Modernity & Encounter of Kurdish Intellectuals in Kurdistan newspaper (1898-1902)

Ottoman modernization from a political and military point of view led to the decline of cultural pluralism and the emergence of political-administrative centralism, and from the social and cultural point of view, educational and bureaucratic structural reform led to the formation of modern social classes and intellectuals. The present study aims to examine the texts of the Kurdistan newspaper (1898-1902) as one of the manifestations of late modern intellectual ideas. The Kurdistan describes modernity and its initial encounter as enlightening and Kurdish political, social and cultural backwardness. According to the contextual and intertextual situation of the newspaper, competing discourses such as the discourse of Ottoman reformism and Kurdish nationalism can be named. Also, these contradictory discourses stem from the uneven development of the empire and the formation of a Premature nationalism with little material basis at the time. In sum, what the first generation of Kurdish intellectuals made of the concept of modernity was an enlightening conception of the backwardness of Kurdish society, which saw science, knowledge and learning as techniques for the development of Kurdish society and the unity and understanding of past history as the path to political development. This understanding of modernity was actually the founder of questions fundamental to Kurdish political-intellectual discourse: namely science and consciousness as a way out of the backwardness of society and the idea of the nation as a way of freedom and political development of Kurdish society.