This paper tackles a very intriguing example of shifts in identities in the Middle East in the late and post-Ottoman periods. The Bedirkhan family was one of the princely families in the Ottoman Kurdistan that enjoyed a quasi-autonomous status from the early 16th to well into the 19th Centuries. Bedir Khan Beg was the last ruler of the Botan Principality centered at the town of Jizra in Southeastern Anatolia. His success in expanding his rule beyond his principality since the 1830s and his short-lived resistance against the Ottoman government’s attempt to exert central rule in Kurdistan in 1847 made Bedir Khan Beg an important personality in modern Kurdish history. Though it came to be known as the Bedirkhan family since the 19th Century, the family was originally known as the Azizan. For generations, the family members traced their origins back to Khalid ibn al-Walid, the famous 7th Century Arab Muslim general, which they used to legitimize their power among their subjects. This paper contextualizes the changing meaning of Bedirkhan family’s origins since the 19th Century by considering the following three questions in reference to the Ottoman archival sources and writings by the Bedirkhanis in Turkish and Kurdish from the mid-19th through the first half of the 20th Centuries: 1) What did Bedir Khan Beg’s claim to be Khalid ibn al-Walid’s descendant mean for the Ottomans when they confronted him in the 1840s? 2) How did the family members continue to take advantage of the story of their descent after their integration into the Ottoman imperial system? 3) Why did the Bedirkhan family members who adopted an exclusively Kurdish nationalist stance by the end of World War I need to revise the story of their family’s descent from Khalid ibn al-Walid? By focusing on a highly prominent Kurdish family’s changing understating of their origins, this paper aims at contributing to the identity debates in the Middle East in the late and post-Ottoman periods. This will more specifically shed light on the development of Kurdish national discourse.

The Ottoman world created a socio-political context in which identities were continuously shaped and re-shaped. A serious analysis of Ottoman identities reveals not only their complexities but it also reveals a specific understanding of the very concept of identity. Identity in the Ottoman world was deeply rooted in types. Ottomans were keenly aware of types, such as determined by social standing or estate/class, occupational attachments (guilds), religious and spiritual affiliations, gender, age group, ethnicity, place of residence (climes), family and even humoral configuration. Every type had a predictable behavioral pattern to which general adherence seems to have been expected. A number of physiognomy treatises written for the court in the late sixteenth century proposed a typology, which provided the ruling elite with a map for understanding its subjects so as to better identify and, ultimately, govern them better. This presumed a diversity of types, each of which had to be treated in a particular way based on its proclivities. The same physiognomy treatises further demonstrate that the Ottoman court was drawing on existing knowledge of prevalent types for the creation and categorization of its own typology. This suggests a complex process in which the court approached its subjects as members of a type, which could be studied and included into a larger typology. This paper examines the construction of a late sixteenth century Ottoman typology based on two specific physiognomical treatises by Talîḳîzâde (d. 1600) and Bâlîzâde Mustafa (d. 1618), both dedicated to Sultan Murad III upon his accession to the Ottoman throne in 1574. By definition, physiognomy “consists of inferring the inner character from the exterior state.” It is generally conveyed through a list of protasis and apodosis between particular shapes and sizes of body parts and their equivalents in terms of moral character. Talîḳîzâde and Bâlîzâde Mustafa did not neglect that fundamental and defining aspect of Ottoman physiognomy in their treatises. However, they expanded (and re-defined) it by introducing different “paths” of physiognomy. These paths went beyond character discernment based on physical appearance to include a person’s gender and life-period, as well as background factors such as social estate/class, race/ethnicity, and clime.