REVIEW OF BOOKS

Richard Luckett on the way of the Kurds

Young men may go east for a variety of reasons; James Elroy Flecker was probably original, however, in going because he couldn't go. The "young men leaped and tossed their golden hair," ran "round the land" or sailed "across the seas "; meanwhile Flecker — consumptive, dark and anguished — moped in England. He did eventually reach the Lebanon, where he became a tolerably efficient consul, and more than a little disaPPointed in his romantic expectations, finding that, Greece aside, he did not greatly like the country. As a friend put it, "his intercourse with Mohammedans had led him to find more good in Christianity than he had Previously suspected." But the hopes of the 'Golden Journey to Samarkand' lived on in his Poem when only the emotions of departure and arrival that it depicted remained valid for him, and now Wilfred Blunt has taken over Flecker's title and given it another tease of life. The evocative vagueness suits, since this is not a precise historical account of that once famous caravan route, nor any kind of topography whatever, but a book about the conquerors and travellers who have traversed that area between, roughly, the Oxus and the Pamirs, in the centre of which lies Samarkand. It is a splendidly illustrated volume, with Marvellous colour photographs both of the

architectural monuments of the area as they

exist today and of paintings and manuscripts relevant to Mr Blunt's historical narrative. It IS, of course, a 'made' book, and we learn

from Mr Blunt's acknowledgements that he is

grateful to his publisher for " suggesting a book with this title." It is easy to sneer at this kind of thing, and to forget how many good

books have been produced as a result of some uch proposal. It was, surely, an excellent and Llinaginative idea to persuade Mr Blunt, who 'as travelled widely, is exceptionally wellread, and responds sensitively both to litera!tire and the visual arts, to provide the text or such a volume as this. The result is rather 'Ike a modern version of Harrison Ainsworth or Lord Lytton: it provides us with splendidly Picturesque material for day-dreams and a good deal of effortless history. But what required three or four pages of dense descriptive Prose in Ainsworth or Lytton can now be expressed in a half page illustration; together Nv_ith the abolition of a creaking plot and teulous dialogue this compression has brought ,about a palatable equivalent appropriate to a Less leisurely age. There is no lack of narrative flow; Alexander the Great, Jenghiz Khan and Tamerlane march and counter march through his pages, while abundant entertainment and light relief is to be had from the antics of the less exalted characters whose ventures he discusses.

Mr Blunt's material is, in the first instance, literary, and it is not therefore surprising that he succeeds best with those of his subjects who left intrinsically interesting accounts of their travels. Wolff dictated an autobiography in the third person; it is a masterpiece of mainly unintentional self-revelation.

Golden Road to Samarkand Wilfrid Blunt kriaMish Hamilton £5.00) An altogether different document, of which Mr Blunt provides an equally interesting summary, was written by Zahir ad-Din Muhammad, better known as ' Babur," The Tiger,' Emperor of India and three times the conqueror of Samarkand. His memoirs surely deserve to be considered as the most remarkable that any man of action — as opposed to courtier or clerk — has ever produced. In fact the chief complaint about The Golden Road to Samarkand is that it concentrates too much on personalities, and is scarcely adequate in its coverage of the places with which it deals. Perhaps Mr Blunt relied on the plates to do that side of it for him, but the architecture of this superficially unpromising and barren land is its principal glory. Some forty years ago it called forth one of the unconsidered masterpieces of twentieth-century English literature, Robert Byron's Road to Oxiana. From this work Blunt very properly quotes, though his idiot of an indexer is unable to distinguish between Robert and the poet; it is a pity that he does not make more use of a work which is a masterpiece both of observation and expression.

