Ideologies and Practices of Civilization among the Kurds
Titre : Ideologies and Practices of Civilization among the Kurds
Invité : Michiel Leezenberg (University of Amsterdam)
Discutant : Hamit Bozarslan (EHESS)
Résumé :
It has long been state policy in the modern republic of Turkey, and in a different way in Iran, to marginalize the Kurds as ‘backwards,’ and Kurdish as a ‘language without civilization;’ that is, as a diffuse group of spoken dialects rather than a unified and standardized language with a written literature and a vocabulary adapted to modern science and civilization. Kurdish modernist nationalists have in part reproduced the ideological image of the Kurds as being in essence or origin a pastoral and/or nomadic society with little or no urban life, and with little or no civilization, in part in an attempt to produce a modern secular concept of Kurdish nationhood that has no links to the Islamic past. Others, by contrast, have attempted to appropriate such civilizational discourse for the Kurds by relocating ‘civilization’ not in the modern present but in the remote past.
In this talk, I will discuss Kurdish appropriations of civilizational discourse and Kurdish civilizational practices in a historicizing manner. After a theoretical discussion concerning the temporality and geography of the modern concept of civilization (coined around 750CE) and its translations into Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, Persian and Kurdish (with neologism like tamaddun, madaniyya/medeniyet, uygarlık and shahrestanî), I will discuss how its Kemalist variant has excluded Kurds in the name of an urbanized, secularized and Turkish-national modernity; simultaneously, ideological discourses like the notorious ‘Sun Language Theory’ claimed Turkish language and civilization as the oldest of all mankind.
Next, I will trace several recent Kurdish appropriations of the ‘backward-leaning’ civilizational concept, specifically in Abdullah Öcalan’s influential writings like his multi-volume Manifesto of Democratic Civilization (Demokratik Uygarlık Manifestosu) ‘sociology of freedom’ (özgürlük sosyolojisi). As is well known by now, these voluminous writings are informed by the idea that modern western science is ‘patriarchal’ and/or ‘colonial.’ I will also discuss Soran Hamarash’s The Lost and Untold History of the Kurds (2022), which is likewise framed in explicitly decolonial terms of ‘epistemic disobedience’ against ‘imperialist’ forms of knowledge. Both authors, like numerous other Kurdish actors, claim an essentially transhistorical if not timeless essence of Kurdishness, projected back to the Sumerians (who are claimed as ancestors of, if not identical with, the modern Kurds), if not to preliterate civilizations. In this context, I will pay specific attention to the recent excavations at Göbekli Tepe (appr. 10,000BCE), which have likewise been claimed as ‘Kurdish.’
In conclusion, and in contrast with this civilizational discourse, I will briefly discuss the vernacular Kurdish medrese culture, which emerged in early modern times, and which has been ignored if not actively repressed by both Turkish nationalists and Kurdish secular modernists. I will then raise the question of what significance the very existence of this early modern vernacular civilizational practice has for our concepts and discourses of civilization and modernity – and of the alleged ‘coloniality of knowledge.’
La séance se tiendra en anglais.
Date, horaire : Mercredi 27 mai 2026, 9h30-11h30 (heure de Paris).
Lieu, salle : Maison de la Recherche de l'Inalco, Salle Silvestre de Sacy
Format : hybride (lien Zoom envoyé la veille)
Coordination de l'Axe Moyen-Orient et Proche-Orient (WP6) : Laetitia Bucaille (Inalco), Gilles Dorronsoro (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), Alia Gana (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), Valentina Napolitano (IRD) et Rima Sleiman (Inalco) avec Jan-Markus Vömel, postdoctorant, programme DÉCRIPT.