Yamaguchi Akihiko

identifier:PJa/33/Aj11

In February 1925 a major Kurdish revolt broke out in the eastern region of the newborn Republic of Turkey, with the intentions of protecting Islamic principles and establishing an independent Kurdish state. This revolt is also known as the Sheikh Said Rebellion. The rebellion was suppressed by the Ankara government and ever since has been labeled in two ways. The first characterizes the incident as a "reactionary" religious revolt led by dissatisfied elements due to a series of secularizing reforms introduced under the Kemalist regime. The second insists the revolt was instigated by Great Britain, which at the time strongly opposed Turkey with the issue focused on the Mosul question. Recently a much more thorough evaluation of the event is gradually prevailing. According to this evaluation, motivations were nationalism as well as religious sentiments. This can be seen in the fact that a Naqshbandi shaikh assumed supreme leadership of military operations, while a nationalist political organization played a distinctive role in the design and preparation for the revolt. The work of Martin van Bruinessen, Agha, Shaikh, and State: On the Social and Political Organization of Kurdistan, Ph. D.Dissertation, Utrecht, 1978 greatly contributed to such a change of evaluation, and research conducted by Olson is based on this thesis. Therefore it would be necessary and indispensable in reviewing Olson' s book to compare this publication with van Bruinessen's material. It is difficult to assess the author's point of view and methodological approach to analyze the Sheikh Said Rebellion. As far as the preface to this volume is concerned, while Olson emphasizes that it depends mainly on enormous amount of documents collected and compiled at the Public Record Office in Great Britain, he makes no mention of the main objective of this study and the method of analysis he adopts here. In this work Olson's arguments focus on the following three points. Firstly, to trace the history of the Kurdish nationalism (more strictly in the eastern Anatolia) chronologically since 1880, and then to define the Sheikh Said Rebellion as the inevitable result evolving from the circumstances. Secondly, to discuss in detail the actual conditions of interactions between the rebellion and the international environment of the period, especially Turkish-British relations. Lastly, to clarify the concrete impact of the rebellion on the domestic politics of Turkey. Unfortunately, in spite of the valuable information and knowledge presented in this material, it is difficult to say that Olson succeeds in offering fresh interpretations on the rebellion's basic characters, which to a large extent is caused by the lack of his radical criticism to former researches concerning this subject, above all van Bruinessen's work. Even so, taking the fact into consideration that the Sheikh Said Rebellion's importance in the Turkish modern history has often been underestimated or neglected, we must rate his merits high, in that he ascertains that the rebellion was a extremely serious affair which gave a wide-ranging influence on internal and external politics of the Turkish Republic in various manners.