Introduction: Rethinking Kurdish Nobility in the Ottoman Empire

Summary

In the last days of August 1848, the inhabitants of Weşin, a village nestled in a secluded valley on the banks of the eastern Euphrates, woke early. The men met at the village mosque to perform the pre-sunrise prayer marking the beginning of a three-day Muslim holiday celebrating the end of Ramadan. Just before the prayer began, they heard the sound of distant gunfire. As the noise approached, the prayer-goers saw that it was being made by Abdullah Beg, the hâkim (ruler) of the Palu emirate and at least six hundred armed men. They were coming to collect 1.5 tons of clarified butter from the villagers in payment for four years of back taxes owed to Abdullah Beg. The villagers responded by opening fire. Eid turned bloody, with three villagers dead and four wounded. The despairing villagers then fled to the surrounding hills. The next day Abdullah Beg came back with his men and set the village on fire, burning sixty-five houses and buildings to the ground, along with stored grain, animals and their fodder, poplar trees and vineyards.

On the surface, this event seems like just one among many conflicts about agrarian surplus extraction the world over. What neither Abdullah Beg nor the villagers knew was that the incident would trigger a series of events that would break up the Kurdish begs’ hereditary rule. Abdullah Beg was a descendant of the Palu ûmera (pl. of emîr – alternatively begs/beys or mîrs) that had ruled the emirate for more than three centuries. Successive Ottoman sultans recognised the Palu begs’ hereditary rulership over the emirate from the 1500s – the time when it came under Ottoman suzerainty – onward. Within a year, this violent encounter would cost Abdullah Beg his position as hâkim, his landholdings and, when the Ottoman state exiled him to Tekfurdağı in Rumelia, 900 miles away from the lands that his ancestors had ruled for centuries, his bond with his homeland. And with the end of Abdullah Beg’s career came the end of the begs’ hereditary rule in Palu.

Kurdish emirates and the elite families have been the cornerstones of both popular and academic historical renditions of the Kurds and Kurdistan.