David McDowall, "Ottoman Kurdistan, 1850-1914",

Chpt. 4 of his A Modern History of the Kurds, I. B. Tauris, London, 1995.

The suppression of the old amirates and other semi-independent satraps of Kurdistan led to less law and order in the countryside, not more. This may seem surprising, since if the Porte had the military power to suppress the amirs and chiefs it presumably could also suppress anyone else. However, while the Kurdish paramounts indubitably were responsible for major upheavals, conflicts and bloodshed in the region, they were also part of the regional balance of forces.

While eager to aggrandize themselves, they were also vital mediators between the tribes and tribal sections within their territory, and between these and the outside world. Without them, unrestrained inter-tribal conflicts arose all over Kurdistan, with both political and economic consequences.

While the Ottoman authorities were able to govern towns and their immediate environs, they were unable to exert control further afield except by reprisal. Such expeditions were an insufficient response to the challenge now posed. The absence of adequate restraint led to repeated fights between one tribe and another, to increased banditry and to a serious decline in the economic condition of the country. Hitherto, the peasantry had been protected from the worse excesses of pastoral tribes by the restraint of the paramount who expected to gain from peasant produce, and mediated between competing tribal claims on client villages.

The rapacity of the amirs and paramount chiefs had always been tempered by the knowledge that a peasant pushed too far would simply abandon the land. They valued Armenian peasants who were willing to colonize abandoned villages or entirely new sites. In their absence a free-for-all occurred, with tribes violating each other's pastures, and moving through agricultural areas in which they had no economic interest beyond exploiting them as much as they could before moving on. Kurdish tribes had always billeted themselves on peasant villages during the winter months. While this was extremely unpopular, particularly with Armenians, it was an accepted fact of life. In r838 Ainsworth had already noted how many Armenians were migrating to the Russian-occupied parts of Armenia.

Now a new tendency arose of stripping villages on departure. Since this could now be done with impunity, it was not long before Kurdish chieftains and their men were also abducting Armenian girls and killing those who opposed them. The assistance given by Armenians to Russian invading forces could always be invoked as justification for such behaviour, and the Russians compounded this impression by busily rebuilding damaged or ruined Armenian churches and sending emissaries 'in the garb of travelling doctors'. [These may have ben genuine doctors, but to Ainsworth, possibly as paranoid about Russian intentions as the Kurds, they were clearly 'emissaries', Ainsworth, Travels and Researches, vol. ii, p. 379]. The tragic consequences of this process will be discussed later.

Within Kurdish tribal society, however, the power vacuum led to a crisis in the settlement of disputes between one family or tribe and another, and even within each family or tribe. The old amirs and paramounts, because they were seldom blood relatives of the confederation, save for their own immediate family, had been able to act as mediators, with authority if not always impartiality. All that was now gone. In due course they were replaced in their role of mediators and unifying leaders by religious shaykhs.

For a number of centuries the shaykhs belonging to one of the Sufi or dervish orders, or tariqas, had been influential in Kurdish society, as they were in much of the region, particularly with the Turkoman and Kurdish tribes. These tariqas dated back to the rise of the Sufi brotherhoods in twelfth and thirteenth centuries to men like Shaykh Safi al Din, eponymous founder of the Safavids, and himself possibly a Kurd. His order had become the focus of the qizilbasb. Another important one was the Naqshbandi order, which had emerged at the end of the fourteenth century and was particularly influential in Diyarbakir by the seventeenth century.

Such brotherhoods were viewed with some disquiet by the authorities, since they were independent of the formalized Muslim institutions of state, eccentric in their practices, if not beliefs, and thus prone to sedition. There was particular nervousness concerning the empire's eastern frontiers, where the qizilbasb movement had represented a dangerous fusion of Sufism and Shi'ism. Many of the qizilbash belonged to or joined the Baktashi tariqa, which was prone to Shi'ite beliefs so extreme that they were barely recognizable as Muslim. The Baktashis had connections with the Naqshbandis - indeed the eponymous founder, Hajji Baktash, a thirteenth-century mystic from north-east Iran, was himself a member of the Naqshbandi order. In fact, despite this ambiguous connection, the Naqshbandiya was strictly orthodox, particularly in its emphasis on the sharia (Islamic law). Many of the ulama and other great men of learning in the seventeenth century, for example, belonged either to the Naqshbandiya or to another tariqa, the Khalwatiya, which had penetrated the Palace. In fact, the Naqshbandiya played (and still plays) a role of cardinal importance in the religious life of Turkey since the fifteenth century. Even so, however, like other orders, its activities were watched closely.

