“Despite their large population and their remarkable place in the Kurdish and Alevi history, only recently the Kurdish Alevis became the centre of attention and discussion among the public and the academicians. This was mainly due to their ethnic and religious identities. Considered as ‘heretic’ by the Ottoman administration they were singled out for centuries.Once the borders of the Ottoman Empire disintegrated and became the Republic of Turkey, the Kurdish Alevis were now ostracized as an ethno-religious group, which led to a painful suppression during the twentieth century. It is due to the input of fieldwork carried out by activists and researchers since 1980s that we are now better informed about their authentic beliefs, myths, religious organizations and ceremonies performed in Zazaki and Kurmanci. This chapter does not only offer an overview of these findings, but also the critical turning points in their history and the main features of their religious tenets, their contemporary state in Turkey and Western Europe and the ongoing debates they are participating in.”

Although the presence of the Kurdish diaspora is relatively new in the European contexts, it has nonetheless developed as a transnational community, enabled and facilitated by global communication technologies that can be used to politically mobilize resources in support of the Kurds in the Middle East. What makes the Kurdish diaspora a politicized diaspora is the persistent exclusionary and violence of the states against the Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. It is during times of crisis and critical events that the Kurdish diaspora is materialized through its claims, lobbying and rallies across the West. Although migration can imply assimilation for many transnational communities, the Kurdish ambivalence vis-à-vis assimilation becomes tangible. It is also true that Kurds might be more receptive to assimilation due to their minoritized backgrounds in the country of origin and experiences of adaptation to the dominant culture and language. However, the political activism of diaspora and the strong attachment to Kurdish identity due to political oppression in the Middle East is a persistent reminder that Kurds have not come to the West to assimilate but to continue struggling for recognition of their identities and rights in the Middle East.

Kurdish poetry is the predominant and the oldest Kurdish literary genre and continues to play a formative role in Kurdish cultural and political identity. An integral part of uprisings and revolutions, Kurdish poetry has been an active site of resistance and remembrance. Despite its cultural and political significance, however, it has not received the scholarly attention it deserves. Against this backdrop, this chapter offers a brief history of classical and modern Kurdish poetry in the Kurdish dialects of Gorani, Kurmanji and Sorani. Starting with a detailed account of the development of classical poetry and its main trends and conventions, the chapter moves to present a new perspective on the emergence of modern Kurdish poetry, and challenges the established explanation of its emergence. The main stages of the development of modern poetry throughout the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries and its instrumental role in the dissemination of Kurdish nationalism are also discussed.

This chapter examines the formation and development of modern Kurdish political activism in the final decades of the Ottoman Empire’s existence. It charts the evolution of the movement through an examination of contemporary documentary evidence, including newspapers, publications and archival materials. Over the course of the period between 1880 and 1923, there was a slow but steady uptick in Kurdish political agitation. However, while growing numbers of Kurdish elites came to see themselves as part of a Kurdish ‘nation’ and began to advocate for Kurdish ‘rights’, there was little consensus on how or within what type of framework those rights might be secured. While some looked towards the creation of an autonomous or even independent Kurdish nation-state as a panacea to the Kurdish question, many early Kurdish intellectuals remained committed to the continuation of the Ottoman state. Indeed, it was only in the aftermath of Ottoman defeat during the First World War that support for Kurdish statehood emerged as the dominant trend within Kurdish intellectual circles. However, ultimately the geopolitical circumstances that came into being with the empire’s collapse served to foreclose nationalist aspirations.

From the arrival of the Ottomans and the Safavids to Kurdistan until the removal of the Kurdish emirates in the mid-nineteenth century, the Kurdish nobility was actively involved in regional and trans-border politics. The struggle between the Ottomans and the Safavids, especially during the first half of the sixteenth century, when the division between ‘Iranian Kurdistan’ and ‘Ottoman Kurdistan’ was consolidated, was pivotal in shaping the political landscape in Kurdistan. However, for the successive centuries some of the Kurdish lands would keep changing hands after each war between two states. At other times Kurdish lords would switch their loyalty for another ruler or simultaneously pay tribute and tax to both states. Tools of politics used by both states and the Kurdish emirs varied from time to time but remained mainly the same in essence. While the Ottoman Empire and Iranian dynasties planned their imperial project on Kurdistan the Kurdish nobility played an active role in regional and trans-border politics. The policies of both states had lasting effects in the region while Kurdish lands remained a ‘buffer zone’ between two states until the mid-nineteenth century, when finally the Ottomans and Qajar Iran removed the Kurdish notables from their position and incorporated their lands into the central administration.

