Thus Spoke the Zarathustrian Kurds

Mehdi Zana, the former mayor of Diyarbakır and a prominent figure among Turkey's Kurdish nationalists, has made the news twice in the past weeks with his claims on Kurdish history. First, he argued that Kurds simply had a brighter record before Islam. Second, as we read in the weekly news magazine Aksiyon, he claimed that the authentic religion of the Kurds is Zoroastrianism. They later converted to Islam, according to Zana, “due to the fear of the sword,” and “as a big mistake.”

By all that, Mr. Zana actually presents a pattern of thought that many modern nationalists have adhered to: the glorification and revival of the pre-Islamic or pre-Christian pagan religions. Since both of these Abrahamic faiths preach a brotherhood which transcends and even surpasses all tribal, ethnic and national identities, they are highly disturbing for the nationalist agendas. That's why the Nazis hated Christianity and tried to replace it with a neo-pagan faith in the German Reich and its messianic Fuehrer. Less radical nationalisms tried softer programs of de-Abrahamification. In its first two decades, Turkey lived through a similar experience with the official denigration of Islam as an “obstacle to progress,” and the invention of a mythical “glorious history” of pre-Islamic pagan Turks. The bizarre “Turkish Language Thesis,” which argued that the Turkish race simply created much of the human civilization during the Neolithic period, is a joke and perhaps and embarrassment for today, but it was the official truth in the 30's.


’The Seed of The Aryan Race’

Now it is the Kurd's turn, apparently. And it is not just Mehdi Zana who tries to glorify the pre-Islamic history of the Kurdish people. As I have examined in my book, “Rethinking the Kurdish Question,” (unfortunately, only available in Turkish for the moment) there is a rhetoric among Kurdish nationalist which one can justifiably call as “Kurdish History Thesis.”

Kurdist ideologues such as Cemşid Bender have long argued that Kurds are the founders of the Mesopotamian civilization and they were the ones who invented pottery, agriculture, and even mathematics. These are simply speculations, of course, because there is in fact no historical data to confirm or falsify them. What these writers do is simply to pin some important achivements in the history of the Middle East and then to invent links between them and “Kurdishness.” It is exactly the same “method” that Turkists used in the 30's to “discover” links between Central Asian Turks and Ancient Egyptians. (The Ancient Egyptians must have been of the Turkish stock; how else could they be so smart to build the pyramids?)

Another emphasis of the Kurdist ideologues is that they are of the Aryan race. This actually started in the heydays of the Nazi regime, when nationalist Kurdish intellectuals bought into the ideology of their German masters, including their hatred towards the Semitic peoples and cultures. Luckily for us, the plans for the Aryan domination of the world failed with the victory of the Allies against the Wehrmact in 1945. But the spirit lived among radical nationalists, which included some Kurds who were keen to potray their disputes with Muslim Turks and Muslim Arabs as the struggle of the modern Aryans against the narrow-minded Semites. No wonder Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the terrorist PKK, once proudly declared, “Kurds are the seed of the Aryan race.”


History by invention

The effort by Kurdish nationalist such as Mehdi Zana to praise and revive Zoroastrianism (or, Zarathustrianism) is a part of thispolitical agenda. Whether this is a justified project or not is a matter of debate and the answer will change according to where you stand. I personally think that creating a separate Kurdish nation — which will, inevitably, demand its own nation-state — is a bad idea, both for the Kurds and their long-time neighbors. The process of creating such an entity will unavoidably raise the ethnic tension in the region and spark horrible ethnic cleansing operations. Just remember what happened during the Indo-Pakistani Partition or the destruction of Yugoslavia.

Moreover, how can one know that a Kurdish nation-state, even once established, will be good for the Kurds? (Believe me, having your own nation-state is not necessarily a blessing.) What really matters is whether you live in a political system which is run by democracy and which respects your rights and freedoms.And a hypothetical “Kurdistan” could well be far-off from those principles.

The second and more objective trouble with the project for Kurdish nationalism is that it deliberately distorts historical facts. Islamic period was not a “dark age” for Kurds. Quite the contrary, according to Kurdish historian Mehrdad Izady, “the golden age of Kurdish culture” was lived between the 10th and 12th centuries, which is long after Kurds' acceptance of Islam. Izady even defines the period as “the Kurdish centuries of Islam.”

The same is true also for Turks. Pre-Islamic Turkish history does not bear many signs of a rich civilization. All the great poets, writers, philosophers, scientists, or architects of Turkish history come from the Islamic period. (This was no suprise: The Islamic Middle East was the peak of civilization in the Middle Ages, and both Kurds and Turks benefited from that. And what allowed that golden age was the openness of the Muslim civilization towards other cultures; a wisdom some Muslims seem to have forgotten today.)

Denying and distorting these facts of the history of the Middle East will not help any of its peoples, including the Kurds. We need to discover, not invent, our history. We Turks lived through a bad experience in that regard. It would be only unwise for the Kurds to repeat the same mistake.

Writer : Mustafa Akyol