Syrian-Kurdish Intersections in the Ottoman Period

This edited collection of fourteen specialized, heterogeneous chapters on the Kurdish experience in Ottoman Syria will impress nuanced scholars with its scholarly depth and impressive maturity of analysis dealing with what many might deem a rather obscure subject. Nevertheless, as documented by Medieval Arab historians, Kurds have lived on what became Ottoman Syria since at least the eleventh century, while according to modern scholars such as Ismet Cherif Vanly and Mehrdad Izady, Kurds have lived there since antiquity.For example, the chivalrous Saladin (1137–93), arguably the most famous Kurd of all, is associated with Syria and is buried in Damascus. Most Kurds, of course, live in Turkey, Iran, and Iraq, with Syria containing a much smaller minority and thus constituting a backwater to their existence until the Syrian civil war that began in March 2011 led to their current, precarious autonomy. One also must consider that Ottoman Syria was geographically larger than what is today the modern state of Syria, whose main but not only Syrian portion in the northeastern is now called Rojava (that is, Western, or direction from where the sun sets) by the Kurds. However, this new term Rojava smacks of current political controversy and apparently does not occur in historical sources germane to the book under review. Thus, although Syria is an ancient land, the modern state only dates from the French mandate established in 1920. The earlier concept of Greater Syria (Bilad al-Sham) was a much larger one that also included today’s Lebanon, Jordan, and what was then known as Palestine, which is today’s Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. Indeed, modern Syria still claims Lebanon, which the French conveniently hyphened off to rule it more readily after World War I.Echoes of the Kurdish past survive through such historical toponyms as the celebrated Kurd Dagh (Mountain of the Kurds) in Afrin (northwestern Syria) and pictured on the presently reviewed book’s cover, as well as the equally noted Ḥiṣn al-Akrad (Castle of the Kurds) east of Tartus in the Homs Gap. They are among countless sites throughout coastal Syria historically identified with the Kurds. Zainab Hajhasan, one of the two coeditors of this book, in her chapter “Locating the Kurds in Ottoman Jordan and Palestine in the Sixteenth Century,” discusses Kurdish communities first settled in western Syria during the Crusader period and subsequently during Mamluk rule. Indeed, all of the book’s authors have occasion to allude to the Kurds’ historical past still visible in its presence.In general, this book lucidly explores the nuances of Kurdish social, political, economic, and religious existence across a 400-year period in Ottoman Syria. The contributors draw on current research in primary Ottoman Turkish and Arabic, as well as a range of other archival and narrative sources to examine the history of Kurdish settlement in Syria, including Ottoman sedentarization policies, notable Kurdish families, trade, landowning, Kurdish-Bedouin relations, Kurdish-Ottoman civil servants, Sufism, and nineteenth-century state reforms, among others. Thus, the Tahrir Defterleri (tax census registers), Muhimme executive decrees, Sikayet fiscal complaint registers, Vakif (pious foundation) records, as well as a broad range of ministerial and other governmental papers from the Tanzimat period all reveal insights into the various subject areas this volume analyzes.The fourteen chapters in the book are nominally ordered in four thematic sections. Part 1 examines “Kurdish Origins and Territorialities in Diachronic Perspective.” Thus, the three chapters here are concerned with the way in which parameters such as language have developed and evolved through time. Tom Sinclair’s chapter, “Nusaybin under the Ottomans,” constitutes a broad survey of what is now a city of over 100,000 people on the Turkish side of the border with northeastern Syria. Qamishli is its larger Syrian twin city. Sinclair describes this important center of eastern Christianity, Turkic expansion, and finally Ottoman conquest. He traces the fluctuations of settlement, economy, and society in and around Nusaybin with emphasis on the rising power of local tribes, and the associated decline and eventual disappearance of the Christian Armenian population at the end of the Ottoman period.Mustafa Dehqan and Vural Genc, in “The Qizilbash Reconsidered: The Role of the Kurdish Arabgirlu Tribe in the Early Safavid State,” examine the Shamlu-affiliated