Expanding Kurdish Studies: A Review Essay

Abstract

The Failure to Implement the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres thwarted Kurdish hopes for their own state, but it did not write the Kurds out of history. From Sheikh Said’s rebellion against the Turks in 1925 to the legendary Mulla Mustafa Barzani and his son Massud, Kurds have grabbed the occasional headline and challenged central authorities more or less continually throughout the 20th century. Conversely, and in less chronicled fashion, they have also played powerful roles in consolidating state rule. Only after the Gulf War in 1991, however, did Kurds begin receiving sustained western attention and, in the last three years in particular, a new flood of articles and books by academics and journalists has swelled periodicals and library shelves. The Middle East Studies Association’s annual conferences from 1995 to 1997 all featured panels devoted to Kurds and Kurdish politics; at the MESA conference in San Francisco last December, papers concerning Kurds were also presented on thematic panels dealing with such diverse subjects as nationalism in the Middle East and youth in Turkey.