Very Good Turkish, Ottoman (1500-1928) In contemporary black cloth. Roy. 8vo. (24 x 17 cm). In Ottoman script (Old Turkish with Arabic letters). Occasionally minor stains and fading on pages. Otherwise a good copy. 384 p. It is a rare book written after the Constitutional Monarchy at the request of the Unionists to make propaganda about Kurds. It is one of the early detached texts about Kurds written in the Ottoman period. Upon the request of the Ittihad ve Terakki [i.e. Union and Progress] leaders, he began to work in 1912 for the newly established National Security Organization (Teskilât-i Mahsusa). He then continued his intelligence work with the IAMM and AMMU, in the name of which he did his fieldwork on the Anatolian Kurds and Turcoman (Turkmen) tribes. Habil Adem's (his pseudonym means in English 'Abel Adam') writing reflect -even more openly than those of his colleague Baha Said- the unionist ambition to collect the data considered necessary for its politics of social and demographic engineering, such as information on basic demographic realities, as well as social and cultural aspects. The obvious aim of this publication was to create public knowledge favorable to the nationalization project. His book on the Kurds, printed in 1918, immediately after WW 1, under the pseudonym of a fictitious German orientalist (Dr. Friç), allegedly only translated by Habil Adem, elaborated on a thesis that would gain leverage in the early Turkish Republic and become very prominent in the 1930s, namely that the Kurds were actually Turks and the Kurdish as an independent language did not exist. In the book's section on the religion of the Kurds, he makes two distinctions such as Muslim and non-Muslim Kurds and Sunni and Shiite Muslim Kurds. (Source: Writing Religion: The Making of Turkish Alevi Islam; Dressler, Marcus). Pelister worked in the translation office of the General Directorate of Security since 1908 and in the Turkmen Branch of the General Directorate of Tribes and Immigrants from 1913, and he personally assigned him to Talat Pasha, (1874-1921). He was very good at speaking English, German, and French languages, thus, he was involved in researches related to the Kurdish and Turkmen tribes with some delegations in Ottoman Turkey in Asia. The German original of this book never existed, neither did Dr. Fritsch from the Berlin Academy of Science. Years later, Celadet Bedirxan, a Kurdish intellectual, explained the mistakes that Naci Ismail made intentionally or unknowingly on the Kurdish culture, population, history, folklore, and language, with the letters he wrote to Mustafa Kemal and drew Mustafa Kemal's attention. This book was written probably by a commission with corrigenda and footnotes by Pelister. The book generally focuses on the historical geography of the Kurds. There is an effort to Turkify in the part that talks about the origins of the Kurds. In the introduction, detailed information about Iranian and Iraqi Kurds is given and Sharafnâma is criticized. Although detailed information is available on many Kurdish tribes (Leks, Sividis, Arukhs, etc) in Anatolia and Mesopotamia, most of these are dubious. Only three institutional copies in OCLC: 977638243 (University of Toronto Robarts Library), 949451620 (Bogaziçi Library), and 164856325 (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek of Germany).; Özege 11517.; TBTK 11113. First Edition.
