Female Cousins and Wounded Masculinity: Kurdish Nationalist Discourse in the Post-Ottoman Middle East Ahmet Serdar Akt€ urk* Introduction Jaladet Ali Bedirkhan, scion of the princely Kurdish family of Bedir Khan and a prominent advocate of Kurdish nationalism, married his female cousin Rawshan Bedirkhan in 1935 in exile in Damascus. He not only honoured Kurdish folk tradition, namely marrying one’s paternal cousin, but also retreated from the tradition of mixed marriages which was com- mon among men of aristocratic and elite Kurdish families including the Bedirkhan family itself. Jaladet was a child of a mixed marriage and a former Ottoman Kurdish gentleman from Istanbul, an ethnically and culturally diverse city. Jaladet’s own mother whom he loved and respected was Circassian in origin, a fact that Jaladet never mentioned in his writings. Indeed, he regretted that for a long time Kurdish men preferred foreign women to Kurdish ones. 1 Thus, his conviction in the 1930s that Kurdish men should only marry Kurdish women reflected an important turning point in the history of Kurdish national consciousness. In fact, nationalist ideas like this one regarding women and men were important markers of Kurdish nationalism in the post-Ottoman era which Jaladet and other Kurdish nationalists elaborated during their exile years. In the 1930s and 1940s, Damascus and Beirut hosted a Kurdish cultural movement led by a group of exiled Kurdish elites from Turkey. Until the end of the French mandate the activities of these former Ottoman Kurds made Syria and Lebanon two major centres of Kurdish nationalism. A close examination of Kurdish publications from this period reveals that the Kurdish nationalist discourse was strikingly gendered. It reflected masculine visions and anxieties of the Kurdish nationalists separated from their ancestral homeland, namely Kurdish territories, under the control of the Kemalist Turkish Republic. Despite their bitter rivalry, the Kurdish nationalists’ views on gender roles resonated with Kemalist Turkish nationalists’ modernist and patriarchal vision as both Turkish and Kurdish national- ist were shaped by the same late-Ottoman social and intellectual context. Nevertheless, Kurdish nationalists’ views of women and men in the 1930s and 1940s reflected their tran- sition from Ottoman Kurds to exclusively Kurdish nationalists. In Kurdish publications from Damascus and Beirut, Kurdish nationalists presented vari- ous and sometimes conflicting images of women and men in two different yet inter- twined worlds. One is the world of documentary reality and the other one is the fictional or created world of short stories, poems, and folkloric songs. Kurdish nationalists pre- sented their national symbols with female imagery and they regarded women’s shame as a threat to their ‘male’ honour, which for the nationalists was often considered ‘national’ * Assistant Professor of History at Georgia Southern University. Postal address: Georgia Southern University, Department of History, P.O. Box 8054 Statesboro, Georgia 30460. Email: aakturk@georgiasouthern.edu © 2015 Taylor & Francis MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES, 2016 VOL. 52, NO. 1, 46À59 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00263206.2015.1078793