Mehmed S. Kaya, The Zaza Kurds of Turkey: A Middle Eastern Minority in a Globalised Society. London: I. B. Tauris, 2011, xii, 223 pp., (ISBN: 978-1-84511-875-4).
Not long after Turkey’s military coup of 1980, an obscure institution in Ankara named Türk Kültürünü Araştırma Enstitüsü (Institute for the Study of Turkish Culture), which appeared to be run by retired military officers, launched an ideological counter-offensive against the Kurdish movement in the form of a series of booklets that reasserted the old claim of the Kurds’ Turkish origins. One of the books had as its title Two Turkish Peoples: The Zazas and the Kurmanc [İki Türk boyu: Zaza ve Kurmanclar, 1984]. The author, Hayri Başbuğ, claimed not only that the Zazas were Turks but also that they were a distinct people from those other Turks, the speakers of Kurmanci. His most important sources included a series of articles published in a popular history journal in 1950 by the retired army colonel Nazmi Sevgen, which in turn leaned heavily on field research by the Republic’s expert on “ethnopolitics”, Hasan Reşit Tankut, carried out prior to the military campaign against Dersim of 1937–38.1 Tankut, who had been “inspector of East Anatolia” for the nationalist Turkish Hearths association and an expert at the Turkish Language Institute, believed that the assimilation of the Kurds would be accelerated if Zaza and Kurmanci speakers were first separated. In the wake of the 1960 military coup, he proposed to the ruling junta a massive project of population resettlement, to create a 50 kilometre-wide corridor of Turkish settlers between the Zaza and Kurmanc-majority regions.
Zazakî speakers, Sunni as well as Alevi, had taken part in the Kurdish movement from its inception in the early twentieth century. The first modern publications in Zazakî appeared in Kurdish journals in Turkey in the late 1970s and in the diaspora from the 1980s onwards. Most of their authors were firmly committed to Kurdish identity but insisted that the Zazas constitute a distinct subculture, or a set of subcultures, within Kurdish society. A small number of diaspora intellectuals developed the idea that the Zazas are neither Turks nor Kurds but constitute a distinct ethnic group, or even two distinct ethnic groups, one Sunni and the other Alevi. Their claims were based on linguistic arguments, presented by such scholars as Karl Hadank, D. N. MacKenzie and Ludwig Paul, and these claims found significantly more acceptance among the Alevi than among the Sunni Zazas.2
More recently, the Armenian scholars Garnik Asatrian and Victoria Arakelova have weighed in heavily in these debates, insisting that the Zazas are a people distinct from the Kurds, even though they may only recently have become aware of this distinctness.3 Unsurprisingly, many Kurdish nationalists have perceived the emerging Zaza nationalist movement to be a creation of either the Turkish state or Armenian nationalist interests, or an invention of Christian missionary interests (which appeared to lurk behind some of the publishing in Zazakî and about Zazas in Germany).
In short, the study of Zaza history, culture and society is a highly politicised and polarised field. The leading Zazakî writers and their journal Vate (which began publication in Stockholm in 1996 and moved to Istanbul in 2003), have to tread carefully in this field, wary of being associated with attempts to divide the Kurds while remaining dedicated to preserving and developing the Zaza language and cultural traditions. Most of the research as well as the polemics has concerned the Alevi Zazas, especially those of Dersim. Tankut and Sevgen, but also Asatrian and Arakelova, wrote primarily about Dersim. There is a considerable body of writing, including anthropological accounts, on the religion and cultural traditions of the Zazakî-speaking Alevis of Dersim, as well as those of Varto. On the Sunni Zazas, however, there is hardly any literature – except memoirs and studies of the Shaykh Saʾid uprising, in which Sunni Zaza tribes were the main actors.
We have therefore good reason to welcome this book by Mehmed S. Kaya, which makes the rightful claim of being the first anthropological study of (Sunni) Zaza society. The author was born in a Zaza village in the district of Solhan, in eastern Bingöl, but as a child followed his family to Norway, where he grew up and studied sociology and anthropology. He carried out a total of eight months of fieldwork in the early 2000s, mostly in Solhan, and completed the manuscript for this book in Norwegian in 2006. Kaya does not explicitly engage with the ongoing debates on Zaza identity and does not even mention the existence of a separatist Zaza nationalism, but shows in the title of the book where he stands. He often speaks of “the Zaza people” but makes clear that for him these are a subgroup of the Kurds. He notices the surprising strength of Turkish nationalism in Solhan – sections of most tribes, including half the leading Solaxan tribe, are affiliated with the ultranationalist party MHP – but blames this on false consciousness and manipulation by the state. The power of tribal chieftains and religious leaders is gradually being eroded by the growing influence of the PKK among the younger generation.
