‘‘Why do you think the Y.P.G. and Y.P.J. saved you?’’ I asked.

‘‘Maybe I know, maybe I don’t,’’ he said. ‘‘But they are the only ones who came to help us. America didn’t come. The pesh merga’’ — Iraqi Kurdistan’s military — ‘‘didn’t come.’’ Now he wanted to devote his life to the teachings of Ocalan. ‘‘I was nothing before coming to the academy,’’ he said.

Despite his imprisonment nearly a thousand miles away, Abdullah Ocalan, who is now 66 or 67 (he has no birth certificate), looms as a Wizard-of-Oz-like presence in Rojava. His avuncular visage — broad, bushy eyebrows; a gregarious, toothy grin obscured by a cartoonishly lush mustache — appears everywhere: in the halls and classrooms of the academy, in government buildings, in community centers, in police stations and on pins and patches on the chests of soldiers. This strange founding-fatherhood is the culmination of an unlikely political career that began in November 1978, when Ocalan first gathered two dozen Kurdish revolutionaries in the town of Fis, in southeastern Turkey. His co-conspirators called him Uncle, or Apo in Kurdish, and called themselves the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K.

Ocalan’s initial impulse wasn’t to fashion himself as a philosopher-politician. The P.K.K. members were unabashed Maoists, who used spectacular acts of violence against rival organizations and government soldiers to destabilize and delegitimize Turkey’s authority in the predominantly Kurdish southeast. In 1980, Ocalan fled to Syria, where he was offered shelter by the regime of Hafez al-Assad. For the next 20 years, he led the struggle remotely — from a villa from which he issued orders to his commanders via messenger, letter and telephone. But in 1998, under pressure from Turkey, Assad kicked Ocalan out of the country. He escaped through Europe before he was captured in Kenya with the help of the C.I.A., which by then considered the P.K.K. a terrorist organization. Ocalan’s lawyers claimed that he was drugged and tortured by Turkish security forces while in custody. He was then paraded in front of TV cameras looking frail and confused, like a grandpa who had just woken from a nap, and he did the unthinkable: He renounced the P.K.K.’s effort to create an independent Kurdish homeland.

Ocalan was remanded to Imrali prison, on an island off the coast of Istanbul. This is when his conversion began — what one academic would describe as a transition from ‘‘Stalinist caterpillar to libertarian butterfly.’’ He was the island’s only prisoner, surrounded by 1,000 soldiers there to ensure he could not escape before his execution (a death sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment). The government allowed him to meet with his lawyers to communicate to his followers the details of a cease-fire. He was also permitted books, finding inspiration in Western texts like Michel Foucault’s ‘‘Society Must Be Defended’’ and Benedict Anderson’s ‘‘Imagined Communities.’’ Soon, one of his supporters gave Ocalan his first book by an obscure Vermont-based philosopher named Murray Bookchin. After Ocalan read it, he requested everything Bookchin had ever written. Oliver Kontny, a translator and P.K.K. sympathizer who was working for Ocalan’s lawyers at the time, told me that Ocalan let ‘‘all of us know that he was working on a paradigm change based on what he learned from Bookchin.’’

Bookchin, a mustachioed octogenarian who lived in Burlington, Vt., and typically wore suspenders and pocket protectors, had no idea Ocalan was reading his work — in fact, he thought hardly anyone was. Born in 1921 in the Bronx, Bookchin joined the Communist Party’s Young Pioneers organization at age 9. But by the 1950s, he had sworn off Marxism-Leninism and pioneered a radical ideology he called ‘‘social ecology,’’ which argued that all environmental problems stemmed from social issues like racism, sexism and inequality. While Bookchin enjoyed some notoriety in the 1960s and ’70s (the academic Russell Jacoby once compared his influence on the American left with Noam Chomsky’s), by the 1990s Bookchin was little known in America, save by a faction of prominent environmentalists who ostracized him for his attacks on those he deemed not revolutionary enough. Gary Snyder, the Pulitzer-winning poet, said that Bookchin ‘‘wrote like a Stalinist thug,’’ and the writer Edward Abbey called him a ‘‘fat old lady.’’ An entire volume was published to denounce his work (‘‘Beyond Bookchin’’), and others lambasted him as a hypocrite because of, among other things, his love of Twinkies and Dunkin’ Donuts.