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The Kurds As Objects and Subjects of Historiography: Turkish and Kurdish

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The Kurds As Objects and Subjects of Historiography: Turkish and Kurdish Martin van Bruinessen, ‘The Kurds as objects and subjects of historiography: Turkish and Kurdish nationalists struggling over identity’ published in Fabian Richter (ed.), Identität Ethnizität und Nationalismus in Kurdistan. Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Prof. Dr. Ferhad Ibrahim Seyder, Münster: Lit Verlag, 2016, pp. 13-61. The Kurds as objects and subjects of historiography: Turkish and Kurdish nationalists struggling over identity1 Martin van Bruinessen The Kurds deconstructed? One interesting variety of literature on the Kurds is the genre, usually produced by Turkish nationalists, that attempts to prove that they do not exist, at least not as a distinct people with their own history and culture. The genre is almost as old as the Republic of Turkey itself, and semi- official publications of this kind have accompanied the various campaigns to assimilate the Kurds and to suppress Kurdish ‘separatism.’ Their authors are typically either retired military or civil administrators who spent part of their careers in the region, or men from the region itself, often belonging to tribes or communities of ambiguous ethnic identity, who made a deliberate decision to identify themselves as Turks rather than Kurds and attempted to provide ‘scientific’ evidence for the Turkish origins of the various Kurdish tribes and Kurdish dialects. Most of the authors of works in this genre published since the 1970s were associated with the far-right Nationalist Action Party (MHP).2 Many of these texts contain in fact some interesting bits of local history and empirical observations on tribal organisation and custom, but they consist for the most part of rambling attempts to connect the names of Kurdish tribes or items of Kurdish vocabulary with names or words from some Turkic language or other. Often Turkishness is simply asserted without even an attempt to provide a serious argument. The authors generally take the Turkish History Thesis of the 1930s for granted, according to which all major civilisations were founded by Turkish conquerors from Central Asia. Ancient empires such as those of Urartu and the Hittites were claimed to be Turkic, and any connection that could be constructed between these empires and the Kurds currently living in the 1 A very early version of this paper was presented under the title “The Kurds as Objects and Subjects of Their History: Between Turkish Official Historiography, Orientalist Constructions, and Kurdish Nationalists' Re- appropriation of Their History”, at the conference ‘Between Imagination and Denial: Kurds as Subjects and Objects of Political and Social Processes’, organized by the Kurdology Working Group at the Free University, Berlin, May 19-31, 1998. An updated version was published in Turkish translation in: Martin van Bruinessen, Kürdolojinin Bahçesinde: Kürdologlar ve Kürdoloji Üzerine Söyleşi ve Makaleler, Istanbul: Vate, 2009; reprint Istanbul: İletişim, 2012. 2 Several of these authors were active in the MHP’s education department, where they provided ideological training; some also found positions in provincial universities after the purge of progressive academics in the wake of the 1980 coup. An interesting file on the production of this type of denialist literature in Turkey, titled “Anti Kürdoloji” was published in the July-August 2015 issue of the excellent popular history journal published in Istanbul, Kürt Tarihi, No. 19, after I had completed the present article. Van Bruinessen, Kurds as objects and subjects 1 same region was seen as further proof that the Kurds were also Turkic. None of these authors were trained as academic historians or linguists; they are typically amateurs and dilettantes, who use their sources very selectively, take items they like out of context and deliberately ignore everything that does not fit their a priori ideas. Two books that were published in 1975, by the same ultra-nationalist publishing house, added a new dimension to earlier denial of the Kurds’ distinct identity: it was the Imperialists who invented them, in order to weaken the Ottoman Empire and later Republican Turkey. Mahmut Rışvanoğlu's The Tribes of the East and Imperialism and Mehmet Eröz’s The Turkishness of East Anatolia both insist that all the tribes of Eastern Turkey, including those known as Kurmanç or Zaza, are authentic Turks of Central Asian origin and that it was only the Imperialists who declared them to be a people in their own right and distinct from the Turks.3 Their thesis is different from the earlier nationalist paranoia that perceived foreign hands behind every Kurdish uprising. For these authors, it was not just the Kurdish rebellions that were fomented by the Imperialists in their great games, but the very existence of the Kurds as a people is an Imperialist creation – not by military intervention but by ideological work. Rışvanoğlu presents this thesis implicitly in his title and tries to set it out the introduction to his book, which is unfortunately rambling and incoherent, and