Sheikh Said: The Martyr Who Lit the First Match (1865–1925)
- Rezan Babakir
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
On 29 September 1925, in the city of Diyarbakır, a Naqshbandi Sufi sheikh from the village of Piran in what is now Bingöl Province was hanged alongside forty-six other Kurdish and religious figures by order of the Eastern Independence Court of the new Turkish Republic. His name was Sheikh Said. Seven months earlier, he had ignited the largest Kurdish uprising against Ankara since the republic's founding — a rebellion that spread rapidly across southeastern Anatolia before being crushed by the Turkish Army. The rebellion failed. But the failure became a founding myth of Kurdish resistance, and Sheikh Said became one of the defining martyrs of Kurdish national consciousness in the twentieth century.
Table of Contents
Part 1: Piran — The World That Made a Sheikh
Sheikh Said was born around 1865 in Piran, a village in the Genç district of what is today Bingöl Province in southeastern Turkey. He belonged to the Naqshbandi Sufi order and came from a family of religious leaders whose authority extended across a wide network of Kurdish tribes in the Zaza-speaking regions of the eastern Taurus. His title of Sheikh was not merely honorific: it designated a man who had been initiated into the highest levels of Sufi teaching, who served as a spiritual guide to thousands of followers, and whose authority in the community was simultaneously religious, judicial, and political.
Part 2: The Naqshbandi Order and Kurdish Political Islam
The Naqshbandi order had been the dominant Sufi brotherhood in the Kurdish regions of the Ottoman Empire since the early nineteenth century. As Ottoman central authority weakened and Kurdish tribal confederacies were disrupted by military campaigns, the Naqshbandi sheikhs stepped into the vacuum: they provided the cross-tribal religious authority, the network of lodges and disciples, and the symbolic prestige that allowed them to mobilise large numbers of people across tribal and linguistic boundaries. Sheikh Said was the inheritor of this tradition in the Genç region — a figure whose religious authority gave him the capacity to lead a movement that purely tribal leaders could not have assembled.
Part 3: The Turkish Republic and the Kurdish Question
The Turkish Republic proclaimed in October 1923 was built on principles that were, in fundamental respects, incompatible with the position that Kurdish people had occupied in the late Ottoman world. The new state was secular: it abolished the caliphate in 1924, closed the religious courts, suppressed the Sufi orders, and subordinated Islamic institutions to state control. It was also nationalist in a specifically Turkish sense: it denied the existence of a Kurdish ethnicity, declared Kurdish people to be 'Mountain Turks,' and set about suppressing Kurdish language, dress, and cultural expression. For a figure like Sheikh Said — a Sufi sheikh whose authority was entirely religious, a Kurdish speaker whose community was entirely Kurdish — the new republic represented an assault on everything that gave his life meaning.
Part 4: The Road to Rebellion
The years 1923 and 1924 saw growing tension between the Kemalist state and Kurdish communities across southeastern Anatolia. The abolition of the caliphate in March 1924 was particularly significant: it removed the Islamic legitimation of the Ottoman order that had given Kurdish tribes and sheikhs their place within a broader political framework, and it signalled, unmistakably, the direction of the new state's cultural programme. Clandestine Kurdish political organisations — most notably Azadi (Freedom), a Kurdish nationalist society with significant support among former Ottoman officers of Kurdish origin — began planning resistance. Sheikh Said was drawn into these networks, and by late 1924 he was in contact with those planning a major uprising.
Part 5: February 1925 — The Uprising Begins
The rebellion broke out prematurely in February 1925, triggered by a confrontation at Piran village between gendarmes attempting to arrest some of Sheikh Said's followers and the followers themselves. Rather than allow the arrest to proceed — which would have compromised the plans for a coordinated uprising — Sheikh Said chose to fight. The rebellion spread rapidly across the Zaza-speaking and Kurmanji-speaking Kurdish regions of eastern Anatolia. Major towns including Elazığ, Genç, and Palu were briefly seized by rebel forces. Sheikh Said raised the religious banner of Islam alongside the Kurdish national cause, framing the struggle as a defence of the faith against godless Kemalist secularism.
Part 6: The Rebellion's Spread and Defeat
The Turkish government responded with overwhelming force. Two army corps were deployed against the rebels, and the Eastern Independence Courts were established to provide a legal framework for suppressing the uprising and its perceived supporters. The Diyarbakır garrison held against rebel attack — a failure that proved strategically critical. By April 1925, the rebellion had been effectively suppressed. Sheikh Said himself was captured in the mountains as he attempted to flee toward the Iranian border. He was brought to Diyarbakır to stand trial.