While Kurdish classical poetry has a long history of many centuries, the modern Kurdish narrative discourse, that is, the Kurdish novel and short story, rises in the early decades of the twentieth century. Reviewing the life of some of the most influential Kurdish poets shows that they usually crossed the borders between the different parts of Kurdistan within the frame of the Ottoman and Iranian empires. These poets mainly served the Kurdish ethnic awareness and literary heritage. Having been deprived of a Kurdish nation-state, modern Kurdish narrative discourse encounters a dilemma as far as the national setting of its narratives is considered. Contrary to the earlier Kurdish poets who could wander to different parts of Kurdistan, the modern Kurdish novelists provide their imaginary characters with such an opportunity of crossing the strictly defined national borders of the modern nation-states in which the Kurds live. These characters, suffering from the lack of a defined national identity and a state of their own, challenge the borders between various parts of Kurdistan by crossing them. The wandering feature of the classical poets and the imaginary communities of the Kurdish novelists are among the distinguishing characteristics of the Kurdish literature in the past and the modern era.

“This chapter analyses Kurdish cultural and artistic work. For much of the twentieth century, Kurdish cultural and artistic productions were repressed by the assimilationist policies the states of Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria adopted with respect of their Kurdish population. One of the most intriguing contributions of this chapter is its emphasis on artistic and cultural production within the actual political arena, interrogating how it contributes to the transformation of the new Kurdish subjectivity that situates itself across borders. The questions underpinning this research investigate how through counter-cultural and artistic efforts create or rather recreate a cognitive territory of an oppressed people.Artistic production for Kurds signifies the memory of a stateless people and a decolonial aesthetic trying to survive amids the hegemony of the dominant national cultures and the traumas of the repression of Kurdish micro-culture. Hence, analysing the participation of contemporary artists and producers in the Kurdish area in the midst of conflict and violence enables us to highlight the emancipatory capacity of their work. During the 1990s and 2000s, theatre, music, cinema festivals began to be held in European countries, which also extended to the four parts of the Kurdish territories, leading to the propagation of both intergenerational and trans-border artistic and cultural activities. This reterritorialization of Kurdish counter-cultural memory may not be a renaissance of Kurdish cultural production but instead should be considered a cultural serhildan.”

Modern Kurdish theatre emerged and developed differently in countries in which the Kurds live. This chapter traces these divergent histories in Soviet Armenia and Georgia, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria and within the diaspora. These histories, particularly in the Middle East, are mired in persecution, repression and violence. In defiance of decades of assimilationist policies, ethnocide and genocide, grassroots efforts were made to build the foundations of a modern Kurdish theatre. Kurdish intelligentsia used theatre as a nation-building institution and a vehicle for safeguarding their language, literature and culture. While in Soviet Armenia these efforts were supported by the state, an outright ban on the Kurdish language and years of political repression and turmoil stifled the growth of Kurdish theatre in the Middle East. Although Kurds are still a marginalized group struggling to achieve basic human rights, the resilience of their theatre artists has resulted in ground-breaking productions, such as that of Hamlet in 2012–13, demonstrating to all that no amount of political repression can eliminate Kurdish identity. It is of utmost importance to document this remarkable history to understand modern Kurdish society and to not allow these events to be forgotten to time.

The Kurdish question, four decades after the Iranian Revolution, continues to be considered one of the most serious threats to Iran’s territorial integrity by the clerical regime. In turn, Iranian Kurds often feel marginalized, discriminated and dissatisfied with the treatment they receive from Shiite Persians who dominate the multinational country of Iran. In a quest to better understand the conflictive relationship between Kurds and the Iranian regime, this chapter intends to examine the social and political dynamics of Iranian Kurdistan by analysing the interaction between social forces, Kurdish organizations and the central state. For this purpose, it aims to examine three major aspects that have shaped Kurdish society since the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The first section presents an overview of the demography, social and class structure of the Kurdish people. By focusing on state-minority interaction, the second section analyses the Kurdish question in Iranian discourse and various state policies vis-â-vis the Kurds. The third section addresses the Kurdish movement’s responses to state policies. It distinguishes between organizations present in Kurdistan and the Kurdish movement which incorporates a wide array of aims, interests and actors. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of new spaces and prospects for action.

