THE KURDS AND THE STATE
By Michael Rubin
American Enterprise Institute, DC –
Nov 29 2006
BOOK REVIEWS
Middle East Quarterly (Winter 2007)
Publication Date: December 1, 2006
In The Kurds and the State, derived from her University of Pennsylvania
doctoral dissertation, political scientist [Denise] Natali explores
how Kurdish nationalism developed in Turkey, Iran, and Iraq. She does
this with the opacity and jargon of an academic: "This book explains
why Kudayetî, or Kurdish national identity, becomes ethnicized and
the similarities and variations in its manifestation across space
and time."
Resident Scholar Michael Rubin Beyond style, her comparative approach
has value. The Kurds are not monolithic, linguistically or politically,
though too many works treat them as such; to this, The Kurds and the
State is an important exception. Natali avoids contemporary Kurdish
narratives of victimization. Kurdish complaints that European powers
divided Kurdistan do not hold up to historical fact: the border between
what is now Turkey and Iran, for example, dates from the sixteenth
century. Nor does she make the mistake of many contemporary authors
and instant experts, retroactively extending Kurdish nationalism. She
explains how Kurdish nationalism grew in early twentieth century
Anatolia with the coming of European consuls and intra-communal
tensions. In contrast, Kurdish nationalism took longer to develop in
polyglot Iran, perhaps because there Sunni versus Shi’ite sectarian
practice rather than ethnicity determined the degree to which Kurds
could integrate.
Natali’s overviews and comparisons are thought-provoking. She
juxtaposes the growth of Kurdish participation in the political process
in Turkey with an increasingly stilted process in Iraq and notes how
Ankara’s embrace of the Kurds and their socioeconomic and political
diversification undercut any unitary sense of Kurdish identity in
Turkey. Her examination of Turkish strategies to undercut Kurdistan
Workers Party (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan) terrorism in the 1980s
is also useful, even if she remains critical of Ankara’s refusal to
"de-ethnicize the notion of Turkish citizenship." In these ways,
The Kurds and the State advances the staid and often simplified
historiography that marks Kurdish studies.
But Natali’s work is undercut by several problems, starting with her
unsure grasp of history. She amplifies, for example, the efficiency
of Ottoman state control and discounts the efficiency of Iranian
bureaucracy. While inefficient and weak by Western standards,
nineteenth century Iran was organized enough to defeat incursions
by Ottoman Kurdish tribal chiefs along its periphery. Natali appears
unaware that published collections of Iranian diplomatic correspondence
are replete with reports and discussions telegraphed from the
front. She is also prone to exaggeration. If "early republican Turkey
removed all opportunities for the Kurds," then why did İsmet
İnonu, an ethnic Kurd, succeed Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey’s
founding father?
More serious is the incompleteness of Natali’s discussion of the
Ataturk religious reforms. She fails to address head-on the impact of
his abolishment of the caliphate, the source of a great deal of tension
among Turkey’s Kurdish tribes for whom religious traditionalism trumped
nationalism as the impetus for struggle with the nascent Turkish
republic. Her bibliographical judgment is questionable, citing, for
example, Armenian polemicist Vahakn Dadrian (whose name she misspells).
Discussion of the Kurds of modern Iran falls short and that of Syria
is non-existent. Natali parses secondary sources, many out-of-date,
for mention of Kurds and appears unaware that some authors upon whose
work she relies, including Afsaneh Najmabadi (whose name she also
misspells), approach Iranian historiography through a political prism
that ends up skewing her narrative. It is unfortunate that The Kurds
and the State falls short, for a more careful and complete comparative
examination of Kurdish society would contribute much.
Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at AEI.
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