In June 1925, as Turkish authorities marched him to the gallows outside the basalt walls of Diyarbakır, Sheikh Said of Piran struck a defiant tone. ‘I sacrificed myself for my people and I do not regret it. We are glad that our grandchildren will not be ashamed of us in front of the enemies’, he declared. For several months, the sheikh, a holy man of the Naqshbandi Sufi order, had led 15,000 of his fellow Kurds in a rebellion against the Turkish government. A descendant of the last Kurdish emir of Botan described these events as the ‘Kurdish revolution of 1925’, while a British official of the Ottoman Bank characterised the sheikh ‘as a fanatic of a type rather like… Ghandi’.

Even though Turkish firepower carried the day, subduing the sheikh and his followers, this was a precipitous moment for the fledgling Republic of Turkey. That the first major uprising against the newly created government was led by a Kurd – and a religious figure, to boot – was the stuff of nightmares for the secularist, nationalist ideologues in Ankara.

Legal and legislative measures introduced after the rebellion were to reverberate long after the sheikh was taken down from the gallows, redefining Turkey’s politics and society and creating the parameters of the so-called ‘Kurdish question’ – which lingers to this day. A century later, as President Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan’s administration seeks to end the long-running conflict with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), questions remain as to whether historical lessons have been learned and whether Turkey can find a way to accommodate the political aspirations of its Kurdish citizens.

In 1925, the Republic of Turkey, just two years old, was underdeveloped, impoverished and seeking to constitute itself from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire after a decade of war that had ravaged landscapes, infrastructure and human populations. The new administration, headed by Mustafa Kemal (later, Atatürk), grew out of the nationalist movement that had successfully fended off Greek, French and British expeditionary forces, all of whom had designs on Anatolia, the latter two having recently occupied Istanbul, the seat of the Ottoman sultans.

The victory of Mustafa Kemal’s forces had been a close-run thing. In his seminal history of the Kurds, David McDowall notes that, when Kemal was garnering support in the east of Anatolia in 1919, he specifically engaged Kurdish urban notables, tribal chiefs and religious figures. Together, Turks and Kurds would see off ‘infidel’ invaders and forge a shared homeland based on religious solidarity and fraternity. Historian Robert Olson argues that, were it not for the participation of the Kurds, Kemal’s nationalist forces would have been hard pressed to liberate Anatolia, crucial to the Turkey we know today.

But any notion of Turkish-Kurdish brotherhood consolidated under the banner of Islam was swiftly abandoned once the republic was proclaimed in Ankara. The Kemalist administration ordered the removal of references to ‘Kurdistan’ from all publications and decreed that Turkish be the sole official language of the republic, banning the use of Kurdish in courts and schools, and declaring that the community of citizens was bound by ‘unity of language, culture and ideal’. Turkish language and culture, that is. The ideal, as indicated in March 1924 by the abolition of the Caliphate, the mantle held by Ottoman sultans in Istanbul since 1517, would be secularism, modernisation and westernisation.

For many Kurds, the abolition of the Caliphate, amid a raft of other reforms, shattered their last bond with Turks. Members of Azadî, an underground Kurdish political organisation, interviewed by British intelligence officers in late 1924, cited this as one of their major grievances with the Turkish state. The great scholar of Kurdish studies, Martin van Bruinessen, notes that Azadî convened its first congress in that same year, where it set out its intention to foment a ‘general uprising in Kurdistan’, to be followed by a declaration of independence. A key voice in favour was Sheikh Said of Piran. The Naqshbandi holy man wielded considerable authority and influence among the Zaza Kurdish tribes and convinced other conference attendees of the need to take action against Ankara.

The original plan was for Kurdish leaders to rise up in late March 1925, seizing their own territories, expelling Turkish authorities, and linking up to consolidate control across southeastern Anatolia. However, Sheikh Said and his henchmen inadvertently tangled with Turkish troops in February near Piran, triggering the rebellion early. Said issued a spontaneous fetva, declaring himself emir of the mujahidin. His men, even if underprepared, advanced with alacrity, claiming several towns, including Lice, the headquarters of the Turkish Fifth Army, and besieging Diyarbakır, the city astride the Tigris.

The authorities in Ankara declared martial law, but the rebels rolled on. In early March, Minister of Justice Mahmut Esat lamented ‘the east is on fire’.

It was only after the government granted itself extraordinary powers and deployed massive reinforcements to the region – by some estimates almost half of Turkey’s entire military strength – that the Kurds’ momentum was dispelled. Turkish forces lifted the siege of Diyarbakır and inflicted heavy losses on the rebels in several pitched battles. The Kurds switched to guerrilla tactics, but the weight of numbers was overwhelming. A cartoon published in the daily newspaper Cumhuriyet depicted upright, well-equipped Turkish soldiers, sporting pill-box hats, with bayonets at the ready, encircling the region. Sure enough, Kurdish resistance crumbled. Sheikh Said and his entourage were duly captured in mid-April, and other rebel leaders rounded up soon after.

