A Modern History of the Kurds Paperback – May 14, 2004

VERY DETAILED

A very detailed and descriptive account of the history of the Kurds. The new edition covers what was missing in the previous edition from 2000. A must read for anyone who wishes to learn more about the history of one of the most oppressed people on the planet.

Not for newbies to middle-east history, since a lot of tribes, people and political entities are named without further explanation. All in all a complex insight into this curious people.

The book is fair and illuminating in giving us a Kurdish side of Turkish, Iraqi and Iranian history. It's an important story, full of significant sub-plots. For just one example, McDowall explains that after Saddam nationalized Iraq's oil in 1972, Kurdish rebels like Mulla Mustafa feared that "Kurdish oil would be turned into Arab oil". They still wanted 2/3rds of all oil revenue reserved for the Kurdish community, and now they sought support from the United States. As the Pike Papers revealed in 1976, Henry Kissinger argued that "a new regime might let us back into the oilfields". In 1973 Mulla Mustafa threw secrecy to the winds by announcing in the Washington Post,"We are ready to act according to US policy if the US will protect us from the wolves. In the event of sufficient support we should be able to control the Kirkuk oilfields and confer exploitation rights on an American company."

The tragic history of the Kurds, with regards to their internecine politics vis-a-vis the various tribes, and more importantly their use as a pawn by larger states in the harsh realpolitik of the region has been captured in this extraordinary book. From the Treaty of Sevres, which offered a glimmer of hope to the Kurds for statehood, to the Treaty of Lausanne, which ultimately marked the end of any Great Power support for statehood aspirations, the book creates a remarkable story.Following WWI, and with the subsequent jockeying for power in the region following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, McDowall presents a clear pattern of failure by the Kurds to coalesce and create a common front to articulate their views. Also presented is the similarly clear pattern by the states, which currently have Kurdish populations, to disenfranchise the Kurds and marginalize their political aspirations.This history covers the fallout from the Coalition war against Iraq (Operation DESERT STORM). I would love to see a more current version of the book which discusses how the current status quo has refueled Kurdish aspirations for autonomy...likewise I would like to see how recent events in Turkey have affected the Kurdish population of SE Turkey.A great book for both the casual reader of the history of this volatile region of the world, and for the scholar alike...Highly recommended. McDowall has penned the authoratitive modern history.

Very detailed description of the modern history of kurds. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the history of the kurds.The only shortcoming of the book is that it stops in the year 1996. And thus does not account for the capture of Abdullah Ocalan, the leader PPK, and other major new incidents. Nevertheless, you will learn a lot!