However, the predominant tariqa in Kurdistan by the beginning of the nineteenth century was the Qadiriya, the brotherhood of the twelfth-century mystic and saint, Abd al Qadir Gailani. By 1800 there were only two Qadiri shaykhly dynasties in Kurdistan, the Barzinjis who hailed from the village of Barzinja near Sulaymaniya, and the Sayyids of Nihri (in Hakkari), who claimed descent from Abd al Qadir Gilani himself. Both families had sayyid status (descent from the Prophet), and both made sure that only family members, i.e. sayyids, should aspire to shaykhly status within the Qadiri order, thus maintaining hierarchical control over their followers.[Virtually the only exception to this rule was the Talabani shaykhly dynasty which made no sayyid claim.] A network based on these two families and their disciples, murids, was to be found through much of Kurdistan, but it was largely moribund.

A new and rival tariqa, however, was born out of the Mujaddidi (revivalist) tradition within the Naqshbandi order which rapidly surpassed the Qadiris in Kurdistan. The instigator of this new Naqshbandi movement was Shaykh (or Mawlana) Khalid. Born into the Jaf tribe in Shahrizur in the late 1770s, Shaykh Khalid seems to have studied with both Qadiri sayyid dynasties, [One should be cautious regarding his sojourn with the Barzinjis since these and the Jafs were antogonistic. However, Shaykh Khalid was apparently authorized for initiation into the Qadiri order but never took up the invitation.] before travelling to Damascus, making the haj in 1805.

Shaykh Khalid went to India in 1810 to meet a particular Naqshbandi Mujaddidi shaykh. It was clearly a profound experience. He returned to Sulaymaniya the following year and swiftly acquired his own large following, thereby upsetting the Barzinii shaykhs and other Qadiris. His more sensational claims included knowledge of the future, an ability to preserve the living from harm and a facility to establish contact with the spirits of the dead. Such things eclipsed the powers claimed by the Barzinjis. At a more practical level, his influence on the Baban rulers must have directly threatened the Barzinjis. Such was the tension that Shaykh Khalid withdrew to Baghdad.

In 1820 Mahmud Baban invited Shaykh Khalid back to Sulaymaniya. It is possible that this was with deliberate Ottoman encouragement. Unlike some rival Sufi orders, the Naqshbandis enjoyed favour in Istanbul on account of their firm commitment to Sunni Islam.[In fact in 1826 when the Baktashi order was suppressed, its takiyas, or oratories, were handed to the Naqshbandiya. It may have been hoped in Ottoman circles that bolstering Sunni feeling in Sulaymaniya would discourage the Babans from their inveterate flirtations with Shi'i Iran. Shaykh Khalid's sojourn in Sulaymaniya did not last long. He suddenly left, under a cloud it seems, and never returned. He spent the rest of his life (d. 1827) in Damascus, from where his influence spread throughout Syria and beyond.

Shaykh Khalid's new Naqshbandi tariqa, however, spread like wildfire in Kurdistan, rapidly outstripping the Qadiriya. The Qadiri system had been fine as long as there was no serious competition. Shaykh Khalid's followers, however, could become shaykhs and could train their own khalifas (deputies), who in turn could aspire to becoming shaykhs. For any ambitious cleric, the revivalist Naqshbandiya was clearly more attractive since it offered the opportunity of establishing one's own network and sphere of influence. In fact many Qadiris converted to the new order including Shaykh Khalid's old teacher, Shaykh Abd Allah) of Nihri.

We have early evidence, too, of the role the Naqshbandi shaykhs began toplay as troubleshooters (and troublemakers) in the political sphere, and the high esteem in which they were held. In 1820 Shaykh Khalid himself acted as a referee between the leaders of the Babans with regard to Iranian intrigues, possibly with Ottoman encouragement. After Shaykh Khalid's departure for Damascus three shaykhly families became central players in the politics of Kurdistan, the Sayyids of Nihri, the Barzanis - both Naqshbandi, and the Qadiri Barzinjis who recovered their position in Sulaymaniya, inheriting the patrimony of the Babans .[Others, no less revered albeit with smaller constituencies, were the Qadiri shaykhs of Brifkan and the Naqshbandi shaykhs of Bamirni.] Martin van Bruinessen, the leading European expert on Kurdish society, has noted that shaykhly dynasties were most important in areas where tribes were most numerous and prone to feuds. Here they prospered on conflict resolution (and provocation) that made their own mediation skills indispensable. They were less influential in those areas either where there were still strong tribes, for example the Jaf, or where the area was basically non-tribal, for example the lands around Diyarbakir, and where consequently tribal conflicts requiring mediation either did not, or seldom, occurred.

These shaykhs not only encouraged tribal chiefs to resort to their mediation skills, but solicited the affections of rank-and-file tribal Kurds, particularly the low status non-tribal peasants who were subordinate to tribal chiefs. For example, the Barzani 'tribe' was, in the view of some, not strictly speaking a tribe at all, since apart from the shaykhly family itself, its adherents were mainly peasants who had defected from the Zibari and other neighbouring tribes. The ties were territorial and spiritual, not ones of kinship. The Barzani shaykhs conferred a protective structure and cohesion on this growing group of fugitives from tribal oppression.

The shaykhs wove themselves into the decaying power structure of the old chiefly families by marriage, thus authenticating their growing political authority. It was a formula which suited both shaykh and chief, since the latter's declining authority was in some measure protected by alliance to religious prestige.

