The Kurdish Principality: An indigenous polity in the sixteenth-century Ottoman-Safavid borderlands

Thanks to the generosity of the Abbasi Program, I had the opportunity to continue my research on early modern Kurdistan, a region which critically lacks scholarly attention for the period preceding the nineteenth century. My project recuperates the indigenous articulations of Kurdish claim over the lands between the neighboring Ottoman and Safavid empires in the sixteenth century. I survey the autochthonous and imperial political formations spanning early modern Kurdistan and underline their agency in the creation and definition of the Ottoman-Safavid borderland. I am grateful to the Abbasi Program for helping me reversing the imperial gaze and approach Kurdistan not as a peripheral and conflict-ridden space as is often projected from modern nation-states perspectives, but as a center of political decision and cultural production in its own right.

This past summer, I started my research in the Ottoman archives institutions located in Istanbul, Turkey. This investigation allowed me to obtain digital copies of many administrative documents relating the establishment and consolidation of the Ottoman rule in Kurdistan. This importantly includes the Koğuşlar Defteri, an understudied ledger containing drafts of the imperial decrees (aḥkām) for the Hijri year 959 (1551-1552 AD), which served as a prototype for the 266-volume series of Registers of Important Affaires (Mühimme Defterleri) maintained by the Ottoman government between 961 and 1323 AH (1556-1905 AD). The Koğuşlar register showcases no less than seventeen orders concerning the succession strife for the principality of Ardalan (modern-day province of Sulaymaniyyah, in the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan), which denotes the Ottoman interest for this Kurdish polity. This corpus offers invaluable insights into the Ottomans’ military and diplomatic approaches to the Ardalan Principality prior to its eventual annexation in 1554.

The Abbasi grant also offered me the opportunity to extend the scope of my investigation beyond the Istanbul-based state research institutions and include the local archives of the awqāf (pious endowments) founded by Eastern-Anatolian Kurdish princes. This endeavor led me to the regions of Diyarbakır, Bitlis, and Van, home of many early modern Kurdish principalities. The highlight of this research travel occurred during my week-long stay in Bitlis, home of one of the most powerful and long-lasting Kurdish dynasties. I gained access to the İhlasiyye madrasa complex, founded by the prince of Bitlis Šaraf Khan Bedlīsī in 1589, which houses the princes’ library and manuscript collections. At the same location, I visited the sepultures of the Princes of Bitlis and their family relatives. In short, this motivating research trip allowed me to collect a host of significant genealogical and matrimonial information, even as it provided some geographic and spatial texture to my research on the Kurdish Princes.