Chapter 2 provides a brief overview of the Kurdish region, its peoples and its historic experience in the Turkish Republic since the 1920s. It describes the multiple peoples of the region, including Kurds, Turks, Alevis, Yezidis and Syriacs before discussing its linguistic heterogeneity. It proceeds to outline the emergence of Kurdish Nationalism in the early twentieth century, and how Kurdish political forces were confronted by the Turkish Nationalism of the early Republic. It discusses the Kurdish rebellions of the 1920s and 1930s and the violent state reaction. It finishes by describing some of the socio-economic and political transformations which changed the country in the 1940s and 1950s such as industrialisation and the installation of a form of electoral democracy. It explains how the unintended consequences of the state presence in Kurdistan led to the formation of an educated class of young Kurds with the social capital required to lead a Kurdish cultural and political rival from the 1950s.

“This chapter discusses some of the different forms of religiosity in Kurdistan over the centuries. Countering a longstanding bias in favour of minorities and heterodox groups, like Christians, Jews, Yezidis and Alevis, it also explores whether one may find more orthodox forms of Islam that are specific to the Kurds, or to the region predominantly inhabited by Kurds. Accordingly, it focuses on the emergence of vernacular religious learning in Kurdish in early modern times, and on the spread of the Khalidiyya branch of the Naqshbandî Sufism during the Tanzimat period and after. From a historical, and genealogical, perspective, it emerges that questions of orthodoxy and heterodoxy have witnessed qualitative changes over the centuries, reflecting changing forms and modalities of power; from a global-historical perspective, it appears that new articulations of religious orthodoxy in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, in particular the rise of the Khalidiyya Naqshbandî tarîqa, reflect, and interact with, wider developments, like the centralization of state power, the emergence of Wahhabism and the arrival of Christian missionaries. Finally, it discusses the qualitative religious changes accompanying the rise of post-Ottoman nation-states and their epiphenomena, up to and including, most notoriously, the so-called Islamic State.”

The Yezidis (also spelled Yazidi or, in Kurdish, Êzdî) are a Kurmanji (northern Kurdish)-speaking religious minority that are spread across northern Iraq, Syria, the Caucasus (Armenia and Georgia) and Western Europe. Today, the largest group of Yezidis live in northern Iraq, which is also home to most of the holy sites. The Yezidis who settled in the Caucasus had left Anatolia during the nineteenth century as well as during the First World War. Since the collapse of the USSR, unemployment and ethnic tensions have pushed many Yezidis from the Caucasus towards Russia, Ukraine or Western Europe. This chapter will set out (i) the Yezidi presence in the USSR with (ii) a focus on their role in the development of Kurdish studies and cultural institutions, as well as (iii) drawing a picture of how the Yezidi presence has evolved after the end of the Soviet Union, especially centring on new identity debates and the relations between the Yezidis and Kurdish movements in the diaspora.

This chapter discusses religious traditions that had their origin in Kurdish-speaking regions, notably Yezidism and Yarsanism (the religion of the Yaresan, Ahl-e Haqq, or Kaka’i), with some reference to the Alevis of the Dersim (Tunceli) area, the Shabak and the development of a Kurdish Zoroastrian community in the Kurdish Autonomous Region. The chapter offers an outline of the characteristics of the main traditions discussed here, points to similarities between them and describes their recent history in the homelands, particularly after the IS attacks that began in 2014.