdistan including Kurdish language; Kurdish art, culture and literature; Kurdistan in the age of empires; political, social and religious movements in Kurdistan; and domestic political developments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Other chapters on gender, diaspora, political economy, tribes, cinema and folklore offer fresh perspectives on the Kurds and Kurdistan as well as neatly meeting an exigent need in Middle Eastern studies. Situating contemporary developments taking place in Kurdish-majority regions within broader histories of the region, it forms a definitive survey of the history of the Kurds and Kurdistan.

Ottoman-Iranian Borderlands

Ottoman-Iranian Borderlands
Author: Sabri Ateş
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2013-10-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107245087

Using a plethora of hitherto unused and under-utilized sources from the Ottoman, British and Iranian archives, Ottoman-Iranian Borderlands traces seven decades of intermittent work by Russian, British, Ottoman and Iranian technical and diplomatic teams to turn an ill-defined and highly porous area into an internationally recognized boundary. By examining the process of boundary negotiation by the international commissioners and their interactions with the borderland peoples they encountered, the book tells the story of how the Muslim world's oldest borderland was transformed into a bordered land. It details how the borderland peoples, whose habitat straddled the frontier, responded to those processes as well as to the ideas and institutions that accompanied their implementation. It shows that the making of the boundary played a significant role in shaping Ottoman-Iranian relations and in the identity and citizenship choices of the borderland peoples.

The Sharafnama, Or, The History of the Kurdish Nation, 1597

The Sharafnama, Or, The History of the Kurdish Nation, 1597
Author: Sharaf Khān Bidlīsī
Publisher: Mazda Publishers
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN:

"In the pages of the Sharafnama are present the Kurdish nation, already unified 400 years ago within a common culture, national ethos, a defined homeland and an integrated history stretching into antiquity. In the text of this unique history the empires of the Kurds parallel those of the Arabs, Persians and Turks, some, according to Bitlisi, reaching back over 4,000 years. As the Kurds continue their arduous journey to regain their proper position as the fourth largest ethnic group in the greater Middle East, it is clear why the Sharafnama has gained the status of a national document and the locus classicus of Kurdish authenticity. The great prestige of the Sharafnama as a national history among the Kurdish literati and rulers has lasted for centuries. To gain the honor of being mentioned in the Sharafnama enticed later Kurdish dynasties to shuffle their own dynastic history into the pages of the book long after Bitlisi's death. Meanwhile, due to the pristine condition of its surviving manuscripts, the Sharafnama has and continues to serve as a primary resource to compare and correct the scribal errors found in other histories written in Persian language before 1597. The Sharafnama also contains invaluable information on the Kurds' neighboring peoples and dynasties who interacted with the Kurds, as well as the empires that emerged and weathered in the area."

The Thirty-Year Genocide

The Thirty-Year Genocide
Author: Benny Morris
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 673
Release: 2019-04-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 067491645X

A Financial Times Book of the Year A Foreign Affairs Book of the Year A Spectator Book of the Year “A landmark contribution to the study of these epochal events.” —Times Literary Supplement “Brilliantly researched and written...casts a careful eye upon the ghastly events that took place in the final decades of the Ottoman empire, when its rulers decided to annihilate their Christian subjects...Hitler and the Nazis gleaned lessons from this genocide that they then applied to their own efforts to extirpate Jews.” —Jacob Heilbrun, The Spectator Between 1894 and 1924, three waves of violence swept across Anatolia, targeting the region’s Christian minorities. By 1924, the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks, once nearly a quarter of the population, had been reduced to 2 percent. Most historians have treated these waves as distinct, isolated events, and successive Turkish governments presented them as an unfortunate sequence of accidents. The Thirty-Year Genocide is the first account to show that all three were actually part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to wipe out Anatolia’s Christian population. Despite the dramatic swing from the Islamizing autocracy of the sultan to the secularizing republicanism of the post–World War I period, the nation’s annihilationist policies were remarkably constant, with continual recourse to premeditated mass killing, homicidal deportation, forced conversion, and mass rape. And one thing more was a constant: the rallying cry of jihad. While not justified under the teachings of Islam, the killing of two million Christians was effected through the calculated exhortation of the Turks to create a pure Muslim nation. “A subtle diagnosis of why, at particular moments over a span of three decades, Ottoman rulers and their successors unleashed torrents of suffering.” —Bruce Clark, New York Times Book Review

Jewish Subjects and Their Tribal Chieftains in Kurdistan

Jewish Subjects and Their Tribal Chieftains in Kurdistan
Author: Mordechai Zaken
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 397
Release: 2007-01-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004161902

This volume deals with the experience and the position of non-tribal Jewish subjects and their relationships with their tribal chieftains (aghas) in urban centers and villages in Kurdistan. It is based on new oral sources, diligently collected and carefully analyzed.

The Kurds in the Middle East

The Kurds in the Middle East
Author: Mehmet Gurses
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2020-06-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1793613591

While dramatic changes taking place in the Middle East offer important opportunities to the Kurdish century-long struggle for recognition, serious obstacles seem to keep reemerging every time the Kurds anywhere make progress. The large Kurdish geography, extending from western Iran to near the eastern Mediterranean, and a century of repression and denial have engendered various Kurdish groups with competing and at times conflicting views and goals. The Kurds in the Middle East: Enduring Problems and New Dynamics, with an emphasis on continuity and change in the Kurdish Question, brings together a group of well-known scholars to shed light on this complex issue.