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PREFACE
After nearly two years' labor, in collecting, reading, arranging, and classifying the material included in this work, I am at last able to publish the following bibliographical study. This work has been driven by two main considerations: First, the need to fill one of the major gaps in the world of bibliographies, namely, a general annotated bibliography on the Kurds and Kurdistan. Second, to assist researchers to locate their needed information on the Kurds in a more efficient way.
In the last few years, the Kurdish question has taken on more prominence in Middle Eastern politics, and attracted the interest of media, the academic community as well as governmental and non-governmental organizations. The years 1991 and 1992 are (and will be) remembered by all students of Kurdish topics as the ones during which they were swamped by the press and academic departments to supply answers to everything that needed to be known about the Kurds--and quickly.
Lacking comprehensive bibliographical studies, the Kurdologists have had little choice but to go to the Internet or DIALOG to search for material to complete their work, spending hundreds of hours and dollars in the process. They had to go over many databases, containing plenty of repetitious and misleading records. They have needed to survey all of the outputs for the needed material and yet with no definite positive end result. Soon also, they would discover that almost none of the databases cover materials published before the mid-1960s which certainly include many valuable works. Therefore, a manual search through a well-classified, annotated bibliography seemed to be more fruitful and presented a more economic and rapid method of communication research and retrieval of information. Had there been an up-to-date, multidisciplinary, annotated bibliography of the Kurds and Kurdistan, the researcher's task would have been much easier, less expensive and more rewarding. In short, no matter how much the Information Science field develops, we will always need to rely on printed bibliographies. This is due to their accuracy, their savings in time and money, and their multi-disciplinary character.
Books, articles, chapters in edited works, doctoral dissertations, and reports on the Kurds and Kurdistan are many, but scattered and often untraceable when needed. It was this situation which motivated me to consider compiling an annotated bibliography on the subject and make it available to the public, students, academicians, researchers, policy-makers, and the press. The fact that very few works of this kind are now available in English was another important reason.
The first real bibliography on the Kurds and Kurdistan was published in 1968 by the International Society for Kurdistan (ISK's Kurdish Bibliography). This impressive work came out in two volumes and was edited by Silvio van Rooy and Kees Tamboer (Amsterdam: International Society for Kurdistan, 1968). The work is exhaustive and includes 9,350 entries in more than twenty languages and on all subjects that had been published before June 30, 1966. The second bibliography on the Kurds in English was by Wolfgang Behn (The Kurds in Iran: A Selected and Annotated Bibliography. [2nd ed.] London: Mansell, 1977. The first edition was published in 1969 under the title The Kurds, a Minority in Iran). This bibliography, compiled chiefly from holdings of the Islamic Union Catalogue in Germany, lists 275 entries in more than four languages, some of which are specialized studies of Iran. It was intended to supplement the ISK's bibliography for the years 1966-1975, yet, as the title reflects, the work is almost exclusively limited to the Iranian sector of Kurdistan. Finally, in anticipation of the rising importance of the Kurdish question in the Middle East, Elizabeth E. Lytle produced a small work entitled A Bibliography of the Kurds, Kurdistan, and the Kurdish Question (Monticello, 111.: Council of Planning Librarians, 1977, 16 p. Exchange bibliography-Council of Planning Librarians; 1301). She says in the introduction that her bibliography cites works that were published between 1837 and 1975, divided into two sections: One is concerned with the Kurds and Kurdistan in general, while the other is limited to the historical and political aspects of the Kurdish question. This small work, however, is merely a list of records (216) written in nine different languages with no subject headings or annotations.