Religious zeal was used as a political weapon. In 1843 we know that Shaykil Taha of Nihri, Shaykh Abd Allah's nephew and successor, played on local Muslin, fears about the Christian threat and actively encouraged Badr Khan's attack on the Nestorians. The motivation was probably twofold: fear of European missionary, encroachment and active dislike of Nestorian Christians who were both formidable fighters and in conflict with their Hakkari overlord.

Yet religious intolerance was not directed solely towards Christians. In 1848 Layard came across a shaykh 'notorious for his hatred of Yazidis ... one of those religious fanatics who are the curse of Kurdistan'. Such behaviour was entirely consistent with Shaykh Khalid's exhortation to his disciples. For alongside strict adherence to the sharia, Shaykh Khalid had enjoined his followers to end their prayers with the supplication that God would 'annihilate the Jews, Christians, fireworshippers (majus) and the Persian Shi'ites'.

Following the collapse of Buhtan in I845, Shaykh Taha sought refuge withone of the last surviving independent tribal chiefs, Musa Beg of Shamdinai whom he seems to have eclipsed in influence. Certainly by the time Shay Taha's son, Ubayd Allah, succeeded in the 186os or 1870s, the Sayyids of Nihr iruled Shamdinan, exerting their influence as far as the erstwhile amirates of Buhtan, Bahdinan, Hakkari and even Ardalan.

Shaykh Ubayd Allah remains for many the first great Kurdish nationalist, but the evidence is hardly conclusive. In 188o he invaded Persia, claiming to be acting in the name of the Kurdish nation. He sent a message to William Abbott, the British Consul-General in Tabriz to explain his conduct:

The Kurdish nation ... is a people apart. Their religion is different [from that of others], and their laws and customs are distinct ... the Chiefs and Rulers of Kurdistan, whether Turkish or Persian subjects, and the inhabitants of Kurdistan, one and all are united and agreed that matters cannot be carried on in this way with the two Governments [Ottoman and Qajar], and that necessarily something must be done, so that European Governments having understood the matter, shall inquire into our state. We also are a nation apart. We want our affairs to be in our own hands.

British diplomats in Iran and Turkey took his words more or less at face value," as the Qajars may also have done. Yet apart from such utterances, the revolt bore little evidence that it was anything other than the kind of tribal disturbance, but on a larger scale, that already bedevilled the region.

Yet it is important. For apart from the mayhem it caused in the area, it raises for the first time ambiguities implicit in the word 'nationalism' which surrounded subsequent risings.

The revolt was started in September 188o by Shaykh Ubayd AUah's second son, Abd al Qadir, who was already inside Iran. Abd al Qadir was his father's representative in those border villages which acknowledged the Nihri Sayyids and, as a result of this status, also designated by governor of Urumiya as their intermediary responsible for the tranquillity of the local tribes. His act of rebellion seems to have been triggered by harsh treatment meted out to a number of tribal chiefs by the local authorities who had acted without consulting him. {this included in one case inflicting 1,000 stripes on a chief and the execution of 50 tribesmen.] This was a serious omission, for it undermined Abd al Qadir's role as intermediary on which his standing with the tribes was based. From his perspective he had little choice but to lead these disgruntled chiefs in rebellion. This he proceeded to do by seizing Sawj Bulaq (Mahabad). He then called for the submission of tribes as far south as Bana and Saqqiz. Most obeyed although some, for example the Mamash, with very marked reluctance. He then advanced eastwards with up to 20,000 men, along the southern side of Lake Urumiya, and out of Kurdish territory. Before leaving Sawj Bulaq, he heard the senior Sunni cleric of the town declare jihad upon the Shi'is. When the inhabitants of the Shi'i town of Miandoab killed his envoys and refused to surrender, his forces put them to the sword slaughtering 2,000 men, women and children, before advancing towards Maragha.

In the meantime two other columns crossed into Iran from Hakkari, one under Shaykh Ubayd Allah's elder son, Muhammad Sadiq, on the west side of Lake Utumiya to protect Abd al Qadir's retreat, and another under the Shaykh's kbalifa, Said, who had raised the Kurds of Hakkari and advanced further south. Among those cajoled into supporting the attack was the tribal Nestorian community of Tiyari. Shaykh Ubayd Allah himself crossed the frontier in mid-October.

Shaykh Ubayd Allah seems to have been a master of disinformation. The Turkish authorities understood he had dissociated himself from his sons' uprising; yet he also called on Turkomans to join the fight against Iran and reportedly declared that once Iran was dealt with he would turn on Turkey. His kbalifa, on the other hand, had been busy claiming that Turkey supported a Kurdish attack on Iran.

Ubayd Allah claimed he wanted an independent principality and undertook to repress brigandage on the part of the various tribes. All he wanted from the European powers, particularly Britain, was their moral support. In view of the advance eastwards beyond Kurdistan, particularly the carnage at Mandoab and the destruction of 'upwards of 2,000 villages', during which 10,000 had been rendered homeless, it was hardly a persuasive argument.

