Discovering the obvious.(Editorial)

 
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, 
  Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit 
  Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, 
 Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it. 
 
Persian Poet Omar Khayyam (1048-1122) 

On an ordinary day in October 1976, I was busy writing my doctoral dissertation on architecture when my Kurdish husband Homayoun asked the meaning of 'predatory.' "A lion is a predator," I replied. "No, it says Kurd," he insisted, handing me the Oxford Concise Dictionary of the English Language. In Oxford was this definition: "kurd - one of a tall, pastoral and predatory people." But Homayoun, the only Kurd I knew, was neither tall nor predatory.

Perplexed that so hallowed a source as Oxford would tar all Kurds with the same brush, I paid my first visit to Columbia's international affairs library only to find that Oxford was not alone. In The Scribner Bantam English Dictionary I found "kurd - a member of a warlike race in Kurdistan" and in The Random House College Dictionary, "kurd - a member of a pastoral and warlike people speaking Kurdish and dwelling chiefly in Kurdistan."

To challenge the definitions, I wrote an article, titled it "Killing Them Softly"--with words, so to speak--and sent it along with a cover letter to the dictionaries and to cited authors. The campaign succeeded. Scribner was first to revise; Oxford and Random House agreed to do so.

Homayoun died on the first day of 1981. Six months later, in his memory, I initiated the Kurdish Program under the aegis of Cultural Survival, Inc., the Kurdish Library in 1986, the journal in the same year, and Kurdish Life in 1991. Only years later did it occur to me that the dictionaries would not have chosen their terms without reason. But I never sought an explanation. Instead, sentiment on my sleeve, I had collected resources to support what I already believed. American poet Walt Whitman would have understood. "All architecture is what you do when you look upon it. Did you think it was in the white or grey stones?" he wrote in Leaves of Grass back in 1892. So is history what we do when we look upon it.

As a mea culpa of sorts, I revisited late 19th and early 20th century texts where I found characterizations and accounts conveying the distinct impression that more then a few Kurds got their ...