The Abolition of the Caliphate, Secularization and Kurdish Nationalism

The abolition of the caliphate and closure of the medreses in 1924 amounted to a significant change in the relations between large segments of Kurdish society and the state. The Ottoman caliphate had integrated all Muslims of the Empire under a single umbrella, irrespective of language or tribal organization. Especially Sultan Abdulhamid II had made great efforts to reach out to the Arab, Kurdish and Albanian tribes of the Empire’s peripheral zones and act as their patron and protector. Traditional medrese education had performed a similar integrative function, allowing the use of vernacular languages as the medium of instruction and oral communication although the core curriculum consisted of texts in Arabic. The abolition of the caliphate destroyed the last institutional link uniting Kurds and Turks, not long after Mustafa Kemal had stopped mentioning the Kurds explicitly as a component of the national fabric. The law on unification of education threatened to erase the culture of Islamic learning and its intellectual networks as well as the cultivation of Kurdish literacy. Combined, these two secularizing measures raised grave questions of identity and legitimate authority. The first large Kurdish uprising against the Republic represented an effort to reconstitute the caliphate and salvage the medrese tradition in the Kurdish region, strengthening the Kurds’ awareness of being a separate people.