This chapter sheds some light on the fusion of Islam and nationalism in modern Kurdish history. It selectively discusses the views and activities of some influential late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Kurdish religio-political figures. It is an attempt to demonstrate that Kurdish religiosity, like that of other Muslim communities, accommodated their nationalism. Major Kurdish religious figures were open to, supported and often worked for some forms of Kurdish self-rule: they imagined Kurds as a distinct nation and therefore defended and declared the legitimacy of Kurdish political demands and rights. The latter point defines nationalism since the right to self-rule is principally based on self-referentiality. Hence, this chapter argues that the defining point of religious nationalism is that the modern religious agent creates/imagines the boundaries of her collective self within those of the national.

This chapter tackles several interrelated issues around the Kurdish language. It provides a general internal classification of Kurdish varieties, proposing also a theoretically informed distinction between language history and collective identity perceptions of speakers to resolve the classification disputes around Zazaki and Gorani varieties. ‘Kurdish’ in this sense is considered more a sociolinguistic unit than a purely linguistic entity. The chapter then provides summary discussion of the position of Iranian philology on the history of Kurdish, whereby it is shown that Kurdish is not in a direct descendant relationship with any of the known languages of the Old and Middle Iranian periods. The chapter traces the history of written and literary Kurmanji Kurdish. The rise of literary or written code in Kurmanji is shown to have taken place in late sixteenth century within the wider sociopolitical context of, on one hand, the emergence of powerful Kurdish principalities and widespread madrasa education, and, on the other hand, a general trend in the vernacularization of local community languages in Kurdistan. Finally, the development of modern Kurmanji as a polycentric variety is discussed and the current approximation of written norms are projected to merge in a more comprehensive plurinormative Kurmanji standard.

Taking a world historical perspective and postcolonial critique as its point of departure, this chapter goes into a survey of the state of the Kurds and Kurdish nationalism in the interwar period. The analysis is organized along the lines of the states under whose rule the Kurds came to reside; namely, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria and the USSR. The dissolution of empires and the emergence of nation-states that were politically, culturally and economically subjected to the Western-centred world economy since the nineteenth century was the main feature that characterized the interwar period. Kurdish reactions to the shifting borders comprised a wide array of responses ranging from assimilation to armed uprisings. Turkey and Iran adopted policies of Turkification and Persianization alongside the forced resettlement of the Kurds in interior regions. In Iraq, they were promised official recognition on paper yet it remained unfulfilled in reality. Syria under the French Mandate was home to Kurdish nationalist political and cultural activities. In the USSR, the earlier categorization of the Kurds as a ‘small nation’ later shifted to that of an ‘enemy nation’, which led to the first wave of their deportation in 1937. The chapter concludes that the interwar period in Kurdish history thus has a defining legacy in the formation of subsequent Kurdish nationalist discourses and movements.

This chapter focuses on the emergence and of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) in 1991 and its evolution since then. The Kurds maintained their strong desire to be sovereign over territories they defined as Kurdistan, but reluctantly remained within Iraq. The removal of Saddam Hussein from power in 2003 by the US-led coalition allowed the Kurdish leaders to strengthen their alliance with Western powers and consolidate their autonomy. The instability in Iraq during the 2000s and the growing dominance of Shia political parties steadily deteriorated the relations between the KRI and the federal government of Iraq, and the insurgency by the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) from 2013 posed an existential threat to the KRI. The struggle against ISIS brought under Kurdish control vast areas of northern Iraq that the Kurds claimed as being historically Kurdish, but that did not lie within KRI’s authority. However, the subsequent Kurdish efforts to secede from Iraq, which faced strong opposition from Iran and Turkey, reached an abrupt end when the Shia forces took control of the Kirkuk city along with other disputed regions back from the Kurdish forces in October 2017.