Content area
Full Text
KURDS AND THE STATE IN IRAN: THE MAKING OF KURDISH IDENTITY Abbas Vali Publisher: I.B.Tauris: London and NewYork Year: 2011 ISBN: 978-1-84885-788-9 (hardback) Pagination: pp. 215 Price: £50
Abbas Vali argues that the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906, in its 'marginalization of ethnic differences and their expulsion from the political process' (p.4), denied the Kurds of Iran their voice and identity, and that it was this effect, rather than an alleged Soviet conspiracy to divide Iran, that blazed the trail for the Kurds' own formation of an ethno-national community. In early 1946, the Kurds forged an independent republic in north-west Iran, at Mahabad, which, while temporary, was influential in successive Kurdish nationalist movements. Vali refers to a wealth of sources here, from Kurdish newspapers between 1942 and 1946 to official documents of the Kurdish Republic, to underpin a trenchant theoretical analysis of 'the genealogy of Kurdish identity in Iran' (p.xii), countering historicist and essentialist versions.
The Constitutionalist era of Iran is explored initially, with its drive towards 'political and administrative centralism: a modern bureaucracy, a national army, a uniform tax regime and secular education' (p.5), which belied a 'latent authoritarianism' (p.5), later to...