Kurdish Nationalism in Mam û Zîn
Ferhad Shakely
Kurdish Institute of Brussels
Determination of the dates of births and deaths of Kurdish poets of old and getting information about their lives are examples of the difficulties, anyone who does research on Kurdish classical literature faces.
The first written European source about Kurdish classical poets, including Ahmad-i Khanl is a book published by A. Jaba in 1860, in St. Petersburg (now Leningrad). Jaba was consul of the Tsarist Russia in Erzurum between 1855 - 1860 A.D. He obtained his information about the lives and works of the classical Kurdish poets from Mala Mahmud-î Bayazidî, a prominent Kurdish scholar. Besides, Jaba collected several Kurdish manuscripts, which he took to St. Petersburg. It seems that most of the dates given to Jaba by Mala Mahmud-î Bayazidî
Ferhad Shakely was born in 1951 in Southern (Iraqi) Kurdistan. He studied Kurdish language and literature at Baghdad University, and was journalist at the beginning of the seventies.
Shakely, who is one of the outstanding modern poets in Kurdish, made his debute in 1973 with his collection “Project of a secret coup”, which was followed by three other poetry books.
This paper was originally presented to the department of Iranin languages at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, in 1983.
He has been living in exile, in Sweden, since 1978. Married and has three children.
INTRODUCTION
I
All those who study and deal with the history, literature and ethnography of the Kurdish people, find out, at an early stage of their work, that their tasks are hard and they have to be equipped with extra capability and patience.
The difficult political circumstances prevailing in Kurdistan, have effected, negatively, the language, culture and literature of the Kurds as badly as the other aspects of their life. The division of Kurdistan among several different countries, divided, simultaneously, Kurdish culture. Frontiers were drawn not only between the parts of the country, but also through the language, culture and literature of the Kurds in those parts. The occupying powers have always been hostile to the Kurdish people. They have done their best to subjugate them, supress their insurrections and eliminate all the appearances of their national character: in short to assimilate the Kurdish people.
The Kurds, on the other hand, have always resisted occupation and oppression and striven for the sake of freedom and independence. The history of the Kurdish people is full of examples of both oppression and resistance. Insurrections and revolts had previously happened in Kurdistan due to several religious, tribal and ethnic reasons, or as spontaneous acts of reaction to foreign invasion (Xeno-phone, Islam, Tamerlane, etc). In the modern times, particularly from the middle of the nineteenth century, the Kurdish national-liberation movement took on new aspects. Since then there have been political goals for the Kurdish insurrections. They became parts of the Kurdish national-liberation movement that struggled, and still does, to liberate Kurdistan and establish a political framework: a national-state for the Kurds.
Kurdish nationalism (kurdayati) has been a motive and a stimulating force in the continuation and development of the Kurdish national-liberation movement. For the first time, the poet and thinker Ahmad-î Khanî (1650-1707) formed and laid the foundations of Kurdish nationalism. In his epic Mam û Zîn (M & Z) Khanî analysed, politically, the situation in Kurdistan and called to struggle to liberate Kurdistan and establish a Kurdish nation-state. This paper is an attempt to survey the political viewpoints that Khani recorded in the epic of M & Z, regarding Kurdish nationalism.
Several writers and researchers have written about Khani and his works. Even two dissertations have been written about him. But Khani's thoughts concerning Kurdish nationalism, to which I devoted this paper, have never been treated sufficiently. This was not because of the inability of those who wrote about him, but because they lived and wrote in countries that regarded Kuidistan an unceaseable part of themselves or denied the existence of the Kurds completely. Khani's thoughts still arouse uneasiness and fear in the powers that occupy Kurdistan. This is a clear sign of the importance and effectiveness of Khani’s thoughts, even three centuries after that they were written down.
II
The primary sources to understand and study Khani’s thoughts are his own writings, especially M & Z. Khani's writings have been published several times. In this study I depended, mainly, on the editions and translations of M & Z, which I will survey in the following. The manuscripts of his writings were not at my disposition:
1- M & Z was published for the first time in 1335-1337 A.H. (1917-1919 A.D.), in Istanbul, with an introduction by Hamza. It is said that the copies of this edition were burnt, but I personally saw a copy in the library of The School of Oriental and African Studies in London, that Mr. C. J. Edmonds had brought from Iraqi Kurdistan. Morever, Mr. Tawfiq Wahby told me, in July 1982, that he himself did have a copy, which he presented, in 1942, to the late Kurdish leader Mustafa Barzani.
In this edition the old Kurdish orthography, that employed Arabic script, has been used. Short vowels and possessive articles (…) (ê, a) are, therefore, not distinguishable and the character (…) (G) is lacking. For both sounds (…) and (…) (K and G) the character (K) has been used.
2- The second edition of M & Z was published in 1947 A.D. in Aleppo. This is only an offset reprinting of the first edition.
3- The same first edition was published twice more in 1954 and 1968, in Hawler (Arbil) in Iraqi Kurdistan by Giw-i Mukryani, with his introduction. These two editions are not very reliable, because the editor changed several words in the text.
4- In 1962 A.D. a new edition of M & Z was published in Moscow by the late Soviet kurdologist M. B. Rudenko. This edition consists of the Kurdish text with a Russian translation by Rudenko and introdutions by Rudenko herself and professor Qanate Kurdo (Kurdoev). It is considered to be the best and the most reliable edition of M & 'L, for in addition to the former editions, Rudenko used even the manuscripts of M & Z that are kept in the library of the Institute of Oriental Studies in Leningrad.