Before crossing the border, Ubayd Allah also unsuccessfully tried to draw in the Shah's half-Kurdish half-brother, Abbas Mirza, who had spent much of his life in exile in Turkey, a move that suggested a challenge to the Qajar throne itself. Meanwhile he told Abbott that the Kurds could no longer bear the exactions of the Iranian government nor its inability to prevent the depredations of the two major Kurdish tribes of the region, the Shikak and Harki.

In other words, he claimed his revolt was against Iranian incompetence and local banditry. In both tribal cases Ubayd Allah was almost certainly demonstrating his intention to defend villages loyal to the Sayyids of Nihri from the depredations of formidable challengers. He had been quite happy to defend Harki banditry elsewhere against Ottoman interference the previous year. As for the Shikak, then had crossed into Turkey and had had a fruitful time marauding, in response to his call to jihad in 1877. But now Ubayd Allah must have been increasingly concerned by the way the rapidly expanding Shikak were beginning to encroach on his own area of patronage in Hakkari-Baradust, and that on either side of the border the government authorities were patently powerless. While his son may have risen in response to Iranian brutality to Nihri client chiefs and then run amok among the Shi'is, Ubayd Allah himself was probably as concerned by the Shikak threat. In both cases the Sayyids of Nihri had to demonstrate their worth as patrons. Only up to a point did this harmonize with 'nationalist' claims.

By the end of October Shaykh Abd a] Qadir's force had shrunk from the 20,000 it had been two weeks earlier to 1,500 men, most of the tribesmen having gone home laden with booty. Shaykh Ubayd Allah and his son Muhammad Sadiq had invested Urumiya with probably no more than 6,000 men. Knowing that a relief column was on its way, Urumiya put up a stiff resistance and broke the spirit of the attackers. By now 12,000 Iranian troops were advancing, 5,000 of them down the west side of Lake Urumiya, and the remainder from the southeastern edge of the lake. These perpetrated ruthless revenge on the non-Shi'a population, slaughtering with scant discrimination between the innocent and guilty. More Ncstorians, for example, perished at the hands of the army than at those of the insurgents.

Shaykh Ubayd Allah's forces fled home, many being captured (and often killed) by government forces on either side of the frontier. Under European diplomatic pressure, the Shaykh was exiled, first to Istanbul, but after his escape in 1882, to the Hijaz where he died in 1883.

The devastation in the fertile Urumiya plain, renowned as the 'Garden of Persia', was felt for years to come and relief taxes were imposed elsewhere to restore the region. Indeed, it so surpassed the normal level of tribal disorder that an American missionary wrote, 'Until the World War, all events in Urumia dated from the "coming of the Sheikh".'

If these facts hardly bear out the claim of a national revolt, what is to be made of Shaykh Ubayd Allah's utterances and actions? We get some clues from the despatches of the British consul-generals either side of the border. Visiting Uruniiya from his post at Tabriz, William Abbott initially thought, 'His project is to place himself at the head of a Kurdish Principality, and to annex the whole of Kurdistan, both in Turkey and Persia'." Shaykh Ubayd Allah may have been after a wider domain than the mirs, as his spiritual authority suggested; but it is unlikely the Qadiri-inclined tribes would have welcomed him, still less the Shikak of whom he complained, let alone those tribes outside his area of influence.

Henry Trotter, consul-general at Erzerum, made a fine but crucial distinction in the question of loyalty to the Ottoman government which the mirs half a century earlier would readily have understood. 'I believe,' he reported to his ambassador, 'the Sheikh to be more or less personally loyal to the Sultan; and he would be ready to submit to his authority and pay him tribute as long as he could get rid of the Ottoman officials, and be looked de lege as well as defacto the ruling chief of Kurdistan."' This was consonant with what Trotter had himself been told by his vice-consul in Van a year earlier: that the shaykh was quite willing to pay tribute to the sultan in lieu of taxes. Shaykh Ubayd Allah had confirmed this orally when he had met Abbott outside Urumiya. Abbott had asked him whether it was his object to form Kurdistan into a separate Principality, independent of the Porte or merely to weld together its rude components, reduce order out of chaos and become the responsible head of the Kurdish nation, answerable to the Sultan for their good conduct and the collection of taxes? To this the Sheikh replied that nobody ever doubted his loyalty to the Sultan, but that he had a very poor opinion of the Pashas [i.e. the provincial administration].

It would seem that while using the vocabulary of contemporary European nationalism, he was more probably after the resurrection of an autonomous principality as these had existed before the extension of administration under the Ottoman tanzimat.

