ABSTRACT

When Selçuk (Seljuk) Turks started their conquest of the territory of the present-day Republic of Turkey in the eleventh century, they found the Kurds roaming in the mountains of eastern Anatolia. Nomadic tribes of Kurdish pastoralists had lived in the area throughout most of recorded history. While the ethnic identity of people bearing similar names in Sumerian and Assyrian records is conjectural, it is widely accepted that the Cardouchi mentioned in Xenophon’s Anabasis—the account written in the fourth century BC of the journey home of 10,000 Greek mercenaries—were ancestors of present-day Kurds. The Kurds encountered by the Selçuk conquerors a millennium and a half later had been converted to Islam soon after the Arab conquest of Mesopotamia and Persia in the seventh to eighth centuries AD. However, as Kurdish nationalists like to point out, they retained some traces of their original Zoroastrian religion, such as the ceremonies marking the spring equinox (Nevruz, Nowruz), celebrated as the first day of the new year. The beliefs of the small community of Yezidi Kurds, whom outsiders describe as devil-worshippers, and who live astride the present-day borders of Turkey, Iraq, and Syria, are sometimes traced to Manicheanism, another religion with roots in Iran. The great majority of Kurds today are Sunni Muslims of the S¸afiî (Shafii) rite, which predominates in Mesopotamia, while most Turks follow the Hanefî (Hanafi) rite. However some Kurds, who are to be found mostly in the Tunceli (Dersim) massif, southwest of Erzurum, are Alevîs (Alawis). Their origin can be traced back to the Kızılbas¸ (Redheads, named after the red bonnets they wore), supporters of the Türkmen (Turcoman) Safevî (Safavid) dynasty, which imposed Shiism as the official religion of Persia at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The Alevîs, of whom only a minority are ethnic Kurds, the rest being of Turcoman stock, differ from the great majority of Shiites, by practicing a syncretistic religion influenced by Christianity and (according to Turkish nationalists) by the animistic beliefs of Turkish shamans in central Asia, or alternatively, if Kurdish nationalists are to be believed, by memories of the Zoroastrian religion of their Iranian ancestors.1