NarrativeThe cover of the third, revised edition, of this book, proudly carries a remark from the reviewer of the Washington Post informing us that this is "the best single narrative history of the Kurds".After reading the book I had some doubts about this claim. But then I realised that, being a Dutchman with limited knowledge of the English language, I had to check for the exact meaning of the word 'narrative'. This turned out to be good hunch. After consulting the Oxford Dictionary the words from the WP-reviewer seem well chosen, indeed:"a spoken or written account of connected events; a story* the narrated part or parts of a literary work, as distinct from dialogue.* the practice or art of narration : traditions of oral narrative."While McDowall's book really provides a wealth of information, indeed it is not very strong when it comes to analyzing on the other hand. More enthralling than enlightening. Because of this limitation of course this book does not get five stars from me. But why only two?That is little bit complicated.When it comes to political visions, especially the ones on muhammedanism, McDowall's is the opposite of mine. While I estimate his vision to be a bit like that of Barack Houssein Obama and his many wishful thinking co-admirers of Edward Saïd, mine is a bit more old fashioned, more like Winston Spencer Churchill's.McDowall's vision most clearly shows at the end of his Afterword and at the very beginning of the book.This is the last sentence of the book proper:"Like the Palestinians, the Kurds must find ways of embarrassing the West regarding its profound hypocrisy regarding human rights violations in the Middle East when these are committed by its so-called friends.""Embarrassing the West" as advised strategy... In this review I will not even begin to express my feelings about the attitude contained herein.The first chapter of McDowall's book is titled 'Kurdish identity and social formation'. It is about the challenges of defining Kurds on aspects like culture, ethnicity, geography and language. It also contains a paragraph named 'Religion'.This is the weirdest paragraph of the book. It starts like this:"The vast majority of Kurds, approximately 75 per cent, follow Sunni Islam. But the religious particularism of the remaining Kurds may point to longstanding differences in origin. Take, for example the Alevi religion which is strong in central Anatolia, particularly in the Dersim region. While claiming devotion to the Imam Ali, the Alevi (or Qizilbash) religion -like Baktashi beliefs- lies on the extreme edge of Shi'i Islam. It is a mixture of pre-Islamic, Zoroastrian, Turkoman shaman and Shi'i ideas that became the basis of a religious sect during the fifteenth century CE."Very strange. Vague. What about this (only?) 'claiming?', what about this 'extreme edge'? Differences in origin of what?There is not a word in this paragraph about the origin of muhammedanism as such among Kurds. The next paragraph however starts with "At the time of the Islamic conquest, the term 'Kurd' had meant (...) ". So, apparently as part of a subordinate clause, McDowall has no problem in identifying that origin. Did the Kurds fight back against this conquest? Did they differ therein from the Armenians or Persians? When and how did they give in?The lack of even the slightest hint of an answer to this questions is extra remarkable while the greater part of the paragraph on 'religion' consists of suggestions that these are very interesting questions indeed. Not only does McDowall mention the many shia Kurds in (sunni) Turkey and the many sunni Kurds in (shia) Iran, but he also acknowledges that sunni Kurds in an environment of sunni non-Kurds are often adherents of the Shafi'i school instead of the Hanafi school. McDowall identifies this as a testimony of "the independence their amirs enjoyed vis-a-vis the sultan".McDowall looks away from the political role of muhammedanism. On page 53 he writes about one of the many times somebody calls for holy war, -yes he uses the correct term jihad-, and adds that this time, in 1880, it is "a Sunni cleric declaring jihad upon the Shi'is". On page 55 he still writes about Shaykh Ubayd Allah and his sons. Most of his fighters "had gone home laden with booty". When the Iranian shia fight back seriously they "perpetrated ruthless revenge on the non-Shi'a population, slaughtering with scant discrimination between the innocent and guilty. More [Christian] Nestorians for example (sic) perished at the hands of the army than at those of the insurgents". On page 56 the narrative shifts back to 1877-78. Shaykh Ubayd "had proclaimed that war [which one?] a jihad, one which the tribal chiefs took as a green light for attacking Armenian villagers." An interesting read indeed, but one gets the impression that the obscurity is introduced on purpose.In the abovementioned paragraph on religion McDowall mentions the Kurdish Jews too:"A few Jews remained in Kurdistan in spite of the Zionist exodus of 1948-52, and many of those who migrated to Israel still consider themselves Kurds".Ah, that Zionist exodus! McDowall 'unfortunately' fails to mention that most of the Jews lived in the Iraqi part of Kurdistan, where in those years Zionism was declared a capital crime. Not an unimportant detail in my opinion. Neither does he mention the relatively good relations between Israel and the KRG nowadays (although this developments might be to recent for the book).Throughout the book McDowall's self-evident anti-western, anti-Christian vision trickles through via the numerous times he writes in a matter-of-factly tone about some 'Christian threat' without any indication of the nature or substance of this threat: the threat of resistance against being pillaged or murdered, the threat of befriending Christians in other countries that might come to their rescue, the threat of employing missionaries who win respect by practicing medicine, the threat of avenging previous attacks they had endured or simply the threat of insulting muhammedanism by disagreeing with its claims?His vision trickles through, but McDowall is a serious historian: his book also contains loads of facts. Facts that are in agreement with his views but also facts that do not.The history of the Kurdish people knows many very dark clouds: they have been both perpetrators as well as victims of horrible crimes against humanity both among themselves and towards or from neighboring peoples. They have been both perpetrators as well as victims of betrayal both among themselves and towards or from other peoples, countries and great powers. McDowall's book is very convincing about this two claims. Although it seems to me that he would like to suggest that all the instances of betrayal by the French, the Russians, the Turks, the Persians, the Arabs and the Brits are interchangeable, he fails to substantiate this: he does not effectively obscure the fact that generally speaking the Brits played a seriously different role. I applaud him for that.McDowall also identifies the many dimensions of the different struggles of and among the Kurds.To be honest I appreciate the fact that he does not rise above the level of simply mentioning them!The amount of useful information in the book put my judgment at five stars to start with: McDowall even has an appendix on the Kurds in the Caucasus. He lost three of them because of his politically motivated omissions and things like casually writing about 'the Prophet' with a capital P and paragraphs like this one:"By 1906 he [Daud Khan] had 12 wives and his son Jawan had five -numbers which do not suggest that they were particularly assiduous in either the spirit or letter of Muslim law."I really can not come up with a better example of contradicting the letter of the sharia while simultaneously embracing the spirit of Muhammed!The book lost another star by failing to introduce all kinds of concepts, events and persons properly before mentioning them casually. According to the index "Mudros, armistice of" is mentioned on page 107, 109 and 134. And indeed on page 134 one stumbles upon:"The length of interval between Mudros and Sevres proved a hostage to fortune: the Greek and Armenian attempts on Anatolia, the rise of the Kemalists and quibbling between the Allies."Well, when you read A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, but still forgot the little-known name of the insignificant location of the non-illustrious negotations, maybe one could deduce that Mudros must have been the Greek location where the armistice was signed in 1918. You could not have done so by reading McDowall's book: not even if you had memorized all the pages before 134. Page 107 does not mention Mudros at all and from 109 you could only have remembered: "...the city [Mosul] was occupied on 8 November and the rest of the vilayet on 10 November ten days after Mudros."However, I really like it that accusing the author or book of 'islamophobia' would be so much more absurd than accusing me thereof (read my e-book essay to learn more about this concept: Islamophobia, Defying the Battle Cry).So the book superbly combines with a book like Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789-1923The Karshes argue convincingly that the main impetus for the developments came from the local actors. The exact opposite of the angle of advising to capitalize on victimhood by "peoples from the Orient".Hence two stars.

Complex read, bigger book than I thought. I may get through it in a year or so. Learning lots.