'Professor, You're Dividing My Nation'

De Sophie Hardach, sur The Chronicle of Higher Education (en anglais) sur l'épineuse question de la division linguistique au Kurdistan d'Irak :

As a young man, Jaffer Sheyholislami walked for four nights from Iran to Turkey to escape the Iran-Iraq war. He secured a visa to Canada, became an academic, and dedicated himself to his great passion: his mother tongue, Kurdish, a minority language spoken in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria that has survived many official attempts to suppress it. Sheyholislami, now an assistant professor of linguistics at Carleton University, is on sabbatical leave to pursue fieldwork in Iraqi Kurdistan, an autonomous region in northern Iraq where, thanks to oil money and U.S. support, his language is finally thriving. But his research has once again landed him in a war, this time a war of ideas. …