The Forgotten Years of Kurdish Nationalism in Iran

Abstract

The forgotten years of the title are those between the fall of the Republic of Kurdistan in late 1946 and the struggle for Kurdish autonomy at the time of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, and the book is a sequel to Abbas Vali’s previous one, which dealt with the emergence of Kurdish nationalism and the  Republic as its political expression  (Vali,  2011). Long-awaited,  it was expected to fill a major gap in the historiography of the Kurdish movement in Iran.  The existing literature in English, considerably less extensive than that concerning the other parts of Kurdistan, has focused mainly on the Mahabad Republic and the years of struggle during and immediately after the  Revolution, with little or no attention to the developments in between.  Yet it may be argued that the particular shape Kurdish nationalism took in Iran cannot be explained without a better understanding of crucial developments of the 1950s and 1960s that continued to define the political and ideological debates in the later period.