Routledge Handbook on the Kurds

Michael Gunter, Michael M. Gunter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317237983
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

With an estimated population of over 30 million, the Kurds are the largest stateless nation in the world. They are becoming increasingly important within regional and international geopolitics, particularly since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Arab Spring and the war in Syria.

This multidisciplinary Handbook provides a definitive overview of a range of themes within Kurdish studies. Topics covered include:

• 
  
  

• Kurdish studies in the United States and Europe
• Early Kurdish history
• Kurdish culture, literature and cinema
• Economic dimensions
• Religion
• Geography and travel
• Kurdish women
• The Kurdish situation in Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran
• The Kurdish diaspora.

With a wide range of contributions from many leading academic experts, this Handbook will be a vital resource for students and scholars of Kurdish studies and Middle Eastern studies.

PART I

Kurdish studies

1

Kurdish Studies in the United States

Michael M. Gunter

Although the United States is about as far away from Kurdistan as is geographically possible, it has a well established tradition of Kurdish Studies. Indeed, as long ago as April 1928, Sureya Bedir Khan—one of the three famous grandsons of the legendary mir of the emirate of Botan, Bedir Khan Beg (1800c.–1868)—journeyed to Detroit, Michigan, to mobilize the Kurdish community in that famous automobile capital in support of Khoybun’s Ararat revolt against Turkey. Surely, Bedir Khan only made this trip because there was a politically active Kurdish community there to receive him.¹

Little known to even Kurdish scholars, William O. Douglas—the famous and longest-serving Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1939 until his retirement in 1975—visited Kurdistan in the summers of 1949 and 1950 as part of a much larger trip to the Middle East. He shared his impressions of the Kurds and concluded that “Independence Is Preferred,” the title of one of the chapters in a book that recorded his overall trip.² Dana Adams Schmidt, for many years a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, spent 46 days with the Iraqi Kurds in 1962 (the climax of which was some 10 days with Mulla Mustafa Barzani), concluding that the Kurds were “the fightingest people in the Middle East.”³ Margaret Kahn, whose PhD dissertation in 1976 at the University of Michigan dealt with Kurdish linguistics, wrote an entire book about her trip to Kurdistan in 1974.⁴ All three of these American descriptions of the Kurds were early preludes to a veritable sea of later studies.

One of the most celebrated early American devotees of Kurdish Studies was Dr. Vera Beaudin Saeedpour (1930–2010). In middle age, she married Homayoun Saeedpour, a young Kurd from Sanandaj, Iran, and developed a keen interest in the plight of the Kurdish people. After her husband’s premature death from leukemia, Saeedpour founded the Kurdish Heritage Foundation of America with a Kurdish library in her Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, brownstone. Her Kurdish library came to contain more than 2,000 texts in Kurdish and other languages, while her museum, opened in 1988, possessed Kurdish artifacts, art, costumes, and maps. For more than a decade, these institutions and related publications served as a source of Kurdish scholarship in the United States and in effect made Saeedpour the dean of Kurdish Studies in that country.

In 1986, she also established and served as the editor of Kurdish Times, a scholarly journal, which published semiannual issues in 1986, 1988, 1990, and 1991. Richard T. Reiter, Benoni, Jane A. Daniels, and Wheeler Thackston served, respectively, as editors. Beginning with Volume 5, Nos. 1 & 2, in 1992, the journal was renamed Kurdish Studies, An International Journal “to better reflect its content and scope.” Wheeler Thackston continued as its first editor. The following year, in 1993, the semiannual publication became known as The International Journal of Kurdish Studies, and for several years, with Merhdad Izady as its Editor in Chief, it published numerous refereed articles of high quality. Izady, an Iranian Kurd with a PhD from Columbia University, also contributed several articles and computer-generated maps to the publication.⁵ Ismet Cheriff Vanly, the dean of international Kurdish Studies, served as one of the journal’s advisers.⁶ However, after Izady left the journal in 1998, its quality declined, and it eventually ceased publication.

