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Books & Films

Reviewing ‘Kurdish Culture and Identity’

The book ‘Kurdish Culture and Identity’ edited by Philip Kreyenbroek and Christine Allison and published in 1996, is an important work in the repository of works written about Kurdish culture, history, and identity. It arose from the milieu of the 1990s, which proved to be one of the most important and productive periods in the […]

Reviewing Kajal Ahmad’s ‘Handful of Salt’

Traditionally, when we hear the voices of Kurdish women from exile in the diaspora, it is often from the lens of the colossal tragedy of post-conflict issues, involving the tirade of political violence, ethnic cleansing, and forced assimilation that has resulted in the murder of her mother tongue and that of her children. Modernity and […]

Reviewing Izady’s ‘The Kurds: A Concise Handbook’

Since the start of the 20th century, the discipline of Kurdish studies and the West’s understanding of Kurdish culture lagged behind all other ethnographic analyses produced on the Middle East. Consequently, the images produced about Kurdish culture and identity were often fragmented and incomplete at best. At worst, they were erroneous and demonstrated a total […]