The Cambridge History of the Kurds is an authoritative and comprehensive volume exploring the social, political and economic features, forces and evolution amongst the Kurds, and in the region known as Kurdistan, from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century. Written in a clear and accessible style by leading scholars in the field, the chapters survey key issues and themes vital to any understanding of the Kurds and Kurdistan including Kurdish language; Kurdish art, culture and literature; Kurdistan in the age of empires; political, social and religious movements in Kurdistan; and domestic political developments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Other chapters on gender, diaspora, political economy, tribes, cinema and folklore offer fresh perspectives on the Kurds and Kurdistan as well as neatly meeting an exigent need in Middle Eastern studies. Situating contemporary developments taking place in Kurdish-majority regions within broader histories of the region, it forms a definitive survey of the history of the Kurds and Kurdistan.

Kurdish Awakening examines key questions related to Kurdish nationalism and identity formation in Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey. The world's largest stateless ethnic group, Kurds have steadily grown in importance as a political power in the Middle East, particularly in light of the "Arab Spring." As a result, Kurdish issues—political, cultural, and historical alike—have emerged as the subject of intense scholarly interest. This book provides fresh ways of understanding the historical and sociopolitical underpinnings of the ongoing Kurdish awakening and its already significant impact on the region. Rather than focusing on one state or angle, this anthology fills a gap in the literature on the Kurds by providing a panoramic view of the Kurdish homeland's various parts. The volume focuses on aspects of Kurdish nationalism and identity formation not addressed elsewhere, including perspectives on literature, gender, and constitution making. Further, broad thematic essays include a discussion of the historical experiences of the Kurds from the time of their Islamization more than a millennium ago up until the modern era, a comparison of the Kurdish experience with other ethno-national movements, and a treatment of the role of tribalism in modern nation building. This collection is unique in its use of original sources in various languages. The result is an analytically rich portrayal that sheds light on the Kurds' prospects and the challenges they confront in a region undergoing sweeping upheavals.

A gripping front-line portrait of the Kurdish people during the buildup to war and its aftermath by a journalist who has covered the region for over a decade.

Presentations of National Cultures. Fifty-one texts illustrate the evolution of modernism in the east-European region. Essays, articles, poems, or excerpts from longer works offer new opportunities of possible comparisons of the respective national cultures, from the different ideological approaches and finessing projects of how to create the modern state liberal, conservative, socialist and others to the literary and scientific attempts at squaring the circle of individual and collective identities.

Soran Hamarash is a Kurdish writer, academic, historian and linguist who has dedicated nearly 30 years of his life to the study of the Kurds and their history. This book is a comprehensive journey into the beginning of writing and agriculture and, consequently, that of the history of the Kurds which is integral to these two foundational elements of the earliest civilisations. In this book, Mr. Hamarash demonstrates that the modern foundation of our understanding of ancient history and the origin of civilisation was not set for the purpose of knowing the past; rather, it was to serve ideological, religious, and political agendas. This manifested non-objective approaches among scholars, which has resulted in dealing with the people in historical records selectively and in isolation from each other. Consequently, the organic nature of human society is not currently reflected in the existing historiography, and this has led to a significant misunderstanding about ancient history. For the Kurds, it has led to a lost and untold history. A core argument stated here relates to the Sumerians who founded the first writing and one of the most advanced civilisations in human history. Their language is currently considered an isolated one, and allegedly died as a spoken language around 4000 years ago. Nevertheless, this book clearly demonstrates that Sumerian is not only still spoken in its newer form by the Kurds, but that the language is related to modern languages such as English, French, German, Russian and others. This book strongly opposes the conventional understandings of the ancient history of Mesopotamia and Anatolia. It evidences that the key to understanding that history, is the Kurds, the Indigenous people of "the cradle of mankind". It argues unequivocally that without understanding the history of the Kurds, the origin of the western civilisation and that of the Indo-European languages will remain unknown.