In 1991, Saeedpour also began publishing Kurdish Life, a “quarterly featuring research and analysis of contemporary issues and events in the Middle East in the context of U.S. foreign policy.”⁷ The last issue of this newsletter was published as Number 68 in the fall of 2008. After her death, Saeedpour’s Kurdish library and museum were donated to the Binghamton University Library in Binghamton, New York. The collection contains more than 3,000 books, journals, and newspapers in Kurdish and other languages. It also holds artifacts, costumes, maps, photographs, artwork, and other unique materials, including Saeedpour’s correspondence with politicians, universities, Kurdish friends, writers, and others.⁸

Not to be confused with Vera Saeedpour’s The International Journal of Kurdish Studies was The Journal of Kurdish Studies, an entirely separate scholarly journal edited by Professor Keith Hitchins (1931–) of the University of Illinois at Urbana. Dr. Joyce Blau, the renowned French scholar of Kurdish literature, served as one of this journal’s associate editors. The Journal of Kurdish Studies published volumes in 1995, 1997, 2001, 2002, and 2005, with probably the final volume publishing in 2008.

Mustafa Al-Karadaghi was a former peshmerga fighter and minister in the Iraqi diplomatic service who resigned in protest against Iraq’s genocidal policies against the Kurds before finally settling in the United States, where his daughter, Dr. Pary Karadaghi, established the Kurdish Human Rights Watch to aid Kurdish refugees. From its first issue in the winter of 1990 to possibly its final one in June 2001, Mustafa Al-Karadaghi edited and published Kurdistan Times: A Biannual Political Journal. While not a scholarly journal, this publication contained short, interesting pieces on the Kurds and their heritage, along with historical photos. Omar Sheikhmous, Margareta Hanson, Walter Landry, Yona Sabar, and Desmond Fernandes, among others, were sometime associate editors.

Practically legendary in Kurdish Studies and considerably predating Saeedpour’s work was the famous PhD dissertation that Wadie Jwaideh submitted to Syracuse University in the United States in 1960. The Kurdish National Movement: Its Origins and Development was finally published, with a foreword by the renowned Kurdish scholar Martin van Bruinessen, by Syracuse University Press in 2005. Although Wadie Jwaideh’s study only goes up to 1959, it remains seminal in Kurdish Studies as a detailed analysis of the early phases of Kurdish nationalism and offers a framework within which to understand the movement’s late development. It also contains a number of fascinating, unique photos.

For many years, Professor Jwaideh taught in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Literatures at Indiana University, where one of the leading modern Kurdish scholars in the United States, Robert Olson, studied under him. Professor Olson went on to author 10 books, edit or co-edit another 4, and write 114 referred scholarly articles in books and journals, many dealing with the Kurdish issue.⁹ For many years, he taught at the University of Kentucky, where he was selected as the Kirwan Memorial Prize Professor in 1999–2000 and the Distinguished Professor of the College of Arts and Sciences in 2000–2001. Olson also served for more than a decade as the general editor of Mazda Publication’s Kurdish Studies Series, which, as of 2013, had published 13 books.¹⁰ In 2013, he finally retired.

In Olson’s honor, Michael Gunter compiled and edited the only Festschrift honoring a U.S. scholar of Kurdish Studies.¹¹ The Olson Festschrift contains 13 chapters on various subjects by such distinguished scholars of Kurdish Studies (listed in alphabetical order) as Hamit Bozarslan, Vera Eccarius-Kelly, Nader Entessar, Cengiz Gunes, Joost Jongerden, David Romano, Michael Rubin, Eva Savelsberg, Kamal Soleimani, Jordi Tejel, and Abbas Vali, among others.

Edmund Ghareeb published another well-known study in the formative period of modern Kurdish Studies in the United States in 1981.¹² He also introduced the first regular courses to be taught in the United States on Kurdish history, politics, and culture. In addition, he became the first Mustafa Barzani Distinguished Scholar in Global Kurdish Studies at the American University in Washington, D.C. Three core topical areas were to guide the research, course development, and program activities of the Barzani scholar: Kurdish history and culture in a local, regional, and global context; reconciliation among Kurdish groups and factions; and coexistence between the Kurds and the peoples and states of the Middle East. Among numerous other accomplishments, Ghareeb was the principal author of the first edition of the Historical Dictionary of Iraq.¹³