Crisis had been averted, but Ankara did not relent. Sheikh Said and the leaders of the revolt went before ‘Independence Tribunals’, receiving death sentences, while other Kurdish notables, some entirely uninvolved in earlier events, were tried and convicted. The state then upped the ante. Across the countryside, soldiers conducted reprisals, destroying numerous Kurdish villages and murdering thousands. One British diplomat encountered a member of the gendarmerie who stated that he ‘was disgusted with the work he had had to do… and was tired of slaughtering men, women and children’. Another British official equated the brutality of the Turkish response with the Armenian genocide of a decade earlier.

Brief though it was, the Sheikh Said rebellion and the state response to it came to define official policy and public attitudes towards Kurds for decades. Their most significant legacy was a refusal to acknowledge that Kurds might have legitimate political grievances. Ankara portrayed the uprising as reactionary, a backlash of feudalism against the progressive Kemalist regime. A cartoon in the periodical Karagöz showed turbaned Kurds stewing in a pot labelled ırtıca (reactionary) upon a fire stoked by mullahs in long robes. Sheikh Said and his retinue were cast as ‘bandits’ rather than as authority figures within their community.

The fabled historian Arnold Toynbee, in the 1925 Survey of International Affairs, applauded the Turkish government’s speedy quelling of the uprising, but castigated it for its failure to recognise the causes of the rebellion and for doubling down on the policies of Turkification, secularisation and modernisation that had sparked it in the first place. Official responses to the PKK-led insurgency that began in the 1980s were similar. The PKK embarked on their campaign with the stated goal – since abandoned – of establishing an independent Kurdistan, spurring Ankara to view all Kurdish political activity as tantamount to separatism, or support of terrorism, and refusing to countenance that the PKK may have adopted violent tactics due to a lack of political avenues or that Kurdish demands could be accommodated within the contours of everyday politics.

Parallel to this, Turkish public opinion held that Kurds were traitorous and susceptible to external manipulation. A 1925 cartoon in the periodical Akbaba offered a perspective on the Sheikh Said uprising in two panels. In the first, an ape, in Kurdish-style turban, clutching a scimitar in one hand and a bag of money in the other, was portrayed as a puppet manipulated by a cigar-smoking Englishman with a Union Jack on his hat. In the second, the ape-Kurd-puppet had been run through with the scimitar and dangled from a noose held by a smiling Turkish soldier.

The idea that Kurds are used as a fifth column by Turkey’s enemies is still commonly held. Historically, Turkish attitudes towards Kurds have ranged from indifference, to ridicule, to refutation of their very existence. An enduring cliché was that Kurds, inferior to Turks and in need of ‘civilisation’, had tails. During the 1980s, as the PKK insurgency raged, some Turkish officials denied that the Kurds had identity at all, claiming they were ‘Mountain Turks’ who had forgotten their language. Others stated that ‘Kurd’ was not an ethnic label, but rather the sound that peasants’ boots made as they crunched through snow.

Turkish politicians and officials have also used confrontations with Kurds as pretexts to buttress their own positions. At the height of the Sheikh Said rebellion, Mustafa Kemal promoted his loyal lieutenant İsmet İnönü, and the parliament ejected the moderate Ali Fethi Okyar from the prime ministry. In so doing, hardline Kemalists were able to extend their domination of the political arena, silencing critical voices in the press and closing down the opposition Progressive Republican Party, accusing them of being soft on the rebels. The prospect of ongoing threats in the east was also used to grant the military greater powers. During the 1980s and 1990s, successive governments used the PKK insurgency to demand conformity and introduce measures to grant themselves emergency powers across the southeast. More recently, Erdogan’s AKP has removed elected Kurdish officials, on the grounds of ‘separatism’ or ‘terrorist sympathy,’ and installed its own appointees.

Unsurprisingly, the Sheikh Said uprising also resonated for Kurds across Turkey. The sheikh assumed a place in the pantheon of Kurdish heroes. Soon after his execution, rumours spread that he was alive and at large. Dengbêj (Kurdish bards) have long immortalised him as a ‘divine elder’, ‘the White Eagle’, and ‘the Sheikh of Divine Enlightenment’ in their epic ballads. Kurdish politician Hişyar Özsoy notes that Turkish authorities were so worried about his influence that they ensured the location of the sheikh’s grave was never revealed to prevent it from becoming a site of pilgrimage.

The rebellion that the sheikh led became the first of a series opposing the new republic. An official history of the Turkish military notes that all but one of 18 uprisings that erupted between 1924 and 1938 were carried out by Kurds. The PKK insurgency, beginning in the 1980s, picked up the baton. As a result, Ankara has long viewed the ‘Kurdish Question’ as a security issue, one that could only be solved through military action.