As a researcher and reference librarian in Jafet Library of the American University of Beirut (AUB), and now a graduate student in the MLS program of the School of Library and Information Sciences (SLIS) at North Carolina Central University, I had the opportunity to examine a considerable portion of the material I came in contact with. Of those which did not fall within my reach, I have been compelled to content myself with various sources of abstracts of articles1 and reviews of books in scholarly journals, all of which are cited following their respective annotations. Many abstracts were surveyed, and the finest ones were chosen for the records. As for the reviews of books, after careful analysis and comparison, those that were chosen were cited almost entirely in abridged form. A wide range of sources have been used in the preparation of the bibliography, including Jafet Library (AUB), SLIS (NCCU), the U.S. Library of Congress through online catalogue, Pferkins Library (Duke University, NC), and Davis Library (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill).
The bibliography represents mostly English-language material. French sources are included only when there has been no English-language equivalent, or when the French item is superior (French diacritics are not used in the text). Materials in Arabic and other languages are not included in the bibliography since they will be neither readily available nor accessible to the majority of readers. The majority of the items (more than 90%) in the bibliography are annotated (50 to 250 words per item) to provide the reader with a summary of their scope and contents. Users should not assume that a long annotation is an indication of a work's high quality, instead, the need to fully describe it. The work lists 814 entries, most for scholarly items published after World War II with an emphasis on recent ones (including 1996)-to cover the important works on the Kurds and Kurdistan.
Two main problems were encountered in compiling this bibliography. First, certain sections, such as those on culture and arts, economy, education, and society, are relatively poorly represented. Second, given the general nature of many works on the subject, their classification was not an easy task. The effects of these two problems, however, have been minimized by the use of comprehensive cross-references and thorough author, title, and subject indices. Finally, this comprehensive bibliography includes a brief introduction that might be helpful to provide users with a general background of the Kurds and Kurdistan.
My deep gratitude goes to my family to whom I dedicate this work. Their assistance and encouragement made it possible. I also wish to thank the Hariri Foundation and AUB whose financial contributions to my undergraduate and graduate studies, respectively, allowed me to pursue education and to become that unusual individual, a well-educated Lebanese Kurd.
I also am indebted to other people who have aided me through their personal encouragement and through their scholarship. Among this group, I especially want to thank professors Mehrdad Izady and Seymour Sargent, Benjamin F. Speller, Jr., Dean of the School of Library and Information Sciences at North Carolina Central University, and Nizar Agri.
Notes
1 Sources include: From online databases: Historical Abstracts, Political Science Abstracts, and Sociological Abstracts. From printed materials: Abstracta Iranica and International Political Science Abstracts.
Introduction: General Information on the Kurds and Kurdistan
Geography and Population
Kurdistan, or the land of the Kurds, is a strategic area located in the geographic heart of the Middle East. Today it comprises important parts of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Azerbaijan. Since it was, and still is, denied independence, most scholars describe Kurdistan as the area in which Kurds constitute an ethnic majority. Kurdistan was first divided in 1514 between the Ottoman and Persian empires. Four centuries later, Britain and France further altered the political contours of Kurdistan by dividing the Ottoman Kurdistan into three main parts. Iranian Kurdistan stayed where it was. The area thus partitioned consisted of about 190,000 square miles divided as follows: Turkey (43 percent), Iran (31 percent), Iraq (18 percent), Syria (6 percent), and the former Soviet Union (2 percent).2
As in the case with most Middle Eastern stateless nations and ethnic groups, estimates of the total number of Kurds vary widely. The subsequent governments of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and the former Soviet Union did not (and still do not) carry out any real official census for the Kurdish populations in their respective countries. Turkey and Azerbaijan have even denied, until very recently, the very existence of Kurds in their countries.3 However, most agree today that there are about 30 million Kurds. According to the most recent and reliable figures estimated by The Kurdish Library in New York, there are about 30.3 million Kurds living in the region today distributed as follows: Turkey 16.5m (52 percent of the total Kurdish population), Iran 7.3m (25.5 percent), Iraq 4.7m (16 percent), Syria 1.4m (5 percent), and Commonwealth of Independent States (former Soviet Union) 0.41m (1.5 percent).4 Kurds living in Europe (particularly in Germany, Sweden, France, England, and Denmark), Israel, Lebanon, the United States and other parts of the world comprises around a million. …
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