The historiography of Syria has long mirrored, with some exceptions, the logic of the modern Syrian state: Syria has been treated as an Arab space, and Kurdish presence has appeared either as marginal or as a late “problem” of borders and nationalism. In this sense, the academic world has followed—metaphorically speaking—the lead of Arab supremacist regimes. The Kurds, whose presence in Syrian history predates the modern Syrian state by centuries, were rendered largely invisible. That invisibility has become increasingly difficult to sustain, particularly after the Syrian Kurds’ widely recognized sacrifice in the fight against the Islamic State and other militia formations, and as they assert their agency in the Syria emerging from the devastation of a decade-long civil war.
Yet wartime visibility is no substitute for historical recognition. This volume offers such recognition through a foundational scholarly intervention that situates Kurdish history as integral to Ottoman Syria rather than peripheral to an Arab-centered narrative. By assembling an international cadre of scholars, Winter and HajHasan have produced a collection that will be indispensable to Ottoman historians, scholars of Syria, and Kurdish studies more broadly.
The editors describe the volume as “a collective exploration of an area that has never been the object of sustained enquiry” (p. 3), and the book fulfills that promise. The essays do not merely add Kurds to an existing Syrian narrative; instead, they challenge the assumptions that rendered Kurdish presence anomalous in the first place. The volume’s most significant contribution is therefore as historiographical as it is empirical: it shows that Ottoman Syria should be understood as a plural social space, and that Kurdish mobility, settlement, and elite participation were constitutive of that space and its history, regardless of the severity of subsequent silencing.
This intervention is necessary because the modern state’s designation as the “Syrian Arab Republic” encourages a misleading conflation of geography and ethnicity. Syria was not historically synonymous with Arabs, nor is the name itself of Arabic origin. The volume’s long view usefully undermines a tendency—common in nationalist historiography and sometimes reproduced in academic work—to treat the Arabization of Syria as timeless. Kurdish movement into greater Syria extends back to antiquity, but large-scale settlement in western Syria occurred during the Ayyubid period, long before the northward movement of some southern Arab tribes. The Kurdish Ayyubid dynasty relocated significant Kurdish populations into the region, including Palestine. Although many such communities were later Arabized, Arabization did not erase the material and geographic traces of Kurdish settlement. Countless place names and regional markers—including Hisn al-Akrad (later rendered Crac des Chevaliers by the Crusaders and Qalʿat al-Husn by Arab nationalist regimes), Jabal al-Akrad, and Kurd Dagh—remain evidence of Kurdish historical presence even where communities have been linguistically and culturally assimilated.
Several essays complicate the assumption that Kurdish settlement in Syria was limited to the northern borderlands. Dick Douwes’s and Muhsin Seyda’s contributions show that Kurdish migration into central Syria continued throughout the Ottoman period. Kurdish presence in the Hama and Homs regions persisted and deepened; members of the Berazi tribe emerged as major landowners into the republican era. This shift in the volume’s geographic focus is significant, as much of contemporary work remains overly concentrated on the narrow northern belt bordering Turkey. By contrast, this collection offers a broader, historically grounded map, suggesting that the histories of Kurdish communities in central Syria, such as the Sachlo, Zirqi, and Kiki and others—many now largely Arabized—require sustained future research, as do Kurdish histories of Raqqa and the Euphrates region.
The book’s emphasis on mobility is equally productive. Kurdish movement into Syria occurred through multiple channels: merchants, tribes, members of the military-administrative class, religious scholars, and landowners. This movement continued into the late Ottoman period and beyond, as the trajectories of some Bedirkhanis and Babans illustrate. One of the volume’s most suggestive implications is that Kurdish presence in Syria should not be narrowly conceptualized as “tribal history.” Kurdish participation in urban life (especially in Damascus and Aleppo), provincial governance, religious authority, and intellectual production—treated in different ways across the volume—also must be incorporated into the field.
The volume’s archival range is another one of its major strengths. Contributors move beyond Arabic and Turkish narrative chronicles and draw on shariʿa court records, waqf records, Ottoman tax-census registers (tahrir defterleri), fiscal complaint registers (şikayet), court registers, and mühimme (executive decrees). These sources are partial and state-centered, but many chapters demonstrate how they can be read against the grain. The editors’ emphasis on “imperial microhistories” therefore is well placed: localized case studies allow the volume to reconstruct plural social worlds without forcing them into a single linear narrative.