This alone does not explain why the government in Istanbul was apparently so relaxed about Shaykh Ubayd Allah or so reluctant to exile him afterwards. It must be remembered that Shaykh Ubayd Allah inherited his uncle's mantle in a period of growing disorder and economic deprivation in eastern Anatolia. The Ottoman inability to achieve law and order beyond the immediate environs of each town, the increased and at times unreasonable tax burden, and the attempts to introduce conscription all undermined the wellbeing of a region already prone to lawlessness. Without the restraint of respected local leaders, each tribe extorted what it could from travellers and settled villagers. As innumerable foreign traveuers through the region testify, brigandage had brought the economy at times almost to a standstill. Trade on the roads was liable to pillage. One tribe would fight with another, with the reverberations of their antagonism felt by villages in the surrounding countryside. Some local Ottoman officials found it lucrative to work hand-in-glove with bandit chiefs. More scrupulous officials knew that in a test of will with powerful local chiefs or shaykhs they would not necessarily enjoy firm backing from Istanbul. Disorder and deprivation merely increased the rapacity of the tribes when moving through peasant villages, be they Kurdish, Armenian or mixed. In other words the Shikak and Harki, while unbridled, were as much the Sultan's enemies as Ubayd Allah's.

Then there was the question of the growing hostility to the Christian communities. Armenians and Assyrians were both targets, Armenians because of their growing national feeling and consequent identification with the Russian threat, and the Nestorians because they were also suspect, for each year 5,000 or so in Urumiya (let alone Hakkari) visited Russia as migrant workers.

In this disordered scene, Shaykh Ubayd Allah had already shown himself willing to help the Sultan against the Christian threat. He had been appointed commander of Kurdish tribal forces in the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78, giving him wider official powers than those enjoyed by any Kurd since the days of the amirs half a century earlier. He had proclaimed that war a jihad, one which the tribal chiefs took as a green fight for attacking Armenian villagers.

Shaykh Ubayd Allah's religious views of Christians may have been ambiguous but his political ones were less so. The Armenian community posed a serious threat to Kurdish interests. The war of 1877-78 had led to the Treaty of Berlin, whereby the European Powers had specifically called (Article 61) for protected sta.tus for the Armenian community a stepping stone, as Muslims saw it, towards the emergence of an independent Armenian state. In fact Britain was anxious for Ottoman reform and proper protection of the Armenians in order to remove the justification Russia wanted (unrestrained Muslim persecution of the Armenian to intervene.

Yet European pressure had its inevitable effect in the area. 'What is this I hear,' Shaykh Ubayd Allah expostulated to one Turkish official, 'that the Armenians are going to have an independent state in Van, and that the Nestorians are going to hoist the British flag and declare themselves British subjects?' Here, surely, lies the clue to his own call to Britain to recognize the Kurds as la nation apart'. If, as feared, an Armenian or Nestorian protected entity was in prospect, it would be established partly in his area of influence. It was a clear case of 'them or us'. Shaykh Ubayd Allah therefore, it seems, made the case for Kurds in the secular nationalist vocabulary current in European chancelleries.

It may seem strange that the Sultan, having once suppressed the Kurdish amirates during the years of Ottoman tanzimat should have then vested Shaykh Ubayd Allah with so much power. Why not stem the Armenian and Russian threat by the reforms Britain wanted? The tanzimat period, 1826-76, had been one in which the Porte increasingly sought to reorganize the empire on European lines. But this could only be achieved at the price of growing discontent among the majority of Muslims in Anatolia who feared the implications of European-inspired reform.

In 1876 a new sultan, Abd al Hamid II, assumed office. He was not a reformer as this had come to be understood - with all its negative resonances (to Muslims) of allowing the European powers a greater influence in politics and trade, and the accordance of equal rights to non-Muslim Ottoman citizens. He was determined to defend his Islamic empire, not by a process of liberalization which had reached a short-lived climax in the Constitution of 1876, but by centralization in the person of the sultan himself and by an appeal to Muslim values and solidarity. Ottoman officials in the provinces, on the other hand, were part of the tanzimat, the Trojan horse of European reform, as well as the bane of community leaders like Shaykh Ubayd Allah.

Sultan Abd al Hamid felt safer with Muslim traditionalists. Shaykh Ubayd Allah, with his immense spiritual stature in eastern Anatolia, was too valuable a pillar in Islam's defence to ignore, in spite of his mercurial behaviour; once formally vested with so much temporal power he could not possibly relinquish it.

Istanbul had already had a little local difficulty with Shaykh Ubayd Allah in 1879. In September that year some of his protege Harki tribesmen had been punished by the local district prefect, or qaim-maqam (of Gawar), for banditry. As with Abd al Qadir the following year, Ubayd Allah could not allow his own status to be undermined by local government; so he sent his sons to attack the local troops. But when his sons were worsted, Shaykh Ubayd Allah protested his innocence blaming all on his sons. Both sons now moved over the border to adherent villages just inside Iran, presumably fill things quietened down. Istanbul discounted Shaykh Ubayd Allah's involvement, increased his state stipend and removed the offending qaim-maqam from his post. The sultan, who was rapidly taking control over many affairs in the empire, evidently felt happier working through the volatile shaykh than he did through his own reformist officials.

