(Set aside from the pen and cut off from the foot): Imagining the Ottoman Empire and Kurdistan.
writing by: Chris Houston.
Magazine: Kurdish Studies, No.2, 2007. pp. 397-411.

Ever since the emergence of the nation-states of Turkey, Iraq, and Iran after World War I, the discourse on Kurdish nationalism has attributed a special signii cance to the (i rst division) of Kurdistan, the sixteenth-century incorporation of what is also denoted as the Kurdish regions into the Ottoman system. Some writers have seen the resulting autonomy as a golden age of Kurdish independence, at least in relation to what came afterward. Others have interpreted the event as initiating i ve hundred years of continuing external—Turkish and Persian—overlordship.
Both summaries assume two key tenets of nationalism: i rst, that the social world is divided into territorial groups on the basis of their nationality; second, that those national groups have the right to self-determination. In examining more closely in this article these and other interpretations of that critical event, at least three related concerns connect vitally with contemporary discourse on Kurdish identity. First is the question of the origins and distinguishing features of the Ottoman Empire—Turkish, Islamic, or something more hybrid—and how those origins are made to explain the Ottoman
role in Kurdistan. Second are constructions of the Ottoman prehistory of the Kurds. Third is the way these representations of Ottoman Kurdish history and prehistory articulate in turn to key components of ofi cial Turkish history, both to its account of the Ottomans and to its broader nationalist discourse on Turkishness.. [1]