The book is structured as a classical ethnography. Successive chapters discuss the role of kinship, tribal organisation, patriarchy, religious leadership, various forms of reciprocity, economic life, relations with the state and the PKK, culture and identity, gender relations and the role of religion as a conservative moral system. There are some interesting observations in each chapter, but unfortunately the author tends to write in very general terms and discuss Zaza society as exemplifying patterns that have been described for other societies. Kaya appears to take for granted that other authors’ observations on Kurdish society are also valid for the Zaza Kurds; it is often not clear to what extent his generalising claims are supported by empirical evidence from his own field research. He asserts that what famous anthropologists have said about other societies – Edmund Leach about descent groups and the right to cultivation in Ceylon, Clifford Geertz on the “bazaar economy” of an East Javanese town in the 1950s, Bruce Kapferer on the nature of “the Sinhalese nationalist state” in Sri Lanka – also pertains to the Zaza society in Solhan. It would have been more interesting if he had told us in what respects Zaza society differs from those celebrated cases in the anthropological literature. Or simply, in what respects the Zaza tribes differ from Kurmanci-speaking tribes (no long-distance nomadism, for instance, but there may be other differences too), how the economic marginalisation of Solhan compares with that of other districts of Kurdistan and Turkey, and how the state’s counter-insurgency impacted specifically on Solhan society.
The best passages in the book are those where the author renounces on generalities and provides us with concrete descriptions of situations and events, such as struggles over land, the role of tribal and religious leaders in national elections, and mechanisms of reciprocal exchange that cut across tribal divisions, such as spontaneous help when a family had some heavy construction work (and every household contributed one man to work), or the ritual co-parenthood established at circumcision between the boy and the man who holds him on his lap, his kerwa (or krîv, in Kurmanci, godfather).
Kaya emphasises that large portions of Zaza society continue to evade contact with the state as much as possible, preferring to resolve internal conflicts through traditional mechanisms, in which tribal and religious authorities play crucial roles (and which in turn enable these authorities to maintain their dominant positions). In the case where a small tribe was deprived of its access to land by a stronger one, it did in fact appeal to the court and won a favourable verdict, but this was never implemented, so that the tribe was obliged to fight for its rights by seeking tribal allies against its stronger rival, with all the economic and political obligations this entailed. Kaya perceives a hierarchy of authorities, the mullahs (mele) closest to the commoners, above them the tribal chieftains (agha), and on top the shaykhs, men who are believed to have supernatural powers. The shaykhs here all belong to the Naqshbandi Sufi order and are connected with the family of Shaykh Saʾid.
In my understanding of the Shaykh Saʾid rebellion, the participation of the (Sunni) Zaza tribes was immense. It was the only Kurdish uprising in Turkey that had a truly compact and massive core region, and this was no doubt due to the degree of penetration of the Naqshbandi network, supported at the grassroots by the mullahs, in this society. This would seem to make Zaza society somewhat different from most other parts of Kurdistan. Kaya’s observations seem to confirm this, but unfortunately he gives very little detailed information about the mullahs and shaykhs; he is more interested in the new forces that are challenging their position.
The self-regulating potential of the traditional power structure comes with a price – of exploitation and violence and oppression of women – as Kaya argues in several of his chapters. He believes that social trust and mutual obligations, which compensated for the violence of inequality, continued to function well until the 1980s but then started breaking down, giving rise to distrust and insecurity. Because social and economic interactions are still based on personal obligations rather than written law, “extensive trickery, lies, fraud, hard haggling (…), cunning and so forth” prevail. In the same period, the Kurdish movement started gaining influence in the region, taking the side of the weak and challenging established authorities. The Turkish counter-insurgency effort in the region was also intensive, and succeeded in mobilising a large proportion of the population against the PKK. Nonetheless, the aghas and shaykhs lost some of the unquestioning support they had enjoyed in the past, as Kaya’s observations on the elections of 1999 and 2004 show. Migration from the region in response to land shortage or to the conflict between the PKK and the state, and the spread of education to others than the children of the elite, are factors likely to further undermine the position of these traditional authorities.
Kaya’s account touches upon many important issues and awakens in the reader the desire to know and understand more. His treatment of the issues is uneven and anecdotal. While he points out the importance of religion in this society, this is the aspect about which his text is weakest. Even on the rise of the Kurdish movement and its interaction with this tribal society, which is closer to his interests, he does not attempt a systematic account. Moreover, the process of translation from the Norwegian without proper editing has resulted in a number of inaccuracies, inconsistencies and some unintelligible passages, for which the author may not be held responsible. But it is the only book on its subject, and therefore the best so far. Future researchers will have to take it from here, and Kaya has pointed at many issues deserving further research.
Tankut’s secret report was first published by Mehmet Bayrak in his important collection of documents, Açık-Gizli Resmi-Gayrıresmi Kürdoloji Belgeleri, Ankara: Öz-Ge, 1994, and Sevgen’s articles were reprinted by a publisher specialising in books on Dersim: Zazalar ve Kızılbaşlar, Ankara: Kalan, 1999.
An overview of the debates is given by Kehl-Bodrogi, K. (1999). Kurds, Turks, or a people in their own right? Competing collective identities among the Zazas. The Muslim World, 89, 439–54.
Among several other papers in the same journal, see Arakelova, V. (1999–2000). The Zaza people as a new ethno-political factor in the region. Iran & the Caucasus 3, 397–408.