Surrounding this local disturbance there were also rumours concerning a 'Kurdish League', purportedly a nationalist group formed by Shaykh Ubayd Allah himself. The latter certainly wanted to expand his following, but its nationalist overtones should be treated with caution. We have little more than the accusations of the Armenian patriarchate to go on. The League, if it really existed, apparently never made any statement nor took any action in that name. But intriguingly the patriarchate claimed that the Porte itself was fostering the League in order to stifle the Armenian question. It is a perfectly credible explanation, a scheme cooked up in Istanbul which offered Shaykh Ubayd Allah undisclosed official sponsorship to form a movement that could act as a counterbalance to the Armenian threat.
A truly independent Kurdistan in such a troubled region, what the Shaykh seemed to be calling for in 1880, had little chance of survival. The Ottoman government must have realized this but the argument for Kurdistan, like the ephemeral League, was a useful counterweight to Armenian nationalist claims, especially if Shaykh Ubayd Allah managed to co-opt, as he tried to do, Armenians and Nestorians into his revolt. Had they co-operated it would have conveniently undermined the Armenian nationalist case for European-protected status. In the unlikely event of a Kurdish principality actually coming into existence, it was bound to remain dependent on the sultan.

There was also the question of improving the Ottoman position on its eastern bulwark. There was no doubt this would be qualitatively improved by incorporating Kurdish tribal territory overlooking the plains of West Azarbaijan. Shaykh Ubayd Allah had already demonstrated his influence over Iranian Kurdish tribes when some of the latter had rallied to his call for jihad against the infidel in 1877. The Porte, anxious about its position in the east, may have seen this foray in a strategic light. Twenty-five years later it was to take advantage again of Iranian weakness to encroach in the very same area.

The Ottoman government would not have wished to explain any of this publicly, since it had to deny any encouragement to Shaykh Ubayd Allah's adventurism. While the British Ambassador remained puzzled, it is now possible to guess what was going on:

I again failed to ascertain to what extent the Porte believes in the intention of Sheikh Obeidullah to found an independent Kurdistan. The general impression was that Assim Pasha [the Ottoman foreign minister) himself did not believe in the serious existence of any such ambitious designs.

Assim Pasha knew that Shaykh Ubayd Allah was a devout Naqshbandi. Mawlana Khalid had taught his followers to 'pray for the survival of the exalted Ottoman State upon which depends Islam, and for victory over the enemies of religion,the cursed Christians and the despicable Persians.' Less apparent perhaps to European than to Ottoman observers, Shaykh Ubayd Allah to the very end had been true to his spiritual mentor.

Given the social context of the region, the Hamidiya was raised from selected Sunni Kurdish tribes, preferably of proven loyalty, to form mounted regiments of approximately 600 men. In many cases these regiments were drawn solely from one tribe, and its commanding officer was the tribal chief. In cases where tribes were too small, each might provide a squadron for a composite regiment. In any case tribal solidarity was always maintained by keeping fellow tribesmen in one unit.

There were enormous advantages for both a chief invited to levy a regiment, and for his recruits. Chiefs and their officers were to be sent to a special military school in Istanbul. They were outfitted in dashing Cossack-styled uniforms to lend weight to their new status. Hamidiya tribes were exempted from one of the most unpopular measures of Ottoman centralization, the liability for conscription which was being introduced into the region for the very first 'time. Hamidiya chiefs were invited to send their sons to one of the tribal schools established in both Istanbul and Kurdistan, in order to absorb them into the Ottoman establishment. In some of the principal 'Hamidiya' villages the authorities also offered to establish schools for the population. Since Kurdistan was the most neglected, backward and impoverished corner of the empire, the offer held serious attraction.

The ostensible purpose of the Hamidiya Cavalry was to provide a bulwark against the Russian threat. It was important to stiffen the resolve of Kurds as part of the empire, especially as some tribes inside Ottoman territory had been willing to support czar versus sultan in previous wars. Besides, an increasing number of tribes had fallen inside Russia's orbit in the Caucasus. The formal deployment of the Hamidiya regiments was primarily along an axis from Erzerum to Van.

Yet the fact that the Hamidiya tribes were an irregular force only to be marshalled in units greater than regimental strength on the instructions of the mushir, or military commander, meant that in practice these regiments remained disposed in their usual habitat except when called upon for duty. Furthermore it was generally suspected that most Hamidiya tribesmen would desert rather than move too far from their encampments and livestock.

It was not long before the creation of the Hamidiya led to trouble. For one thing, squabbles and fights broke out between various chiefs for senior rank within one tribe, and for another, local commanders did not differentiate between enemies of their tribe qua tribe, and enemies of the Hamidiya Cavalry. Scores soon started to be settled between Hamidiya tribes, armed by the state, and local adversaries. The powerful Sunni Jibran tribe, which had fielded four Hamidiya regiments, soon started attacking the Alevi Khurmaks, confiscating their lands. As reviled Alevis, or Qizilbash, it was not surprising that the state authorities did nothing to obtain redress for them or for other Alevi tribes suffering similarly. But even Sunni tribes not similarly favoured with Hamidiya status were liable to land theft by force of arms. H.RB. Lynch who was travelling in the region in 1894 wrote of recent pillaging bands around Erzerum:

It is well known that these bands were led by officers in the Hamidiyeh regiments tenekelis, or tin-plate men, as they are called by the populace, from the brass badges they wear in their caps. The frightened officials, obliged to report such occurrences, take refuge behind the amusing euphemism of such a phrase as "brigands, disguised as soldiers.'