I have said that The Golden Road to Samarkand encourages day-dream, and this• summarises its strengths and its weaknesses; it isn't, in the last resort, a verrserious book, for all that it is an enjoyable one. It prompts one thought, though, which must make even the most escapist of readers momentarily analytical. How did all this splendour come to an end? It won't do merely to say that the peoples who established it were traditionally and essentially nomadic, for they built on a scale and in a manner that deliberately spoke

of permanency. Moreover, as Mr Blunt is at pains to point out, in many ways the rulers of Central Asia could claim to be more civilised than their western counterparts: as accomplished in the arts, equally daring builders, better military strategists, and arguably more humane. By 1500 they apparently had the lead even in hygiene, since Babur had some form of water-closet to repair to. But Balkh, the " mother of cities," was deserted, Samarkand neglected and depopulated, Herat reduced to a provincial town and its principal monuments razed to the ground, all in some three hundred years. Two chief reasons suggest themselves: firstly the failure of Islam to propose a religious model of the state which might serve, however much it was abused, in the way that the heavenly city served as an ideal for Christendom; secondly the survival of the tribal system and the inability of the ruling dynasties to free themselves from their tribal mores. Both reasons can be related to the concept of nationalism, which plays a central part in a book published last week, a book that might almost be taken as a text for answering those questions that Mr Blunt, perhaps wisely, considering his brief, does not put.

This is Edgar O'Ballance's The Kurdish Revolt*, about as different in style and approach from Mr Blunt's offering as it possibly could be. Major O'Ballance shares with Mr Blunt a gift for clarity, but he has no interest in the picturesque. His aim has been to set down the facts about the nine years of Kurdish revolt in as orderly a manner as possible, and to comment on them from the military point of view. His modest presentation gives no idea of the complexity of this task, for the Kurds, as befits a people with an epic past, still habitually talk of their sufferings and achievements in the hyberbolic terms appropriate to heroic poetry, whilst the government of Iraq, for less attractive reasons, places no higher value on precision. When the Kurds began

their struggle for autonomy little attention was paid to them beyond the Arab world; consequently there is a dearth of reliable documentary material. Major O'Ballance has managed to give a brief historical sketch of the Kurds and to disentangle the involved and often clandestine politics of the period preceding open revolt. Perhaps some future historian will provide the colour that the episode so obviously needs, but for anyone at

tempting this O'Ballance's book will be essential.

The Kurds are highlanders, of a different stock from the Arabs inhabiting the plains around the Kurdish mountains. The massif of Kurdistan extends into four countries, Iraq, Persia, Turkey and the USSR, and all of these countries have had, in varying degrees, a 'Kurdish problem.' The USSR, the least affected resolved it in a decisive and drastic manner soon after the revolution. The Turks, at the same period, announced that they did not have a Kurdish problem, but that some "Mountain Turks "who had "forgotten their native language" had caused dissention, and severe measures were taken to curb them. In Persia Reza Shah's programme of modernisation naturally included steps to de-tribalise the Kurds. But in Iraq, where they formed a significant part of the population in a politically unstable country their position was quite different. The difficulty was that the Kurds were not, in any conventional sense of the word, a nation; rather, like other highlanders nearer home, they were a group of racially allied clans, generally at war with each other, and always ready, like the Campbells, to ally with foreigners against other clans should this prove to their advantage. Thus Mullah Mustafa, the leader of the Kurdish revolt, and by all accounts a remarkable warrior, was primarily a Sheikh of the Barzani tribe, and the revolt started as a result of the government's endeavours to stop the Barzanis raiding other tribes, who might also be accurately described as Kurds. Mustafa's great achievement was to realise the limitations of his tribalism, accept the principle of Kurdish nationhood, and to fight the Iraqi army to the point at which fruitful negotiation was possible. At the same time he managed both to obtain a certain amount of assistance from the USSR, where he was for several years a refugee, and also to resist the demands of the extreme left within the Kurdish movement.

The question remains as to whether the solution arrived at in 1971 will last. There may well be further fighting in Kurdistan before long. But however many local victories the Kurds may win the final victory will not be theirs, even if they manage to avoid the tribal strife that has so often hampered them in the past. Urbanisation and its corollary, voluntary de-tribalisation, will win where the napalm of the Iraqi air-force is powerless. Mustafa refrained from sabotaging the oil installations because the Kurds wanted to shared the wealth they produced. That wealth will kill the Kurdish way of life in a. matter of years. At best the mountains will become, like parts of the Caucasus, a glorified dude ranch. It is not for nothing that the most prominent building in Samarkand is now a twenty-storey Intourist hotel.