The Formation of Modern Kurdish Society in Iran by Marouf Cabi

Author:Marouf Cabi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Figure 4 The Iranian army displays Sulaiman Mu‘eini’s body, 1968. Addressing Sulaiman Mu‘eini, the text reads, ‘this is the outcome of treason’. Source: Author’s collection. Sulaiman Mu‘eini, a well-known figure in Mahabad 1933–68, who studied in Mahabad, Tehran and Tabriz. Source: Author’s collection.

Figure 5 Kurdish university students in the 1960s. By the 1960s, the intellectual centre of modern Kurdish opposition moved to new Iranian universities. Kurdish university students at the University of Tehran, March 1964. Esmail Sharifzada (back row, right); the poet Swara Ilkhanizada (fourth from right); and (second from right) Amir Hassanpour (1943–2017), who became a renowned professor of Kurdish studies. Source: Courtesy of Kurdipedia.

Cultural consequences of modernization

‘Westernization’ and the establishment of Persian cultural hegemony, that is, the consensual acceptance of Persian language and culture as superior to other cultures in Iran, were two significant consequences of the state-led modernization in the era of the White Revolution. While the focus is not ‘Westernization’, this chapter discusses how the era’s cultural transformation reshaped the cultural positions of communities, in this case Persian and Kurdish, in modern times. New cultural positions were a consequence of modern education, the proliferation of the new audiovisual means of communication and an exclusive literature, all accompanied by new cultural critiques from different perspectives. An analysis of these themes is preceded by exploring the topic of cultural encounters in modern Iran, which provides both a historical context and a conceptual framework. The chapter is finalized by discussing the following themes: ‘modernisation and secularisation’, intellectual transformations and cultural resistance.

Persian and Kurdish modern cultural encounters

There are abundant analyses of cultural encounters taken place between in many ways fundamentally distinct cultures such as between Europeans and Native Americans or the British and Indians. However, cultural encounters within Iran do not conveniently fit the framework provided by such analyses and present their own challenges. A closer analogy to Persian and Kurdish cultural encounters is Ireland. Scholars of Irish historiography and cultural studies warn that a homogenizing and monolithic approach to Irish, including Northern Ireland, history and culture is misleading, and they draw attention to the misconception that ‘Ireland’s position was or is exactly the same as that of all Britain’s African, Asian or Caribbean colonies’.33 Therefore, Ireland is not to be seen simply as a ‘colony’; indeed, it seems there is an ongoing debate about to what degree the British Empire perceived ‘Irish questions as colonial’.34 Therefore, as Stephen Howe gives a detailed account of these debates, themes of Irishness versus Englishness, language, race and culture continue to form historiographical and cultural debates.35 However, there are many aspects of the cultural encounters between the British Empire and Ireland which distinguish this relationship from the one between Kurdish and Persian cultures in modern times. First and foremost, a colonial context formed British and Irish cultural encounters on a massive scale, followed by the issue of race, empire and nationalism, the colonialist structure of imagery. Moreover, unlike the case of the Kurds, Ireland became a state in a ‘post-colonial’ world, probably a former partner and/or victim of empire but undoubtedly a new partner of Europe.

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