This book proposes to explore the construction of Kurdish
nationalism in Kurdish journalistic discourse from the late Ottoman Empire
by interrogating these underlying misconceptions. Contrary to the prevailing view in the literature, which portrays the corpora of the Kurdish press
of the period as primarily Pan-Islamist or Ottomanist cultural publications,
this book argues, based on empirical findings, that the Kurdish press of the
late Ottoman period served as a communicative space in which Kurdish
intellectuals negotiated, imagined, and disseminated an unmistakable form
of Kurdish nationalism. Hegemonic Ottomanist and Pan-Islamist political
thought were used in pragmatic ways in the service of burgeoning Kurdish
nationalism, but were rejected altogether when they were no longer useful to
fostering Kurdish nationalism.