Sheikh Ubeydullah of Nehri

Sheikh Ubeydullah of Nehri was born near Hakkari and became a powerful Naqshbandi sheikh whose influence spanned the Kurdish lands of both the Ottoman Empire and Persia. Far more than a religious leader, he built a proto-state with its own treasury, courts and army, and commanded the loyalty of hundreds of thousands of Kurds.

Seeing that the Kurds were being divided between two empires, Ubeydullah articulated one of the earliest clear statements of Kurdish nationhood, declaring that the Kurds were a separate people who wished to manage their own affairs "like the other nations." In 1880 he launched a great uprising across Kurdistan, and although it was suppressed by the combined power of both empires, it is widely recognised as the birth of the modern Kurdish national movement.

Forced to surrender, Ubeydullah was exiled and died in Mecca in 1883. His ideas, however, lived on. His movement was the first genuinely pan-Kurdish revolt - one that inspired every Kurdish uprising that followed and established him as the founding father of Kurdish national consciousness.