Under the leadership of Sheikh Ubeidullah of Nehri, in the last months of 1880 tens of thousands of Iranian and Ottoman Kurds marched on northwestern Iran and temporarily took control of several ...cities. This movement, coupled with the response of the Iranian army, resulted in great violence and displacement. Despite its failure, in the limited literature on Kurds this revolt is seen as the birth of Kurdish nationalism. Using extensive and underutilized historical documents-including official correspondence from Iranian and Ottoman authorities as well as British consuls, and day-to-day reports and memoirs from American missionaries active in the region-this project suggests that Sultan Abdulhamid's (Sunni) pan-Islamist agenda, Shi'i-Sunni tensions, the rise of Armenian nationalism, and missionary activities in the region also played significant roles in the formation of this movement.
Using a plethora of hitherto unused and under-utilized sources from the Ottoman, British and Iranian archives, Ottoman-Iranian Borderlands traces seven decades of intermittent work by Russian, ...British, Ottoman and Iranian technical and diplomatic teams to turn an ill-defined and highly porous area into an internationally recognized boundary. By examining the process of boundary negotiation by the international commissioners and their interactions with the borderland peoples they encountered, the book tells the story of how the Muslim world's oldest borderland was transformed into a bordered land. It details how the borderland peoples, whose habitat straddled the frontier, responded to those processes as well as to the ideas and institutions that accompanied their implementation. It shows that the making of the boundary played a significant role in shaping Ottoman-Iranian relations and in the identity and citizenship choices of the borderland peoples.
In very broad terms my dissertation examines two things. Firstly it explores the creation of the Iranian-Ottoman border extending from the Persian Gulf to Armenia, in the period from 1843 to 1881. ...Secondly, it examines how peoples who lived in this border zone, adapted and resisted to this process and the new forms of domination and intervention by both the modernizing Middle Eastern states and encroaching European powers. To write the history the making of this border in relation the centralization of the Ottoman Empire and Iran, I conducted two years of research at the archives and libraries in England, Iran and Turkey. From these disparate archives, I gathered a variety of different sources ranging from governmental and non-governmental documents to pamphlets, newspaper articles to manuscripts. The first chapter outlines the border related history of the Ottoman Empire and Iran and provides a new outlook at the destruction of the Kurdish principalities in relation to the making of the frontiers. Then in the next three chapters I detail the working of various frontier conferences and commissions striving to demarcate the limits of the Ottoman Empire and Iran. While providing a chronological outline of this operation and the making of the frontiers, I specifically looked at the responses of the inhabitants of the borderland region to the process of boundary making. Hence in my last two chapters I concentrate on a cross-border rebellion which was diametrically opposed to the Ottoman and Iranian centralization projects and the border making. By focusing on a border region where global, regional and local histories intersect, my dissertation seeks to question common approaches that treat Ottoman and Iranian histories as independent and self-contained entities and reduce their relations to a struggle between Shi'i and Sunni Islam. That is why one of the major contributions of my dissertation will be to bring the fields of Ottoman and Iranian studies into closer dialogue. At the same time, my work will furnish a much more comprehensive and historically grounded approach to understanding the Kurdish question and will also contribute to the field of border studies.
