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I pressured my family to speak Turkish at home too, so my mother could learn it faster and the neighbours wouldn't laugh at her anymore. I even said to her, “When you make mistakes in speaking, it embarrasses me.” In reply, she told me not to be ashamed of my Kurdish heritage. In later years, when I was more aware of Kurdishness and the reality of Kurdistan, I would remember her words and regret my earlier shame. I had become estranged, I would realise then, from my own native tongue.
Sakine Cansız (1958–2013), Kurdish revolutionary, co-founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Cansız 2018)This book aims to provide an introduction to the Kurds as the largest stateless people in the world, a contemporary overview of their history and a critical examination of their quest for national identity and statehood from the demise of the Ottoman Empire, following the First World War (1914–18), to today. In doing so, it endeavours to explore and analyse discourses on Kurdish national identity, using existing theories of nationalism, addressing the following questions: why has the struggle for Kurdish national identity been imagined and not realized in statehood? Are the challenges and threats currently facing Kurdish autonomy, as manifested in the Kurdistan region, Iraq and the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, likely to ignite a regional conflict in the already volatile Middle East?
The Kurds and the Kurdish nationalist movement have been the subjects of many scholarly works since the 1950s. However, much of this work has tended to be too detailed, overly specialist and bulky, with some giving disproportionate attention to the history of the Kurds. This book differs in that it aims to be the first foray into the topic, giving focus and voice, in a concise and accessible format, to the contemporary issues and challenges facing the Kurds and their quest for national identity and statehood.
THE KURDS: POPULATION DISTRIBUTION AND CULTURAL RIGHTS
Numbering 25–35 million, the Kurds make up the fourth largest ethnic group in the Middle East. They are one of the indigenous peoples of the Mesopotamian plains and the highlands in what are now south-eastern Turkey, a contiguous 500,000 square kilometres straddling north-eastern Syria, northern Iraq, north-western Iran and south-western Armenia.
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