When the government could not afford to pay Hamidiya officers, it offered them tax-collecting rights on local Armenian villages, causing further hardship for the latter. In several cases a Kurdish chief was not only commander of a Hamidiya regiment but also the local civil authority.

Such circumstances apart, those who sought recourse to government still found that the civil administration had no power to restrain the Hamidiya, who were answerable solely to the mushir of the Fourth Army in Erzerum. The mushir, Zakki Pasha, who happened to be the sultan's brother-in-law, was subject not to the wali but direct to Istanbul. He was clearly using the Hamidiya as the instrument of a policy that had little in common with the brief of the civil administration of the region. The civil administration had nothing but contempt for the Hamidiya, a view echoed by British military consuls:

The Hamidiye troops, in fact, are under no control whatever, beyond that of their own native Chief, which does not appear to be exercised much in the interests of law and order. It is a curious sight to see Kurds walking about the streets of the town [Bashkale) in their native costume.... They have a habit of taking what they require out of the shops without payment.

The lawless activities of the Hamidiya set an example which non-Hamidiya tribal Kurds were soon to imitate. In fact there were any number of young swells anxious to look the part. Local blacksmiths did a roaring trade with such dandies, forging Hamidiya badges for wear with lambskin busbies. As with the Hamidiya, the civil authorities found themselves powerless to curb them, while the army commanders ignored or indulged tribal excesses.

Although most affrays initially were inter-tribal ones, it was the client peasantry, Muslim and Christian, which suffered most. Soon it became clear both that the Armenians were the primary targets, and that the Hamidiya was egged on or even deliberately directed by the Ottoman military authorities.

The growth of the Armenian problem has already been discussed. By the early 1890s it had deteriorated considerably. Largely because after their experiences in the i877-78 war some Armenians had finally begun to react to the provocations, depredations and persecution suffered at the hands of the Ottoman authorities, the Kurdish tribes and the Muslim citizens of mixed towns and cities. In 1882 'Protectors of the Fatherland', almost certainly a revolutionary group, was uncovered in Erzerum. In1885 the Armenakan Party began to operate from Van, supported by groups in Russian Transcaucasia and Iran. After its formation in 1887 the internationalist Hunchak Party established armed cells in eastern Anatolia and Russian Transcaucasia. In 1889 an armed Armenakan group was caught crossing the frontier from Persia. Other militant groups appeared, giving rise to paranoia both in Istanbul and in the eastern provinces. In 1893 seditious placards appeared on the walls of several Anatolian towns. Agitators tried to arouse dissident Alevi tribes in Dersim and peasant Kurds around Sasun, reputedly descended from convert Armenians.

However, the event that paved the way for more widespread attacks on Armenians took place in Sasun district, south of Mush where a Hunchak group had intermittently ambushed and killed Kurds since 1882. In summer 1894 an affray between Armenian villagers and the local qaim-maqam concerning tax arrears gave the pretext for wholesale massacre in which local Hamidiya tribesmen played a prominent part. Over 1,000 villagers probably perished. By spring 1895 the representatives of Britain, France and Russia wanted reforms for the Armenian provinces: an amnesty for Armenian prisoners; 'approved' governors; reparations for victims of the outrages at Sasun and elsewhere; Kurdish nomadic movements to be allowed only under surveillance and for them generally to be encouraged to settle; and the Hamidiya to be disarmed. Abd al Hamid agreed to these demands but deliberately neglected to implement them. Continued level of insecurity had reduced agriculture to famine levels by 1897-98.

For a year there was relative quiet, but on 30 September1895 a violent incident took place between Armenian demonstrators and police in Istanbul, which marked the beginning of a more widespread attack on Armenians in the city, in which hundreds perished, some at the hands of the many Kurdish porters there. A week later over 1,100 Armenians were massacred in and around Trabzon. By the end of October there had been massacres in Erzinjan, Bidis, Erzerum and elsewhere, in each of which hundreds were killed. In the first ten days of November about 1,000 Armenians perished in Diyarbakir, almost 3,000 each in Arabkir and Malatya. More massacres followed, in Kharput, Sivas, Kayseri and Urfa. The perpetrators were a mixture of Muslim citizenry, both Turks and Kurds, and Ottoman soldiers, including the Haniidiya.

Some Armenian villages stood up to this harassment and won the begrudging respect of the tribes. Some became Muslim, others invited Kurdish chiefs to settle in their villages at the cost of offering inducements, for 'policemen have to be paid.' By 1897 even the urban Turkish population had begun to protest about the intolerably disruptive effect of the Hamidiya Kurds.