Part 7: The Eastern Independence Courts
The Eastern Independence Courts were not designed to deliver justice; they were designed to deliver results. The court that tried Sheikh Said in Diyarbakır in the summer of 1925 was a military tribunal operating under emergency powers, with no independent judiciary, no right of appeal, and a predetermined conclusion. Sheikh Said was charged with leading an armed rebellion against the state and fomenting religious reaction against the republic. He was convicted on both counts. At his trial, he is reported to have defended himself with dignity, acknowledging his leadership of the rebellion and offering a coherent political defence of the Kurdish right to self-determination that the court was entirely unprepared to engage with.
Part 8: The Gallows — A Martyr Made
On 29 September 1925, Sheikh Said and forty-six other Kurdish leaders and figures were hanged in Diyarbakır. His death, and the deaths of those hanged with him, provided Kurdish national memory with something it had previously lacked: a founding martyrdom. The execution was intended to be a demonstration of the state's absolute power and the futility of resistance. It became, instead, the source of an enduring legend. Sheikh Said's name entered Kurdish oral tradition immediately, and the memory of the rebellion — of a people who had risen even in defeat — gave subsequent generations of Kurdish political activists a story to tell about themselves.
Part 9: Legacy — The Name That Would Not Die
Sheikh Said's legacy has been disputed almost since the moment of his execution. Turkish nationalist historiography cast him as a reactionary religious fanatic and tool of British imperialism. Some Kurdish secular nationalists, uncomfortable with the Islamic framing of the rebellion, downplayed its national dimension. Kurdish Islamists embraced him as a defender of the faith. Kurdish nationalists of various traditions claimed him as a pioneer of armed resistance. The truth is more complex than any of these framings: Sheikh Said was simultaneously a Sufi sheikh defending the religious order he had been raised in, a Kurdish leader resisting the cultural annihilation of his people, and a political figure whose rebellion — whatever its motivations — became the foundational event of Kurdish resistance to the Turkish state in the twentieth century. The PKK's armed uprising beginning in 1984, the mass Kurdish political movements of subsequent decades: all of them operated in the political and symbolic space that Sheikh Said's rebellion had opened.
Chronology of Sheikh Said
c.1865 — Born in Piran, Genç district, southeastern Anatolia.
1908 — Young Turk revolution; brief Kurdish political opening.
1923 — Turkish Republic proclaimed; abolition of the caliphate in 1924 signals direct threat to traditional Kurdish order.
Late 1924 — Sheikh Said enters contact with Kurdish nationalist organisation Azadi; planning for uprising begins.
February 1925 — Sheikh Said Rebellion breaks out prematurely at Piran village; spreads rapidly across southeastern Anatolia.
April 1925 — Rebellion defeated by Turkish Army; Sheikh Said captured while fleeing toward Iran.
Summer 1925 — Tried before the Eastern Independence Court in Diyarbakır; convicted of rebellion and religious reaction.
29 September 1925 — Hanged alongside forty-six others in Diyarbakır.
References
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Sheikh Said?
Sheikh Said (c.1865–1925) was a Naqshbandi Sufi sheikh from Piran in southeastern Turkey who led the Sheikh Said Rebellion of February–March 1925 — the first major Kurdish uprising against the Turkish Republic. He was captured, tried by a military tribunal, and executed by hanging in Diyarbakır on 29 September 1925 alongside forty-six others.
Was the Sheikh Said Rebellion religious or nationalist?
Both. Sheikh Said framed the rebellion in Islamic terms — as a defence of the caliphate and Sufi traditions against Kemalist secularism — while also drawing on Kurdish nationalist networks (particularly the Azadi organisation). Scholars continue to debate the relative weight of religious and nationalist motivations. The rebellion drew support from both religious conservatives and secular Kurdish nationalists, suggesting it combined both dimensions.
Why is Sheikh Said important in Kurdish history?
He led the first major Kurdish uprising against the Turkish Republic, and his execution created Kurdish national memory's first founding martyrdom under the new Turkish state. The rebellion established the political and symbolic template for subsequent decades of Kurdish resistance in Turkey, from the Dersim uprising of 1937 through to the PKK's armed campaign begun in 1984.
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