The PKK’s leader, Abdullah Öcalan, is said to have often invoked the sheikh’s memory and legacy. Journalist Stephen Kinzer observes that both Said and Öcalan were galvanised into action by a fear that the Turkish state was seeking to eradicate the identity of their people. And just as Sheikh Said and his followers adopted guerrilla tactics, the PKK deployed the same approach in confronting the military superiority of the Turkish state. For generations of Turkey’s Kurds, in the wake of Sheikh Said and subsequent uprisings, adopting a posture of resistance, participating in marches, protests or Kurdish cultural events, and voting against the incumbent government, became a central element of their collective identity. A popular Kurdish catchphrase is ‘berxwedan jiyan-e’ – resistance is life!

Even as Sheikh Said was still roaming southeastern Anatolia, the Turkish powers-that-be puzzled over whether the uprising he led had been inspired by religion or Kurdish nationalism. Said’s status as a holy man, his leadership of the Naqshbandi order, and his declaration of a fetva as the rebellion erupted, all lent credence to notions that the rebellion was religiously motivated. During parliamentary discussions, Ali Fethi Bey claimed that a Kurdish rebel who had been killed was found with a letter in his pocket that read, ‘God confirmed Sheikh Said for the revival of the religion.’

On the other hand, van Bruinessen documents an intriguing encounter with one participant in the uprising, a relative of Sheikh Said, in the 1970s. This figure argued that the sheikh’s primary motivation was to protect Kurds and Kurdishness from state encroachment. Indeed, one of the goals of Azadî was the establishment of an independent Kurdistan, even if religion – the abolition of the caliphate in particular – was used to win support and garner rank-and-file participants. Van Bruinessen concludes that both religious and nationalist ideas gave oxygen to the sheikh’s cause and spurred Kurds to rise up.

Whatever the case, neither of these phenomena was palatable to the Kemalist administration. In his Epic of the Republic, revered Turkish folk musician Âşık Veysel blamed religious and nationalist motivations for the uprising, claiming the sheikh had rebelled to protect the Shariah, and had encouraged ‘his people to look down on the homeland’.

Ankara acted to suppress both sentiments. Aside from the military reprisals mentioned above and policies intended to deny Kurdish identity, a ‘Reform Council for the East’ introduced measures to accelerate Turkification and the assimilation of Kurds into the ‘ideal’. Meanwhile, Mustafa Kemal banned Sufi tarikats (religious orders) and closed tekkes (Sufi lodges) and medreses, which, as the primary vehicle for education in Kurdish-populated areas of the southeast, had a significant negative impact on literacy rates among Kurds.

Speaking in late 1925, Kemal decried the dervish orders, their tombs and so-called holy men as responsible for ‘deadening the mind of the nation’, while also attacking traditional garb of the peasant – the fez and the şalvar – as markers of ignorance and superstition. Amid a raft of modernising initiatives, the Hat Law was then introduced, obliging Turkish citizens to wear European headgear. It would be a stretch to contend that the Sheikh Said rebellion led to the banning of the fez. Nonetheless, the sheikh had used his religious authority to mobilise against the state, something that others might do, so the Kemalists acted decisively to accelerate their secularisation project and subdue religious influence and symbols – hats included – across Turkish society.

In the wake of the Sheikh Said rebellion, with the closure of the Progressive Republican Party and the Sufi lodges, and the demise of the fez, liberal politics was swept aside and the era of ‘high Kemalism’ commenced. Nationalists held the upper hand in Turkey for decades; the ideal of allegiance to the Turkish republic was paramount, religion banished to the private sphere, and talk of pluralism deemed a threat to national cohesion.

Perhaps inevitably, Islam and Kurdishness were to re-emerge. Islam has been most visibly manifest in the ascendance of Erdoǧan’s Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP). It has now been in power for over 20 years, and has sought, by its own admission, to raise ‘pious generations’. It has entrenched itself in the corridors of power and enforced its own code of conformity, as Kemalists had previously done.

Kurdishness resurfaced in the 1980s, initially among those marginalised and disenfranchised by Kemalist policy, in the form of PKK militancy, and later in a broader Kurdish movement, which has sought representation for Kurds through legitimate political avenues.

In recent months, the Erdoǧan government has sought to end the long-running PKK conflict. The PKK’s leader, Öcalan, has called on militants to lay down their arms, which some have done, symbolically burning weapons in a ceremony in Northern Iraq. Whether this amounts to the end of the ‘Kurdish question’ is another thing. The fact that Erdoǧan frames this as the creation of a ‘terror-free’ Turkey, and has made no tangible political concessions to Kurds, suggests that he still views Kurds through a security prism. In an increasingly authoritarian political arena – one entirely of Erdoǧan’s making – concerns arise that he is merely seeking to win Kurdish approval in order to extend his rule, rather than acknowledging the place of the Kurds in Turkey’s socio-political realm and granting them – or anyone – greater political freedoms.

In these circumstances it is easy to imagine Sheikh Said, 100 years on, turning in his unmarked grave at the thought of another agreement struck with the Turkish leadership, one that will inevitably leave the Kurds hung out to dry.