Why did Sultan Abd al Hamid allow such mayhem in his eastern provinces? Was the Hamidiya deliberately raised in order to destroy the Armenian population? Armenians were not alone in seeing sinister, indeed genocidal designs in the Hamidiya. They had been raised ostensibly in order to mobilize the Kurdish tribes as auxiliaries in the event of another war with Russia.

It was well known that some Kurds - both Sunni and Alevi tribes - had responded to intermittent Russian overtures since the war of. 1827-29. The Russians had skilfully exploited tribal unhappiness with both the centralization that had led to suppression of the old amirates, and the reforms which seemed to favour the Christian peasantry. Similarly the Russians fomented the tribes, particularly the Alevi Kurds of Dersim, during the Crimean War in 1854, and 1877-78. Fear of Kurdish disaffection remained real. In fact, not long after the establishment of the Hamidiya, the Russians invited a disaffected Badr Khan to Tiflis to discuss the formation of a pro-Russian counterweight.

Enrolment of tribesmen, exemptions from taxation, the education of tribal officers, and particularly chiefs' sons, in Istanbul were all part of an attempt to draw the Kurds more closely into the fabric of the empire. In principle it was a good idea. The more the Kurdish tribes were integrated into the Ottoman regime, the more secure would be the eastern border and, hopefully, the tamer the Kurds. In practice integration never really happened. The tribes remained wild while some of the chiefs took town houses.

It was also a policy of weakness. Sultan Abd al Hamid could not afford to alienate the Kurds, neither militarily nor indeed with regard to tax collection. For the tribes, rapacious as they were, could facilitate or ftustrate the collection of taxes in the countryside. So he permitted their depredations, and as Army Commander in Erzerum his brother-in-law, Zakki Pasha, indulged and protected them from local civil administrators. He could have crushed them, but only by virtual military occupation of the region, creating tension with Russia and alienating the Kurdish tribes.

It was also as much out of weakness as deliberate policy that Abd al Hamid allowed the Hamidiya to inflict such suffering on the Armenians. By 1895 neither the average Hamidiya tribesman nor Turkish soldier made any distinction between Armenian peasants and revolutionaries, The tanzimat had risked alienating the tribes already, better now to allow them free rein. So Abd al Hamid swallowed the European reforms thrust upon him in Istanbul but made sure, by putting the Hamdiya under Zakki Pasha rather than the civil authorities, that they could never be properly implemented. Law and order took second place to loyalty on this vulnerable border.

Nevertheless, the Hamidiya Cavalry was clearly a failure. On the whole, there was little sign of integration into a wider Ottoman context. On the contrary, through the licence allowed to the Hamicliya regiments, tribalism enjoyed a strong resurgence. Furthermore, as the local British consul reported, 'Zeki [Pasha] is a king among them; they recognize no authority but his. The opinion is that he means to make himself a Prince of an independent Kurdistan."' It is unlikely Sultan Abd al Hamid distrusted Zakki Pasha for he was only removed from his post after his own overthrow in 1908.

Yet the revival of tribal power was a different matter. However much Abd al Hamid was opposed to reform, he could hardly have had in mind a reversion to the tribal principalities his forebear Mahmud II had abolished. By 1900, with fears of Russian attack abating and popular irritation with the Hamidiya mounting, Zakki Pasha began to curb their excesses and punish Hamidiya chiefs who only a year or two earlier could have counted on protection. Yet, even so, they remained a menace. As the empire slid towards revolution, it was not seditious Turks but the Hamidiya chiefs who still gave provincial governors the real cause for concern. Even on the battlefield the Hamidiya proved a disappointment, and several regiments were disbanded.

After the overthrow of Abd al Hamid's regime by the Committee of Union and Progress in 1908, a theme discussed more fully in the next chapter, the Hamidiya regiments were renamed as 'Tribal Regiments' (ashirat alaylan) but remained essentially the same. The triumph of the Young Turks, the threat which they posed to supporters of the ancien regime, and their reversion to authoritarian and explicitly Turkish rule after a brief spate of liberalism led to disorder in many parts of the empire: within Kurdistan itself, among the Bulgars of Macedonia, the Catholic tribes of northern Albania, in Yemen where a new Mahdi proclaimed himself, and among the formidable Druzes of the Syrian Hawran.

Tribal regiments were sent to some of these trouble spots alongside regular troops. Tribal contingents were despatched to Yemen in 1908 and to Albania in 1911 where they performed badly, sustaining heavy losses, and acquiring a reputation for savagery while restoring order. Indeed, it could be said that on the eve of the First World War, the Kurds were generally noted mainly for their disorderliness, banditry and harassment of the Armenians.

Thus the nineteenth century ended with a firmer Ottoman grip on the towns of the region, but a more volatile situation with simmering inter-communal conflict, lawless tribes and the now familiar pattern of periodic Russian land seizures - a mixture finally detonated in autumn 1914.