Transnational aspects of the Kurdish question

Abstract

Simplifying a complex question, one may observe that the objectives of all Kurdish political movements of the past century have concerned two central issues, culture and territory. The Kurdish language and the region historically known as Kurdistan are the Kurds’ most important national symbols. It is only seemingly a paradox that many of the most active participants in the present Kurdish movement (especially so in the case of Turkey’s Kurds) speak but little Kurdish and have long lived outside Kurdistan. Pre-modern Kurdish uprisings were mostly directed against outside interference in the affairs of local communities; the insurgents as well as their leaders had strong local roots and usually spoke the same Kurdish dialect. Ideas of a common Kurdish identity or of Kurdistan as a natural territorial unit, however, did not occur to them. These ideas are not entirely a modern development — we find them quite explicitly expressed in the work of the seventeenth-century poet Ehmedê Xanî — but only in the twentieth century did they get something of a wider appeal. The first Kurdish nationalist associations were established, significantly, outside Kurdistan, and in Kurdistan itself it was only in the largest and most modern towns that initially gained some influence.