Warriors, Kings, and Caliphs: Questions of Origins and Dynastic Culture in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Kurdistan
Résumé
For most of the tenth/sixteenth and eleventh/seventeenth centuries, Kurdistan was a primary battleground in the never-ending wars playing out between the two imperial states of the Middle East, namely the Ottoman and Safavid polities. In this period, Kurdish dynasties thrived as they never had before and never would again, and they present a case in point for studying the dynamic character of family-based authority and the processes of its legitimation and transmission. In an ever-changing political landscape marked by a conflict in which the sectarian identity of both empires was construed as a paramount instrument for state propaganda, Kurdish rulers were required to align with the overarching religious and cultural identity of their new protectors whenever they switched sides. In order to do this, they had a number of tools at their disposal, giving them a degree of creativity in deciding how exactly to construct the political identity of their various houses. Nasab, or ‘genealogy’, was perhaps the most important of these tools and in this article, I will endeavour to study the ancestry claims made by the rulers of some of the Kurdish dynasties in order to legitimate their power.