At present, the Kurds are considered to be “the biggest nation in the world, deprived of its own state, of self-government and basic human rights” (1). It is difficult to estimate the exact number of the Kurdish population in Turkey. The main reason is that people in Turkey were not allowed to call themselves Kurds until recently. Research shows that the official statistics about the Kurdish population do not reflect the truth. Different sources give varying data about the Kurdish population.

At present, the Kurds are considered to be “the biggest nation in the world, deprived of its own state, of self-government and basic human rights” (1). It is difficult to estimate the exact number of the Kurdish population in Turkey. The main reason is that people in Turkey were not allowed to call themselves Kurds until recently. Research shows that the official statistics about the Kurdish population do not reflect the truth. Different sources give varying data about the Kurdish population.

Kurdish books dating from the Ottoman era are mainly manuscripts in verse. Although there were some written in the Yezidi, Armenian or the Assyrian alphabet, most of them were written in the Arabic alphabet. The press and printed works play an important role in the spreading of ideas and the standardization of a language. However, until the First World War the Kurds in Kurdistan did not have a printing house. The existing printing houses were owned by the state or by Western missionaries. That is why the first books in Kurdish were printed outside Kurdistan in cities like Cairo and Istanbul.

The national movement of the Kurds who were still living in a feudal structure started later than the movements of other people living within the Ottoman Empire. The development of Kurdish publishing in general mirrors the progress of their national revival.

There was a Kurdistan Newspaper printing house in 1898 in Cairo (43) as well as the printing house “Metbe’a Kurdistan ’Ilmiye” (Scientific printing house of Kurdistan) owned by a Kurd called Ferecullah Zekî El-Kurdî in 1911 but we do not know if Kurdish books were printed there (44). Abdurrahman Bedirhan and Abdullah Cevdet, the Kurds who had been opposing the Ottoman sultan, tried to buy a printing house during their stay in Switzerland, but the ambassador of the Ottoman Empire was annoyed and expressed his concern to the state officials there (45).

Liceli Kurdîzade Ehmed Ramîz ve Motkili Xelîl Xeyalî started a Kurdish printing house in Istanbul in 1908 with their friends (46). It is also known that in Istanbul in 1910, there was the Matbaa-i Amedi printing house owned by a man from Diyarbekir, where books related to Kurds were printed (47).

Ekrem Cemilpaşa was the first of the nationalists from Northern Kurdistan to buy a printing house in Diyarbekir and publish the Gazi newspaper in 1918 (48).

The first Kurdish book in Istanbul was printed in 1844. This book by the famous mystic Mewlana Xalidê Neqşîbendî was not completely in Kurdish. It comprised of poetry in Arabic and Persian with a few poems in Kurdish.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
THE PAST AND THE PRESENT
OF BOOK PUBLISHING IN
KURDISH LANGUAGE IN TURKEY

This research had been commissioned by the
Next Page Foundation
and conducted by M. Malmisanij, 2006

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