Arabgirlu tribe and other Kurdish groups. However, they were only nominally linked with Syria as they joined the Qizilbash (Kizilbash or red-headed from the color of the headgear they wore) confederation to become an important part of the rival Iranian Shiʿi Safavid state to the east of the Ottomans and even occupied high offices there. Of course, these were the days before the current era of the nation-state when broader allegiances along with tribal ones still openly prevailed. Today these affiliations still exist but under the often thin veneer of the nation-state.Stefan Winter, the main coeditor of this volume under review, in the third chapter of Part 1 titled, “The Afrin District under Ottoman Rule, 1516–1921,” contributes a wide-ranging historical overview of this major Kurdish area in Syria, which has been geographically disconnected in the west from the main Kurdish area in northeastern Syria. (However, since 2018 this district has been occupied by Turkish-affiliated militias battling against the Syrian Kurds, who have been organized politically as the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria [DAANES] and militarily as the Syrian Democratic Forces [SDF]). Winter surveys the various phases of Ottoman government over the local Kurdish population from the cooptation of their leaders in the sixteenth century to the expanding integration of tribal structures, and more recently the attempts to assert more central control during the Tanzimat and Young Turk eras. He also alludes to the pre-Islamic, religiously heterodox, and ethnically Kurdish Yezidis—formerly referred to by some in a derogatory tone as devil worshipers—who were also established in the region since the fourteenth century.Part 2, “Kurds in Western and Urban Syria,” offers three chapters on this subject. Zainab Hajhasan, the other coeditor of this volume under review, employs Tahrir Defterleri (tax census records) to describe the town quarters (mahalle), villages, agricultural activities, and religious bequests associated with the Kurdish community in the early modern period. Although today assimilated, this Kurdish population were descendants of tribal military units originally settled by the Ayyubid dynasty established by Saladin during the struggles against the Crusaders and were probably among the oldest Kurdish groups in the region.The late Abdul-Rahim Abu-Husayn’s chapter, “The Lebanese Junblats and the Canbolads: A Case of Mistaken Identity,” was previously published in another venue. Despite the supposed Kurdish etymology (heart or soul of steel) of the name Junblat (Joumblatt), Abu-Husayn interestingly argues that the supposed link between the Druze Joumblatt family and Kurdish Canpolad dynasty of Kilis is in error. The Junblats actually had already been long-established in the Shuf mountains of Lebanon when the Canpolad revolt in Kilis occurred early in the seventeenth century. Dick Douwes’s chapter, “Warlords and Landlords: The Kurdish Presence in Central Syria in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” concentrates on the Berazi and Milli families, to illustrate the transformation of previous Kurdish military figures to livestock farming, agriculture, commerce, and landowning. This offers a useful example of the gradual assimilation of Kurdish tribal elements into mainstream Syrian society. Indeed, descendants of the Berazi tribe would subsequently become prime minster of republican Syria on two occasions.Part 3, “Kurdish Tribalism and Tribal Control in the Jazira,” presents five separate chapters. In chapter 7, Keiko Iwamoto, in “Waqf versus Miri Nomads: Taxation, Endowment, and Settlement Practices in Northern Syria in the Eighteenth Century,” examines an important difference between the fiscal-administrative status of the Yeni-Il and Aleppo Turkomans in opposition to the Reswan (possibly the best documented of all Ottoman tribal confederations in the eighteenth century) and Kilis Kurds. She shows that the former were committed to imperial waqf foundations, while the latter were subject to regular miri state taxation. She also demonstrates that the tribes could play on the confusion between these two parallel systems to try to escape paying their dues. This difference also enables her to ask whether the Ottoman state was pursuing a conscious policy of ethnic differentiation in Syria.Muhsin Soyudogan’s chapter, “Bekir Bey and the Making of a Reswan Nobility at Rumkale,” assesses the Resi Kuloglu dynasty, in the south Anatolian fortress town of Rumkale on the Euphrates