in the generally paranoid style of Turkey’s far right. The Imperialists, he asserts, spent huge sums of money to have encyclopaedias, books and journals written, which were to be used in an offensive to break the unity of the Turkish nation, separating it into Turks and Kurds, Sunnis and Alevis, so that all could be enslaved.4 Encyclopaedias, books and journal articles: several years before Edward Said’s Orientalism,5 Rışvanoğlu pointed the finger at Orientalists as the foot soldiers of Imperialist interests. Eröz, who at least had an academic education (in economics),6 presents his argument slightly more coherently. In the chapter “Is it possible to speak of a ‘Kurdish’ nation?”, he argues that these so- called Kurdish tribes speak a large number of widely divergent and mutually unintelligible languages and dialects. The English have first produced an alphabet based on one of these 3 Mahmut Rışvanoğlu, Doğu Aşiretleri ve Emperyalizm, 2. baskı, İstanbul: Türk Kültür Yayını, 1975; Mehmet Eröz, Doğu Anadolu'nun Türklüğü, Istanbul: Türk Kültür Yayını, 1975. The cover layout of these books is, incidentally, identical with that of the 1970 reprint of a classic in the “Kurds are Turks” genre, M. Şerif Fırat’s Doğu İlleri ve Varto Tarihi [History of Varto and the Eastern Provinces], 3. baskı, Ankara: Kardeş Matbaası, 1970 (on which more below), suggesting a visual acknowledgement of intellectual debt. 4 Rışvanoğlu, Doğu Aşiretleri, p. 9. 5 Edward Said, Orientalism. New York: Random House, 1978. 6 Eröz (1930-86) was in fact a lecturer of economics at the University of Istanbul. He had written a thesis on the economic life of Yörük nomads, and later published also on the Alevi communities of Turkey – all of which he of course declared to be Turkish. Van Bruinessen, Kurds as objects and subjects 2 languages, Kurmanci, and then they have attempted to unite the other three language groups with the Kurmanci speakers into an artificial ethnic group (kavim) and turn them into a nation (milliyet).7 A generous reading of these books might find here the rudiments of an early and unsophisticated formulation of the now dominant view that identities are deliberately constructed and politically contested.8 Stripped of their paranoia and xenophobia, Rışvanoğlu and Eröz seem to say that many of the symbols of identity embraced by contemporary Kurdish nationalists were constructed by Imperialist agents, and that their self-perception has been profoundly shaped by the writings of foreign scholars. This is in itself a reasonable claim, although few Kurdish nationalists had sufficient knowledge of foreign languages to actually read the relevant publications (unless they were translated into Turkish). It was two consuls of Imperial Russia who, each in close collaboration with a learned Kurdish counterpart, provided us and the Kurds themselves with the first authoritative surveys of Kurdish language and culture. Alexandre Jaba, the Russian consul at Erzurum in the 1850s, urged the knowledgeable Mela Mehmûdê Bayezîdî to write overviews of Kurdish literature, folklore and society, and to produce a Kurdish translation of the Persian Sharafnameh, the famous 16th-century history of the Kurdish emirates.9 These texts constituted the major part of the corpus on the basis of which Jaba later compiled the first Kurdish dictionary and the German linguist Ferdinand Justi wrote his Kurdish grammar.10 Some sixty years later, Basile Nikitine, who was the Russian consul in Urmia in 1915-18, established a similar partnership with another Kurdish mullah, Mela Sa`id Qazi, who wrote for him a series of Kurdish texts on religion and society that constituted the basis for much of Nikitine's later scholarly writing on the Kurds.11 The third great Russian Kurdologist, Vladimir Minorsky, also began his career in the diplomatic service of the Czarist government. His 7 Eröz, Doğu Anadolu'nun Türklüğü, pp. 77-8. 8 Authoritative statements of this view: Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991; Craig Calhoun (ed.), Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, Oxford: Blackwell, 1994; Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. II: The Power of Identity, Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. 9 A. Jaba, Recueil de notices et de récits kourdes (St-Pétersbourg, 1860); M. Bayezîdî, Nravy i obycai Kurdov [Adat û rusûmname-y Ekradiye], Moscow, 1963; M.M. Bayezîdî, Tewarîx-i qadîm-i Kurdistan, Moscow, 1986. On Bayezîdî see also Michiel Leezenberg’s forthcoming article ‘Between Islamic Learning and Philological Nationalism: Mullah Mahmûdê Bayazîdî’s Auto-Ethnography of the Kurds.’ 10 A. Jaba, Dictionnaire kurde-français, St-Pétersbourg, 1879; F. Justi, Kurdische Grammatik, St. Petersburg: 1880. 11 B.P.Nikitine & E.B. Soane, ‘The tale of Suto and Tato’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies 3 (1923), 69- 106; B.P. Nikitine, ‘Les Kurdes racontés par eux-mêmes’, L'Asie française no. 231 (Mai 1925), 148-157; idem, ‘Kurdish stories from my collection’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies 4 (1926), 121-138; idem, Les Kurdes, étude sociologique et historique, Paris: Klincksieck, 1956, and numerous other publications.
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