Kurdistan: Crafting of National Selves (review)

This relatively short treatise is a sophisticated but difficult read that will reward the careful scholar with many heuristic insights into not only the crafting of Kurdish nationalism but also the overall modernization process carried out by what the author somewhat problematically terms “the Kemalist states of Turkey, Iraq, and Iran” (p. 3). Although Houston explains that he uses Kemalism to mean “a trans-regional ... political project to nationalize the bodies and perceptions of the populations circumscribed by its new territorial boundaries and to reform Islam for service to the nation-state” (p. 126), this reviewer still finds Kemalist too country- and ideologically-specific to Turkey to be used to describe other states. Despite the interesting linguistic, genderemancipatory, and national-engineering similarities, it probably would have been less confusing to call these other post-Ottoman states secularizing, modernizing, and/or nationalizing.

Houston’s narrative is not meant to be a retelling of Kurdish history, but rather an analysis of its various historiographic interpretations. For example, he examines the incorporation of much of the Kurdish region into the Ottoman Empire in 1514–18, the tanzimat centralist reforms of the 19^th century that abolished de facto Kurdish autonomy (for which autonomy the author uses the striking Ottoman phrase “set aside from the pen and cut off from the foot” (p. 40)), and the creation of new nation-states inhabited by Kurds following World War I. He then concludes that “the different ways of imagining Kurds and Kurdistan that are discussed indicate that Kurdish ethnicity is a relational and creative act, something made by — not given to — every Kurd” (p. 6). For example, the author writes about Kurdish accounts of “Ottoman exploitation of Kurdistan and ceaseless local resistance. In contrast, many Islamist narratives deny the alien character of the Ottoman system, sensing in its dissolution instead the origins of present-day problems in the region” (p. 36). Further, “because dominant versions of Turkish historiography have stressed both the Turkish facility to found states and implied a Kurdish inability to do so, Kurdish historiography is often engaged in identifying past independent Kurdish or proto-Kurdish states” (p. 32–33). Yet “paradoxically this [earlier Kurdish] autonomy is often also represented as a millstone around the neck of an emerging Kurdish nation-state” (p. 50). Thus, in speaking of “this ‘gap’ between an event and its multitude of interpretations [that] is typical of historiography in general” (p. 48), “for many Kurdish nationalists, their imagining of Kurdistan resembles the Turkifying of the Ottomans by Turkish nationalists” (p. 63). Finally, in regards to “Kurdistan’s geographical promiscuity” (p. 80), “although there was never a state named Kurdistan, until the institution of the nation-states of Turkey and Iraq, there was also never a taboo about calling that place where Kurds made up the majority of the population, Kurdistan” (p. 63).

In his “core chapter” (p. 4) on “Kemalism and the Crafting of National Selves in Kurdistan,” the author informs his readers: “Rather than dwelling on the dictatorial character of Kemalist nationalism vis-á-vis Kurds, it would be more illuminating to examine the attempts made by these varied Kemalisms to craft a new embodied-consciousness or a changed political identity of citizens through their campaigns and initiatives in the fields of culture and education” (p. 107). This enables the author to discuss Kemalism’s “imagining and narrating of national origins and characteristics, the emancipating of women for service to the family of the nation, and the engineering and censoring of language” (p. 126). Yet, for Kemalism, “nationalism as the simultaneous internal generation and exclusion of gendered ethnic subjects, or nationalism as the process of actively and often violently undermining other emergent national groups is persistently downplayed” (p. 126). Kemalism has been “chauvinist against ethnic minorities and ... has also underwritten the sovereign denial of Kurdish identity in particular” (p. 135). A final chapter expands our understanding of Kemalism by examining its establishment or re-modeling...