The Sheikh and the Missionary: Notes on a Conversation on Christianity, Islam and Kurdish Nationalism

On the morning of October 11, 1881, Henry Otis Dwight, an American missionary and newspaper correspondent for the New York Tribune paid a visit to the Kurdish Naqshbandi Sheikh Ubeydullah. For the last few months, Sheikh Ubeydullah, originally from the Hakkâri region, south of Lake Van, had been living in a house near the Yıldız Palace in Istanbul. As the preeminent Naqshbandi sheikh in the Ottoman Empire, descended from the Prophet Muhammad and with hundreds of thousands of ardent followers, Sheikh Ubeydullah was accorded a certain amount of official respect, receiving food daily from Sultan Abdülhamid II’s personal kitchen. However, he was also, as Dwight observed, “for all intents and purposes a prisoner.”1 A year before this meeting, in October 1880, Sheikh Ubeydullah had led a predominantly Kurdish army into the northern plains of the Qajar Empire.2 Over the course of ten days, part of Ubeydullah’s army would lay siege to the city of Urmia. Although his exact intentions have