The race certainly is, these days, a savage one, and many tribes fully merit the execration that has been poured upon them for outrages and massacres; that is, they fully merit the execration of modern European times. Yet, if justice be done, we must for purposes of comparison place Kurdistan side by side with the Europe of six hundred years ago, and then it requires but little comparison to show very conclusively that in point of mercilessness, lawlessness, and savagery, this people of a militant creed stand out in almost creditable relief against the black deeds of the Middle Ages in a land where the religion of submission was supposed to be the guiding motive of life. Nor, in the present day, does the Kurd appear unfavourably in comparison with the European, judging him by the gauge of ideal and precept, upon the adherence to which alone a man can be judged, having in mind the exalted nature of each, or, as is too often the case, their absence. There is less crime of a despicable nature among any thousand Kurds, picked at random, than among the same number of Europeans taken in the same manner.
KURDISH CHARACTER
Yet the character of the Kurds is one on which the would-be writer is to experience enough difficulty, for the tribal character differs so much as to make one summary quite inadequate for the whole nation.
In the north, circumstances have to a great extent made the Kurd what he is, a brigand. Among the tribes of Hasananlu, Sipkanlu, Haidaranlu, Adamanlu, and Zirkanlu, who inhabit the mountains of Armenia and the country on the Turkish frontier, the character resultant from the precarious life of a robber is developed to the full. With the tribes on the frontier, who have always lived a life of duplicity, by the nature of the stratagems they adopt to escape the wrath of the countries whose frontiers they ravish, the man becomes suspicious, wary and unscrupulous. Their mountains, too, are not such as to lend to much cultivation, nor are there any commercial towns. So they are driven back to the horse and rifle, and as is natural, such a life demands scheme and counter-scheme, which speedily becomes a treacherous habit. Of their bravery there is little doubt, though I take it that it is more the bravery of “derring-do” than a calm, cool courage against steady odds. This, however, is a feature of many mountain peoples and guerilla fighters.
The true feudal spirit is strong in the race. Devoted to the mountains, to his own clan, intensely proud of being a Kurd, the northerner will take to arms at the word of his chief, never asking to hear his reason. Fraser, a traveller in the early part of the 19th century, observes: “The similarity between these Kurds as they are, and the Highland (i.e. Scottish) clans as they were not many centuries ago, is wonderfully strong.”
The fighting Kurd is, like the Highlander of old, looking about him ever for the enemy, always on the defensive, and the character developed by these circumstances, coupled with the wild and terrible country in which the northern Kurd lives, has gone to make that character, composed of suspicion, bravery, an intense alertness, and highly developed faculty of observation.
In considering the criminal characteristics of a race or class, the conditions among which it exists must always be regarded, as also the amount of instruction in what we may call recognition of the existence of others.
Self-sacrifice, except that of the mother for the child, which is an instinct, is a purely artificial quality, and one instilled with great difficulty, and easily lost by those who fail to hold before them an ideal or principle. Now Islam provides no such ideal. The Christian has the highest incentive to this quality, which must be the foundation of all true civilisation, and yet even he is extraordinarily apt to forget it as time goes on.
The Kurd has not even the strict commands of Islam before him, and so is fain to learn by hard experience how he must live his life if he is to exist, and this, as among most rough communities, is a pure selfishness; and since the man thinks of nought but himself, there is no occasion for the birth of those qualities by which we are apt to appraise men. Moreover, it may be said, though it be a platitude, that the decadence and backward condition of the Islamic states generally is due to this omission in the religious code, for every public improvement is fundamentally due to the recognition of the existence of others.
If, then, we are to find in the Kurdish character any quality that falls within our Western category of good qualities, it must be ascribed to a nature which, fundamentally possessing such tendency, would be capable of development along those lines to the ultimate good of the community.