Suchergebnisse

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: The Hamidiye Light Cavalry in the Ottoman Tribal Zone -- 1. A Manifold Mission -- 2. The Hamidiye Under Abdülhamid II, 1890-1908 -- 3. The Tribal Light Cavalry Under the Young Turks, 1908-1914 -- 4. The Hamidiye and the "Agrarian Question," -- 5. The Hamidiye and Its Legacy -- Appendix: Map of Hamidiye Regiments, ca. 1900 -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Drawing on the theoretical underpinnings of Gyanendra Pandey's work on the construction of minorityhood in India, this article explores how Kurds became a minority in the context of foreign intervention in the Ottoman Empire and how a new discourse surrounding 'minorities', citizenship and rights became elements in a wider discourse on modernity, civilization, sovereignty, identity, citizenship and power. This article ultimately traces the minoritization of the Kurds and how Kurds became minoritized after, but along with, Armenians. Of particular interest in the present study is how fresh thinking in the field of borderlands history can help illuminate other angles of the minoritization process, here, namely, its connection to territoriality. Thus, here I add to Pandey's concept of 'marked citizenship' to reflect on what I call 'marked territoriality' as the companion feature in the process of making minorities. I also suggest that the case study I explore in this article may help us tweak the periodization of territoriality itself.

ABSTRACT. Recent scholarship has begun to nuance the idea of Ottoman decline, but few works have attempted to see nationalism outside of the dominant decline paradigm. By addressing the emergence of Kurdish nationalism in the late Ottoman period, this paper questions the idea that imperial disintegration and nationalism were inherently intertwined; and challenges not only the mutually causal relationship that has been emphasised in literature to date, but also the shape that the 'nationalist movement' took. Using archival sources, the Kurdish‐Ottoman press, travel literature and secondary sources in various languages, the present paper will illustrate how the so‐called Kurdish nationalist movement' was actually several different movements, each with a differing vision of the political entity its participants hoped to create or protect through their activities. The idea of Kurdish nationalism, or Kurdism, may have been present in the minds of these activists, but the notion of what it meant was by no means uniform. Different groups imbued the concept with their own meanings and agendas. This study demonstrates that most 'nationalists' among the Kurds continued to envision themselves as members of the multi‐national Ottoman state, the temptingly powerful rise of nationalism in their day notwithstanding. The suggestion has important implications for students and scholars of nationalist movements among other non‐dominant groups, not only in the Ottoman Empire but in contemporaneous empires such as the Habsburg, and in later states like Iraq, Rwanda and Sudan. The present study further questions the received wisdom that multi‐ethnic entities are a recipe for disaster. It proposes that a joint effort to rethink what we know about minority nationalism may involve not only a reconceptualisation of the very terms we use, but perhaps an accompanying shift in approach too.

Kurdish studies have, in the past few decades, come to be established as a respectable field of academic investigation and publication, after long having been as marginal in academia as the Kurds themselves were in the politics of the Middle East. The received wisdom, in many Western academic institutions, was that it was essential to retain access to the "field" and that permits to carry out field research in such pro-Western and relatively accessible countries as Turkey and Iran would continue to be granted as long as scholars stayed away from sensitive issues – and the Kurds were definitely one of the most sensitive of those issues. Turkey and Iran, Iraq and Syria perceived their Kurdish citizens as a major security issue, and scholarly interest in the Kurds aroused suspicions of imperialist meddling in Arab, Persian or Turkish affairs.