This book by Wadie Jwaideh is an excellently thorough walkthrough of exactly the topic described by its title. Unfortunately, it is also pretty old - it was written as a doctorate thesis in 1959, two years before the guy who wrote the foreword to this book claims the Kurdish nationalist movement properly took off (and the PKK, probably the biggest player in the modern history of Kurdish nationalism, weren't formed for another nineteen years); so even if Kurdish issues fascinate you, frankly I'm not sure why you'd read this one compared to more recent books about their struggle - unless you were, like me, doing a super in-depth academic study with Kurdishness at the centre of it.
Still, as you can probably tell by the fact that it's getting a post,* I found this informative, useful, and very well-structured - genuinely learned loads of stuff from Long Ago that still helpfully resonates with more contemporary developments. History is always great fun to read too - it's like going through current events on fast-forward, apart from the actual tone and caliber of those events subtly shifts the further back you go, because, like, history, innit. And so the grandeur of the achievements of great persons, placed into the immensely-grander complex webs of context in which they must invariably occur, seem so strange and small, enormous struggles condensed for brevity and laid out cold as mere memory, words on a page. If you want a small taster of this kind of Ozymandian ennui, just google (don't bother actually I'll wikilink it) Sheikh Mahmud Barzanji.***
Still, as you can probably tell by the fact that it's getting a post,* I found this informative, useful, and very well-structured - genuinely learned loads of stuff from Long Ago that still helpfully resonates with more contemporary developments. History is always great fun to read too - it's like going through current events on fast-forward, apart from the actual tone and caliber of those events subtly shifts the further back you go, because, like, history, innit. And so the grandeur of the achievements of great persons, placed into the immensely-grander complex webs of context in which they must invariably occur, seem so strange and small, enormous struggles condensed for brevity and laid out cold as mere memory, words on a page. If you want a small taster of this kind of Ozymandian ennui, just google (don't bother actually I'll wikilink it) Sheikh Mahmud Barzanji.***
* That means I read the whole book, which is not the norm for books I'm only reading for research for an essay. But dissertations, as I am finding, are different beasts entirely, if only due to scale; much like having gotten used to writing pickles and now having a full-size courgette demanded of you. Also, the topic is super interesting and I've got a month and a half left** so am taking the luxury of imbibing a ridiculously large quantity of source material from which to whittle out support for my arguments.
** As compared to my typical position when writing essays, which is to do all the reading in a week or two and write it up in a coffee-and-bread-and-humus-and-satsuma-fuelled thirty-six hour stint in the open-all-day library. But dissertations are way too long to do that. And the IC is closed over summer, which is probably just as well.
*** Regardless of how adept or inept a leader they may actually be, I find myself unable to not find something enthralling about historical figures who seem to make it their mission to cause as much irk to great powers as they can while going about their own aims. Not that Barzanji necessarily did, but from the way Jwaideh recounted his exploits, complete with snippets from the statements and letters of increasingly confused and irritated British colonial officers, he certainly did a bit.
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