Kurds must look to the past to carve out a future

Britain’s departure from the European Union, Donald Trump’s rejection of political and economic blocs like NAFTA, Vladimir Putin’s admiration for tsarist Russia’s Orthodoxy, piety, and nationalism, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s neo-Ottomanism all indicate the global liberal democratic order is in retreat.

These leaders collectively emphasize national identity, nationalism, and isolationism over liberal internationalism and multilateralism. Professor Francis Fukuyama’s claim that the achievement of liberal democracy marks the “end of history” and the death of ideologies has proven deeply flawed. Nationalism seems to have triumphed once again.

For the Kurds, this could present an opportunity to reignite aspirations for their own nation state and reconnect with their own past.

According to the influential Israeli academic Yuval Noah Harari, this nationalist revival suggests many states are embracing what he calls “nostalgic dreams”. The term denotes the desire to restore national pride in elements of shared history and to embody it in present day political structures, or at least in public discourses, to celebrate national identity and repel globalism.

How can Kurds stake out a spot in the post-liberal era? Where can we find that pride in our history to fuel our own nationalism when our perceptions of Kurdish history appear to revolve around failures, inferiorities, and betrayals?

The prominent Kurdish thinker Masoud Muhamad once famously told an interviewer: “Kurds have been living outside of history for 2500 years”. His claim is not unfounded and bears precise and rational explanations. For a nation, living outside of history mostly denotes isolation.

Muhamad said the Kurdish nation-building project has suffered as a result of internal divisions, foreign domination, and marginalization throughout recent millennia. These factors taken together contributed to the isolation of Kurds from history.

Kurds have lived outside of history because they were ruled and conquered throughout that period, and they were rarely, if ever, the rulers and conquerors of others. They lost pride in their nation and their national sentiments were blunted.

But what happened in the period before the Kurds stepped outside of history?

Approximately 2500 years ago, in the 6th century BCE, Muhamad said the ancestors of Kurds, the Medes, ruled the massive Median Empire, which stretched from the Caspian to the Black Sea, westward to the Mediterranean, south to the Gulf, and covered the entirety of modern day Iran.

Moreover, the Median kings, particularly Phraortes and his son Cyaxares (Kai-Khusraw), were successful in uniting the early proto-Kurdish tribes and centralizing power in the Median capital Ecbatana, today’s Hamadan in Iran.

They taught their early variant of the Kurdish language to people under their rule, built an army equipped with advanced weaponry, and defeated powerful rivals in battle, including the mighty Assyrians.

Most importantly, they appeared to value Kurdish blood. When a group of Scythian nomads killed a Kurdish teenager who was teaching them the Kurdish language and fled to the Lydian kingdom, Cyaxares waged a war against the Lydians for failing to extradite the killers. The war lasted five years and was arguably waged purely to avenge the teenager’s life.

This point in the history of Kurds is the nostalgic dream that we should extract and celebrate, just like the Ottoman Empire constitutes Erdogan’s nostalgic dream.

Having a nation state as an historical entity is not imperative to embracing such national pride and dignity. The Ottoman Empire and tsarist Russia were not nation states in the modern sense, but the values of those geographical entities are embodied by their inheritors today.

The Kurds, similar to other nations, must take pride in their historical achievements. The Median Empire is but one of those points in our history from which we should take inspiration in our century-old struggle for Kurdistan.

Mohammed Kamaran is a graduate of international studies at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS).

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.