KURDISTAN: In the Shadow of History.<i> By Susan Meiselas</i> .<i> With chapter commentaries by Martin van Bruinessen</i> .<i> Random House: 390 pp., $100</i>

The Kurds may indeed, as this title suggests, have lived in the shadow of history. But they have also formed an indissoluble part of the narrative that we call historic. In Xenophon’s “Anabasis” (one of the first extant records of a military campaign), he recounted the clash between the Greeks and the Karduchoi of Asia Minor, a martial and well-defined people even in 400 BC. The next well-attested glimpse that we get from the West is that of the figure of Salah al-Din, or Saladin, who emerged from his Mesopotamian home in the late 12th century to combine great generalship and chivalry in the rout of the Crusaders. When he died in Damascus, his Kurdish fellow warriors demanded the right to stay and be buried in the same soil when their turn came.

That marks a rare episode in Kurdish history because, as a general rule, they have kept to those mountain areas once so hauntingly defined by the American anthropologist Carleton Coone as “the lands of insolence.” The rise of the nation-state and the clash of regional empires, to say nothing of the presence of oil beneath the land, have made it distinctly chancy to live in the area where Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria converge.

Their geographical inconvenience and, indeed, their insolence as a people have visited the Kurds with numerous enemies. At times, they have even had difficulty establishing their right to exist or to be named. For example, until very recently, modern Turkey denied that there was a Kurdish problem at all, let alone a separate Kurdish language. And though Iraq has acknowledged the presence of a Kurdish minority, it has often identified the Kurds the better to isolate and extirpate them. In the past, great international peace conferences, confronted by Kurds bearing maps and making demands, would speak vaguely of tribal forces and relegate the matter to the end of the agenda. As a consequence, the Kurds are today by far the largest national group in the world without a state of their own.

That account of their orphan history can be rendered in a number of ways, by historians, sociologists, anthropologists or journalists. “Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History” marks the first time that the task has been attempted by an artist. Susan Meiselas has, with infinite labor and tenderness, composed a collage, framed a composition, designed a frame, confected a design and, by means of a deft balance between text and camera, brought off a thing of beauty as well as of instruction. She has taken her own photographs in the high defiles of Kurdistan and among its variegated and resilient people; she has amassed the best work by her contemporaries; she has been through every feasible archive in public or private hands; and she has given Kurdistan and the Kurds a face. With the same assiduity and generosity, she has consulted and excerpted every past and present written authority. The work of editing and correlating, which must have been immense, was shared by Martin van Bruinessen, a first-rate Dutch scholar of the region.

The result is very nearly beyond praise. For example, immediately after World War II, an autonomous Kurdish government was proclaimed on Iranian soil. The Mahabad Republic, as it became known, was swiftly crushed and its leaders slain or exiled, but the heady memory of a moment of self-government lived on in millions of hearts. Until recently, there was almost no evidence, apart from the Kurdish oral tradition, that this episode had really taken place. Meiselas has found photographs of the period and of its leading figures, texts and proclamations printed in Kurdish and testimony from eyewitnesses. The chapter closes with a graphic picture of the leader of Mahabad as he dangles from a hastily erected gibbet put up by the forces of the renascent Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi of Iran. All this happened, incidentally, on a United States “watch.” Ever since the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, an American signature, for better or worse, has been on various international promises for Kurdish autonomy. The worst moment in this wretched subplot, after Mahabad, came in 1975, when Henry Kissinger aborted a covert war against Saddam Hussein and tried to abandon and disown the luckless Kurds who had believed in it.

We are perhaps over-fond of saying that globalization brings nations together, abolishes distance, leads to interdependence and so forth. These easy phrases grow smooth with repetition. But actually, an honest telling of the Kurdish story does involve a “learning experience” about American history also. This is no mere slab of coffee-table gorgeousness, designed to evoke the quaint and the folkloric. It is replete with blood and tragedy and struggle and all the other raw materials of humanity and ought to engage us even if it did not expose our complicity. Look again at the photographs of the Kurds, like a river flowing uphill, as they flee their homeland en masse in the spring of 1991. America had gone to war in the name of these people so recently subjected to massacre by poison gas. Forgetting, here, is not an option.

Nothing is flawless. Arthur Henderson was not British prime minister in the 1930s but a member of Parliament, for instance. But this is like the knot of imperfection that pious weavers include in the warp and woof of a Persian rug. This book is everything that scholarship and journalism and humanism ought to aspire to be. I have spent a scribbling life in the service of the disputed proposition that one well-chosen word is worth 1,000 pictures, but I have to concede, in the face of Meiselas, that my words can do no more than point you at her photographs.