This paper uses the example of Abdurrezzak Bedirhan to examine the intersection of Great Power competition, state centralization, and social transformation in Eastern Anatolia in the late Ottoman period. Abdurrezzak Bedirhan was a “prince” of the Kurdish emirate of Botan, which the Ottoman state had destroyed in 1847 as part of a program of centralization and modernization. Although born in Istanbul in 1864, Abdurrezzak never forgot his lost patrimony or his familial ties to Eastern Anatolia. He entered the Ottoman diplomatic service and was posted to the Ottoman embassy in St. Petersburg as third secretary. There began Abdurrezzak’s lifelong fascination with Russia and Russian culture. He saw the Russian Empire as the means to do two things. First, Russian power and support could help him drive the Ottoman state out of Eastern Anatolia. For its part, St. Petersburg at the beginning of the 20th century was intensely interested in expanding its influence in Eastern Anatolia in order to secure its own turbulent Caucasian borders against sedition and separatism. Russian diplomats and military officers alike had identified Ottoman Kurds as a key constituency to court, and were eager to work with Abdurrezzak. Second, Abdurrezzak believed that Russia could provide the Kurds of Anatolia access to the modern forms of knowledge that they needed to survive and prosper in the twentieth century. Like many other Kurdish figures, Abdurrezzak was acutely sensitive to the reality that economic and social changes were leaving behind the overwhelmingly illiterate and politically fractured Kurds. When in 1910 he quit Istanbul for Eastern Anatolia to mobilize and unite the Kurdish tribes, he actively pursued cooperation with Russian authorities. That cooperation extended beyond efforts to create a Kurdish insurgency. With Russian aid Abdurrezzak sought to build an organization to propagate a binding national Kurdish identity. He also took the initiative to enlist Russian expertise for long-term projects to improve cultural prospects for the Kurds such as the establishment of a school for Kurdish youth and the development of a Cyrillic alphabet for Kurdish. Upon the outbreak of WWI, Abdurrezzak joined the Russians with his own unit of Kurds. Wartime suspicion of Muslims and rivalry with Armenian militias, however, blocked Abdurrezzak’s efforts to advance his cause. Finally, following the collapse of Russia, Abdurrezzak was captured and executed by Ottoman forces. The paper draws on Ottoman and Russian archival materials.

This paper argues that the goal of assimilating the Kurds constitutes the basic anxiety of Turkish nationalism, which supplies the core of contemporary Turkish Republican ideology. The origins of this anxiety lie in the double identity of Ziya Gokalp, the founding theorist of Turkish nationalism. A trained and accomplished sociologist, the identity of Gokalp himself was mixed, his father a Turk and his mother a Kurd from Diyarbakir. The ideas and sociological categories of Emile Durkheim profoundly influenced Gokalp’s understanding of society in Diyarbekir, and in the scale in the Kurdish regions. Diyarbekir was a castle city inside of which Ottoman hegemony existed and around which tribalism was dominant. In this context he defined the city center as Turkish and just beyond the castle as Kurdish. This Diyarbekir context will be main point when Gokalp will put the Kurdish question in his Turkish nationalism. He thus identified “Turkishness” as an urban and civilized identity. “Kurdishness,” by contrast, he classified as a rural, and hence, primitive identity. This definition came from personal experience. But the advancement and development of the Kurds, he concluded, required that, in effect, they become Turks. The other effect of his personality on his nationalism was scientific. According his own words, he discovered his Turkishs origin through scientific methods, i.e. linguistic, religious and historic methods. The first point that confirmed his Turkishness was the language spoken in Diyarbekir. He judged it to be Turkish influenced by Kurdish, not Kurdish influenced by Turkish. The second point that scientifically indicated his Turkishness was the fact that his family on his father’s side came from an area where the people were Hanafi, like most Turks, not Shafi’I, like most Kurds. At the end, he declared that his Turkishness was a scientific truth, and Kurdishness was an emotional and subjective attribute. In fact, he wanted show that although one can feel an identity, identity is something that has to be proved scientifically. At this point this paper will argue the scientific character of Turkish nationalism, the character that Gokalp emphasized should be discussed.

At the turn of the 20th century, roughly between 1890 and 1910, two important local elite groups in the province of Diyarbekir could be distinguished. They were both composed of ethnic Kurds (predominantly), but one Ottoman in character and the other nationalist, or proto-nationalist. What may be regarded as the local Ottoman elite group was primarily tribal, nomadic and rural, loyal to the sultan and with the Hamidiye (cavalry) regiments as an important focal point of power. Their principal leader was Milli ?brahim Pa?a. The (proto-)nationalist elite group was essentially urban in character, composed of Kurdish notables and prominent families, with substantial rural possessions and major trading interests. This elite was close to the nationalist Young Turk movement and more in particular the Committee of Union and Progress. A main leader was Arif Pirinççizade, and later Ziya Gökalp. This contribution aims to deconstruct the conflict between the two elite groups. It will discuss the (personal) backgrounds of the elite groups and mainly focus on confrontations between the groups in the period 1905-1908, but also the position of the elite groups in relation to the 1895 anti-Armenian violence will be touched upon. By working at a local level it is attempted to develop our understanding of the complexity of events such as occurred in eastern Ottoman Anatolia in the second half of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth century.