The volume is organized into four thematic sections, with a loose chronological progression. Among the noteworthy contributions is Tom Sinclair’s longue durée chapter on Nusaybin, which traces demographic, economic, and religious transformation and situates Kurdish presence within broader regional restructuring following the Mongol disruption of trade routes and later shifts in global export corridors. Stéfan Winter’s chapter on Afrin is another centerpiece. Afrin—now the site of severe human rights violations and ethnic cleansing—appears here as a historically recognized Kurdish district rather than a modern enclave. Winter shows that after the end of Mamluk rule, the Ottoman state sought to incorporate the Kurdish population of Kurd Dagh as such, with a degree of autonomy, and reconstructs the administrative designation of the region as Ekrad Sancağı or Liva-i Ekrad (including Afrin, Azaz, and Kilis). Although studies of Kurdish autonomy under Ottoman rule often focus on core areas of Kurdistan, Winter convincingly demonstrates that Kurdish autonomy and agency also must be considered in Ottoman Syria.
The volume’s geographic scope extends beyond the borders of modern Syria, an appropriate choice given the historical boundaries of Ottoman Bilad al-Sham. HajHasan’s chapter on Ottoman Palestine and Jordan is exemplary. Through careful reading of tahrir registers and waqf records, she maps Kurdish quarters, villages, and endowments in Jerusalem, Safad, Gaza, and Ajlun between 1526 and 1597. This meticulously researched chapter provides a model for how Kurdish presence can be reconstructed even where communities have been assimilated.
Not all contributions are equally persuasive, and the volume’s internal unevenness is most visible in chapters that treat identity as rigid. ʿAbd al-Rahim Abu Husayn’s essay on whether the Jumblats descend from the Canbolads of Kilis illustrates this limitation. Although the argument for a mistaken identity is plausible, the chapter moves too quickly to dismissal, without adequately explaining why the Jumblats historically identified with the Canbolads rather than with Shaykh Jumblad, whom Abu Husayn suggests as an alternative ancestor. The chapter leaves little room for the fluidity of identities that characterized the Ottoman Levant, and it treats contemporary Druze restrictions on conversion as timeless without specifying when such doctrinal boundaries became central.
A second limitation appears in essays that accept Ottoman bureaucratic language too readily. Several chapters reproduce the state’s categories of “banditry” and “rebellion” without asking what social conflicts and administrative abuses lay behind such labels. Given that provincial officials were frequently agents of extraction—and, one might add, disorder—the uncritical adoption of their language risks reproducing imperial narratives rather than analyzing them. Muhsin Soyudogan’s contribution stands out as a methodological corrective. He demonstrates how Ottoman centralization targeted Kurdish power west of the Euphrates before the better-known campaigns against Kurdish hereditary dynasties east of the river, including the dismantling of Reşwan dominance and forced resettlement to Ankara and Konya. Soyudogan’s critical reading shows how Ottoman documents can be used to reconstruct coercion and dispossession rather than simply narrating “rebellion.”
The volume’s treatment of tribal politics is otherwise among its strongest elements. The essays cover cases such as the Reşi Kuloglu tribe of Rumkale (Soyudogan), which maintained autonomy until 1814, and the Berazi rebellion around Suruj (1840–45), treated in Seyda’s contribution. Yet the book avoids reducing Kurdish history to rebellion. Yonca Koksal shows how large Kurdish groups such as the Reşwan and Cihanbeyli prospered through provisioning networks, supplying meat to Istanbul markets in the late 19th century. As Erdal Çiftçi shows, the coexistence of cooperation and conflict is also evident in the relations between the Kurdish Milli and Arab Shammar tribes, which were embedded in Ottoman provincial politics and entered into alliances with the governors of Dayr ez-Zur and Diyarbekir.
The final section shifts attention from tribes to religious and elite networks. Metin Atmaca traces the influence of Mawlana Khalid’s migration to Damascus and the diffusion of reformist Islamic networks through his spiritual lineage. Other meticulously researched chapters, such as those of Barbara Henning and Martin Strohmeier, examine Kurdish elites in provincial governance and urban politics, including the rivalry between the Bedirkhanis and the Babans. The concluding focus on two Kurdish notables of Damascus—Mehmed Salih Bedirkhan and ʿAbd al-Rahman Pasha al-Yusuf—offers contrasting late Ottoman trajectories: the former contributing to a Kurdish cultural awakening, the latter assimilating into the Arab elite.
If the book as a whole has a limitation, it is perhaps the inevitable one of a field-opening volume: some unevenness in approach, and a few essays that feel less tightly integrated into the collection’s central goals. One also wishes the book had included a consolidated bibliography, which would have served readers and future scholars particularly well. Yet these are minor criticisms in light of the volume’s achievement. Winter and HajHasan have assembled a collection that will be indispensable to scholars of Ottoman provincial history, Kurdish studies, Syrian historiography, and Middle Eastern studies at large. More importantly, the volume demonstrates that Syria’s past is plural—and that any future political imagination claiming to be democratic must begin from that historical plurality rather than suppress it.