Michael Gunter followed Ghareeb’s first book on the Iraqi Kurds, with two more books on the Kurds in Iraq in 1992 and 1999.¹⁴ His first scholarly publication on the Kurds, however, had already had been published in 1988 but only after Paul Henze, the former U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) station chief in Ankara, who was then working for the Rand Corporation, asked Gunter to document how the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Turkey was controlled by the Soviet Union and international communism.¹⁵ When Gunter instead concluded that the PKK was mostly motivated by Kurdish nationalism, Henze rejected his findings. However, Gunter felt vindicated when the prestigious Middle East Journal published his article.¹⁶ In the succeeding years, other U.S. scholars began to publish a veritable flood of scholarly books and articles on the Kurdish problem in Turkey, Henri J. Barkey in 1993 being one of the first.¹⁷ Over the years, Gunter also published three more well-reviewed monographs on the Kurds¹⁸ as well as numerous scholarly articles.¹⁹

Gunter also was possibly the first and only Western scholar to meet Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK leader, in his Syrian safe house before he was expelled from Syria in October 1998 under heavy Turkish pressure and then captured by Turkey in February 1999.²⁰ At the time, a few said that somehow Gunter was involved in some type of plot to capture Ocalan, a wild conspiracy theory in complete opposition to the facts.²¹ Indeed, for several years, Gunter has served as the Secretary-General of the EU Turkey Civic Commission (EUTCC), a non-governmental organization that lobbies the EU parliament in Brussels for Turkish admission into the EU as a way to help solve the Kurdish problem in Turkey. Since its establishment in 2004, the EUTCC has held 14 annual conferences on the Kurdish problem in Turkey at the EU parliament. Gunter also taught courses on Kurdish and Middle Eastern politics, among others, for the U.S. Government Areas Studies Program and U.S. Department of State Foreign Service Institute in Washington, D.C. In a keynote speech at the international conference on “The Kurds and Kurdistan: Identity, Politics, History” at the Centre for Kurdish Studies, University of Exeter, UK, April 2, 2009, the renowned French-Kurdish scholar Hamit Bozarslan referred to Robert Olson and Michael Gunter as the two leading scholars of Kurdish Studies in the United States.

Dr. Najmaldin O. Karim was a young Iraqi Kurdish doctor who treated Mulla Mustafa Barzani in his final years and became an American citizen. Then for almost 35 years, Dr. Karim was a very prominent and successful neurosurgeon in Washington, D.C. In addition, he served as a most knowledgeable lobbyist for the Kurdish cause on Capitol Hill and frequently shepherded Kurdish visitors about the city. For several years, he also served as the president of the Kurdish National Congress of North America (KNC), a nonprofit, member-driven organization founded by Asad Khailany that represents Kurds from all parts of Kurdistan living in the United States and Canada. In April 2013, the KNC held its annual conference in Nashville, Tennessee, whose maybe 12,000 Kurds are the largest such concentration in the United States, where maybe 50,000 Kurds presently live. In 1996, Dr. Karim also established the Washington Kurdish Institute (WKI) as a nonprofit research and educational organization. Finally, in 2010, he returned to this homeland and served as the prominent governor of Kirkuk province until Baghdad removed him in October 2017. His colleague, Dr. Kirmanj Gundi, a professor of education at Tennessee State University, also served recently as the president of the KNC.

Born in Kirkuk, Dr. Mohammed M.A. Ahmed earned a PhD in Agricultural Economics from Oklahoma State University in 1964 and worked for many years in the United Nations. Upon his retirement, he established the Ahmed Foundation for Kurdish Studies, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization based in the United States, which undertakes scholarly conferences and studies pertaining to Kurdish history, culture, an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of maps
• Introduction
• Part I Kurdish studies
• Part II Early Kurdish history
• Part III Kurdish culture
• Part IV Economic dimensions
• Part V Religion
• Part VI Geography and travel
• Part VII Women
• Part VIII The Kurdish situation in Turkey
• Part IX The Kurdish situation in Iraq
• Part X The Kurdish situation in Syria
• Part XI Iran
• Part XII The Kurdish diaspora
• Notes on contributors
• Index