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The Kurdish Nation
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Nowadays, the "Kurdish Question", as we call the war in Kurdistan, became more and more crucial for the future of the Near and Middle East. Here and there, someone talks about the problem of "Kurdish minorities" in Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran. Previously, at the Treaties of Sèvres and Lausanne, in 1920 and 1923, the fate of the Kurds who lived in Turkey had been decided only because of their belonging (or not) to a minority's specifical status in the Kemalist state. But what is really the status of the Kurds and how could we call "minority" some thirty millions persons ?
We should at first examine what did mean and means today "nation" for European theoricians. What are the criterions that allow a people to be agreed as a "nation" or a minority ? After a short survey of the attitude of the traditional Muslim society about its various ethnies and an attempt to understand on which underground the model of Nation-State had been set up in the Middle East, we will study the rising and the evolution of the Kurdish nationalism, and examine if the present Kurdish situation allows the Kurds to be considered as a real nation.
Then we will examine other people without state or who do not suit with the classical definition of nation, and try to determine the real value of these criterions and if the belief that a nation must have its frontiers-state and its national institutions to exist really. So we could consider the Kurds' destiny and their hopes.
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THE CONCEPTS OF NATION IN EUROPE
From the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries, we have inherited two conceptions of nation. In a very common dictionnary we could read that a nation is " all the humans who live in a same territory, with the same origins, the same way of life and, often, the same language "; however, the nation is too defined as "a juridical person composed with all the people ruled by the same constitution, distinct from them and holder of sovereignty ".
The first type of nation, a group of human who are agreed to live under a political regime that they feel as their particularity and the basis of their citizenship, existed already in Classical Times : the Greek City, the Roman Republic.
Theoricians in the XVIIIth century, and especially in the French Revolution, looked into this concept of nation, ever opposited to the Monarchy. The King did not represent citizens but personnified a divine principle. In a monarchy, people are less united each other than bound by a common allegiance to a sovereign. The French state issued from the Revolution required from its new citizens that they adhered to a political constitution, and then considered the faithfullness to the Republican institutions as a patriotic duty. So an opposition to the government could be condemned as a treason. This political conception of nation had been taken up at the same time by the United States of America.
But in the XIXth century raised some other national European identities, in parallel with an else definition of nation, that seemed at first more evident but provoked and provokes again bloodies ethnical and frontier truncheons. In fact, most of these new nationalisms did not set their legacy on a political ideal but on that the Germans at the end of the XVIIIth and the first part of the XIXth century, when they were spared in numerous tiny imperial principalities, called " volk ". This principle had been invoked for the unification of Italia in the second part of the XIXth century, and at the end, almost every states issued from the disintegration of the empires took up to it. It allowed to conciliate the people's independance and at the same time to maintain a royalist government, considered as more authoritarian and more lasting.
According to these theoricians, this is not a political will that bind citizens to their state, but some objective, natural facts : a nation is only a population speaking the same language, and having in common ethnical, cultural and historic characteristics. In the first case, the Law makes the Citizen, the Law or in other words the territory ruled by this juridiction (droit du sol). In the second case, we belong to a nation because of our birth (droit du sang). The excess of the German system could generate the worse racial discriminations. The French system could develop that we call "jacobinisme", in fact a political or insitutional imperialism, as the Napoleonian empire and its centralized administration.
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LANGUAGES, NATIONS AND RELIGIONS IN ISLAM
When theoricians tried to determine if a population was or not a real nation, they refered more often to the criterions of the "volk". Germans and later Sovietics had especially support the criterion of language and a lot of modern nationalisms had often been based on it (one people, one language, one nation). But in the Classical Time of the Muslim world, these concepts of nation and ethnies had been completely ignored by Islam, that takes only religion into consideration for ruling human communities. The shar’ia distinguished then, after the Arabian conquest, three sorts of citizens : the Muslims ; the " dhimmi ", or the " people of the Book ", at first Jews and Christians, and after all the members of a revealed religion (dhimmis were maintained in an inferior status but were protected against persecutions); then the paganist, promised to extermination. In this distinction there was no ethnical consideration. If Arabic, the language of the Qoran, was the scholars and religious' language, its practice was not imposed and did not determine the belonging to the Umma, the Believers' Community . Local proudness and particularisms existed of course, but it was some regional competitions inside the same political and cultural community, the Dar-al-Islam. If an alliegeance to a tribe or a dynasty was however behind almost all the political conflicts, - Ali's Shi’a against Mo’awiya and his clan, the Omeyyads' "Syrian" supporters against the Abbassids' "Iranian" partisans ; the Turkish Seljuks champions of Sunnism against the Arabian and shiit Fatimids in Cairo - these allegiances in clans or families did not induce racial hostility. In these rivalries, it is hard to distinct a "national" conscience. Turkish or Kurdish sovereigns led Arabians, Kurdish and Turkish troops against the Crusaders. Facing the threat of the Crusades and after the Mongol invasion, Nur ad-Din (Turkish), Salah ad-Din (Kurdish), or Baybars (Turkish), appeared to people as the protectors of the Dar al-Islam.
So, in this multi-racial world, human groups were only distinguished by their confession and the practice of a language was not necessarely the sign of an ethnical origin but depended often on liturgy, habitat, or social class. Under the Seljukids of Rum as their cousins of Iran, Persian was the language of literature, Turkish being a popular idiom. Arabic was for a long time the language of theology and sciences. Until our century, bilingual and even trilingual persons were numerous : for example the Persian poet Hâtef (dead in 1783), wrote in Arabic and in Persian. Mohammad Iqbâl of Lahore (1877-1938) versified in Persian and in Urdu, his mother language.
So, the status and the practice of languages as they existed in the Classical Time of Islam complicated the task of the European nations when they shared Ottoman territories. However, they tried to accord independance to countries with the Russian-German criterions, and to determine with them who had the right to self-determination. The Christians of High-Mesopotamia, speaking Aramaic because of their cult, received the sumptuous title of the "Assyrian-chaldonic" nation. The "Greek" Christians of Anatolia, speaking Turkish but writing it with hellenic alphabet were "exchanged " against the "Turks" of Greece, speaking Greek and writing it with the Arabic alphabet because of their belonging to Islam. The ancient sultans or shahs' subjects became the citizens of new independant lands, and should make up a national conscience, inside arbitrary frontiers, with an history often falsificated.
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