Buried among course lists of Arabic and Aramaic is one on Kurdish, the first time the language has made its appearance on an academic curriculum. The obvious question is why a university should have to petition Ankara before it can open a field of studies in the first place, but even so, we can at least celebrate that the government's much advertised but still largely inchoate Kurdish initiative has managed to limp out of the starter's block.Of course Rome (nor Mesopotamia) wasn't built in a day. Fırat University in nearby Diyarbakır, a larger and more prestigious institution, had its request for a similar course denied. Even so, one should not be too dismissive of Mardin's modest success. The famous historian Halil İnalcık proposed a Kurdish institute back in the early 1970s and was laughed out of court. It was the absence of academic freedom in the universities of those days which pushed him into exile at the University of Chicago, he once told me. A law passed in 1983 making it illegal even to speak Kurdish was only repealed in 1991. Yusuf Halaçoğlu, a former head of the Turkish Historical Society (TTK), proposed setting up a Kurdish institute in Ankara in 1988, a proposal he said attracted great military interest until it was kyboshed by a changing of the guard in the National Security Council (MGK). Professor Halaçoğlu made a similar proposal two years ago, and the powers-that-be looked politely at their feet.
There are, for example, graduate students working on Kurdish linguistics and of course much anthropological and political scientific research. However, it seems bizarre that Turkey wrestled with a Kurdish problem while its institutions of higher learning were reluctant to engage in studies that would help clarify what that problem was all about. For years Turkey preferred to deal with issues in self-imposed ignorance.
If that seems strange, then it is worth recounting the bizarre circumstances surrounding the funeral of a soldier who died last week on active duty. Murat Taş was the victim of a cruel resurgence of fighting in Turkey's Southeast. He was being buried according to Alevi ritual among his family and friends in İstanbul. Alevism is, of course, a variant of Shiite Islam and regarded by many Turkish Sunnis as a form of heterodoxy. Alongside promising greater rights to Kurds, the government has also promised to end the de facto discrimination of Turkey's Alevis, who for years were virtually ignored by the well-funded Directorate of Religious Affairs.
As the rites were being read over Mr. Taş's body, a senior military officer interrupted the ceremony. To the astonishment of the cemevi (an Alevi house of prayer) congregation, the officer inveighed upon Mr. Taş's family to allow him to make off with the body to a Sunni mosque down the road where a more official funeral was taking place. The congregation was too stunned and bewildered to protest and only registered its anger once the body was gone. The body snatchers were not entirely insensitive. It seems that the officer recruited to fetch Mr. Taş was himself an Alevi.
Even so, it is hard to escape the conclusion that Mr. Taş gave his life not just fighting terrorism but an ability even to articulate different-ness. Why could the officials who wanted to give a fallen soldier a state sendoff not do so in the religious tradition in which he was born? It is distasteful even to refer to it as an irony, but we may feel some sympathy for Mr. Taş, who died fighting one problem and in death provided evidence of another.