in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Their chronicle reveals details regarding an important Kurdish-dominated tribal territory as well as the initial stages of state centralization that would come to involve all Kurds in the region. Interestingly, the Resi tribe originated from or was closely linked to clearly Yezidi populations, the heterodox religious group mentioned earlier.Translated from Arabic for this book, Muhsin Seyda’s chapter, “The Berazi Tribe of Suruj and Their Rebellion in the Tanzimat Period,” illustrates how the Tanzimat regime’s new policy of military conscription in the area fostered resistance among the Kurdish population and led to armed resistance. The Berazi dominated the Suruj plain southwest of Urfa in today’s Turkey but, as pointed out by Dick Douwes above, also had scions serving as Ottoman military retainers settle in the Hama region of northwestern Syria where they in time became one of the largest landowning and political power–wielding families into the Syrian republican era.Yonca Koksal, in “The Reswan in Central Anatolia: Tribal Settlement and Sheep Trade in the Nineteenth Century,” focuses on the forced settlement of the Reswan tribe in central Anatolia in the nineteenth century and their role in the Ottoman sheep trade. Leading to new tribal wealth, Koksal’s chapter illustrates how widely Kurdish pastoralists with links in Syria were integrated into the imperial Ottoman economy. Finally, Erdal Ciftci, in “Warfare and Alliances in Ra’s al-‘Ayn: Hamidiye Regiments, Bedouin Tribes, and Ottoman Governors, 1895–1905,” details how major opponents such as the Milli Kurds and the Shammar Bedouin Arabs entered into frequent alliances with the Ottoman governors in their own regional struggles. Ciftci’s chapter shows a complex domain of tribal autonomy and diplomacy within Ottoman provincial politics in the empire’s final years.The fourth and final part of this volume, “Syrian Kurdish Elites of the Late Ottoman Period,” centers on individual Kurds who came to Damascus to pursue careers as Ottoman functionaries, scholars, and gentlemen in the nineteenth century. In this volume’s twelfth chapter, Metin Atmaca, “Kurdish Naqshbandi-Khalidi Sheikhs of Damascus in the Nineteenth Century,” chronicles how the Khalidi family of the Naqshbandi Sufi order emigrated from Sulaymaniyya and Baghdad to Damascus in the 1820s. There they created their own unique Naqshbandi branch that ironically attracted Shafiʾi Kurdish scholars and Sufis leading to one of the main currents of reformist Islam in Syria. The late grand mufti Ahmad Kaftaru (1915–2004) was its last representative.The famous Bedirxan (Bedirhan) family—whose latter scions practically invented Kurdish nationalism in the 1920s—plays a prominent role in the final two chapters. Barbara Henning, in “Alliances and Competition in Kurdish Networks in Late Ottoman Syria: The Example of the Bedirhani and Baban Families,” focuses on how Huseyin Bedirhan tried to have his court case moved to another locale on the grounds that the governor of the area with jurisdiction was a member of the rival Baban family of notables and thus unfairly hostile to him. Possibly illustrating how the Ottoman authorities appreciated the district’s continuing Kurdish character, members of the Bedirxan family from Ḥiṣn al-Akrad to the north had been transferred to the south and appointed kaymakam (governor) of Akkar in what is now northern Lebanon. In the final and fourteenth chapter, Martin Strohmeier, in “Between Ottomanism and Kurdism: Mehmed Salih Bedirhan and Abd al-Rahman Yusuf in Damascus,” compares the career paths of these two important Kurdish notables against the background of the authoritarian rule of Abdulhamid II, opposition from the Young Turks, the rise of Turkish and Arab nationalism, and the emergence of Kurdish nationalism in Syria and the larger Ottoman realm.In addition to these fourteen interesting chapters that illustrate how the seemingly narrow history of the Syrian Kurds often intersects with and helps elucidate the broader extent of Ottoman history, this volume contains fifteen evocative and, possibly for many readers, unique illustrations, four useful maps, a helpful concluding index, and an impressive list of fifty or more primary archival sources used by the authors. Although probably too specialized to appeal to any but nuanced authorities in what many might also consider to be an obscure field, this volume still constitutes a collection of praiseworthy scholarly chapters that will reward committed students in the expanding field of Kurdish Studies.