Mehmet Şerif Fırat

Mehmet Şerif Fırat (1894/1899 – 1949) was a Kurdish author and is known for his 1945 book History of Varto and the Eastern Provinces in which he denied the existence of Kurds and claimed they are of Turkish origin. The book was republished in 1961 and counted with a foreword from the Turkish president Cemal Gürsel.

Biography Fırat was born into a Kurdish family in the village Kasman in Varto He attended high school in Varto but did not take up studies at a university. that had fought with the Turkish Military against the Kurdish rebels of the 1925 Sheik Said rebellion. He defended the view that Alevi preferred the Kemalist policies instead of the Sunni Islamist ideas of the rebels., After the defeat of the revolt, he was exiled to the west of Turkey by the government as were the relatives of Sheikh Said and Halit Beg Cirbran, the military leaders of the rebellion. He was allowed to return after two years in exile. He published his book History of Varto and the Eastern Provinces in 1945. He then reasoned that the Kurdish Alevis hail from Khorasan and were influenced by the Turkic mystic Ahemd Yesevi in the 12th century.

In 2002, this book was brought forward as an argument in a trial against Kurdish university students who wanted to learn the Kurdish language, based on Fırat's claim that Turkish and Kurdish are the same language. In The Cambridge History of the Kurds of 2021, his omission of the Kurdish Koçgiri rebellion in 1921 and the massacre of dozens of his tribesmen during the Dersim rebellion is seen as noteworthy.

Death Fırat was killed by his uncle Halo near the Kasman village on 1 July 1949. Fırat was buried in the cemetery of Varto. Halo attempted to escape with his family to Bingöl province, but was captured and imprisoned in Bitlis. In the 1980s the government of Kenan Evren built a sarcophagus for Mehmet Şerif Fırat.

Personal life His uncle Halo was known as a bandit and in the aftermath of the Sheik Said Rebellion, he lived in the mountains evading exile. He was pardoned in 1929. His nephew Selim, who opposed his uncle's views regarding the Kurds, resides in Berlin, Germany, has learned the Kurdish language and is a supporter of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). As of 2010, his daughter and granddaughter still lived in the village Kasman of Varto.