Rudenko, too, used Arabic script for writing the Kurdish text of her edition. Short vowels and possessive articles (…) and l (ê and a) are, sometimes, lacking. When, in 1962, Rudenko published the book, the new Kurdish orthography in Arabic alphabet was in use in Iraqi Kurdistan, but it seems that she was not aware of that development.
I depended, mainly, on this edition and quoted the examples of Khani's baits from it. In a few occasions, when I was in doubt of her choice of the right word, I took the other editions into consideration.
5- Another edition was the one published in 1968 in Istanbul, in Turkey, by M. E. Bozarslan. This edition consists of the Kurdish text of M & Z with its translation to the Turkish. The Kurdish text is printed in Latin characters. The system used in the writing is the one that was founded by Prince Jaladat Badirkhan and also is known as the Hawar alphabet. Bozarslan based his edition, as he told me, on the editions of Istanbul and Aleppo and a manuscript written by his own father, who also, for his part, based it on the Istanbul edition. What attracts one's attention is that in his introdution to this edition, Bozarslan did not mention the Aleppo edition of 1947. He mentioned, instead, a Sham (Damascus) edition of 1958. As far as I know there is not such an edition at all.
In transcribing the text into Latin characters, many mistakes have occurred. This edition was reprinted in 1975, in Istanbul.
6- M & Z was translated into Arabic and published by Muhammad Said Ramadan al-Boti, in 1957 A.D. It has been republished three more times. The parts of M & Z that contains Khani's thoughts about Kurdish nationalism have been totally removed. Al-Boti translated the epic in prose and turned it into a love novel that does not contain any of the philophosical, religious or political view-points of Khani.
7- A summarized version of M & Z was translated into German by Jemal Nebez in 1969.
8- In 1960, the Kurdish poet Hazhar (1920-1991) translated M & Z from North Kurmandji dialect into South Kurmandji (or Mûkri). This translation was made in verse, which caused it to lose many of Khani's view-points.
In addition to the above-mentioned editions and translations of Khani's M & Z, there are several folkloric versions of M & Z or Marne Alan with translations into Arabic, English, French, German, Swedish and Armenian. The introductions to some of these translations were useful.
The secondary sources that I used, consisted of studies and articles that treated and discussed the life of Ahmad-î Khanî and his epic M & Z. These were:
1- History of Kurdish literature (in Kurdish) by Alauddin Sajjadi, Baghdad - 1952. This book is the sole comprehensive book in its field. The writer has shown significant ability in investigating the lives of the Kurdish poets. Moreover, he has studied, thoroughly, the works of the poets, but these studies are considered not to be written on an academic or scientific basis. This also applies to the chapter about Khanî.
2- Ahmad-î Khanî (in Arabic), by Dr. Izzudin Mustafa Rasul, Baghdad - 1979. This book is a disseertation that was presented to the Institute of Oriental Studies in the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow. It is the best and most comprehensive study about Khani and M & Z. The writer studied, thoroughly and in an academic way, all the aspects of Khani's work. He arrived at many important conclusions. The only aspect that he has not studied in the thoroughness that it does deserve is Kurdish nationalism in Khani's work. Obviously this was due to the fact that the writer lived and published his book in Iraq.
There are a few shortcomings in the book that we can summarize as follows:
1- The writer has tried to show Khanî as a philosopher. But I think that Khani was a poet, a sufi and a practical thinker. One can say that Khani, moreover, was thoroughly acquainted with philosophy, though he himself was not a philosopher.
2- The examples of M & Z that the author translated into Arabic indicate that he was not able to understand some of the baits correctly.
3- The writer has studied, in his book, the history of the Kurdish people as background information for M & Z, but there are some mistakes in his information that indicate that he has not been precise in studying Kurdistan's history.
In addition to these two works, I made use of several other studies, forewords and articles written, among others, by: Sadiq Bahauddin Amedi, Qanate Kurdo, Abdulhamid Husaini, Tawfiq Wahby, Maruf Khaznadar, Hamza, Ubaidullah Ayyubiyan, Prince Jaladat Badirkhan, çiroknivis (pseudonym of Nurad-din Zaza), Husain Huzni, Hemin, Lucie Paul-Margueritte, Alan Ward and Gisbert Janicke (see Bibliography).
III
In this paper I have studied Khanî's M & Z from two aspects: firstly: M & Z as an example of the oriental epic, and secondly: the foundations of Kurdish nationalism in Mam û Zîn. Moreover, I have introduced a brief account of the life of Khani, in which I have presented new information about his family and his name.
In order to be able to study the political thoughts of Khanî I had to understand the text, first. In this connection, I made use of the translations, as well as the text itself. The Kurdish language that Khanî used in writing M & Z contains many Arabic, Turkish and Persian words and phrases, that one must deal with within the general framework of the oriental poetry of his time. Many of the Arabic words that Khani employed cannot be taken in their modern meanings as they are explained in modern Arabic dictionaries, because then we will misunderstand his aims, whereas the old meanings of the words help us to understand him precisely.
The political viewpoints of Khanî are not mere theoretical ideas. They are connected with his time and with the history' of Kurdistan. In order to understand Khani's thoughts within their historical context, a thorough study of the history of the Kurdish people, particularly in the 16th and 17th centuries is necessary. Sharafnamah, the famous history of the Kurds, was of great importance in this connection, as were the additional commentaries and marginal notes provided by its translators to Arabic and Kurdish, without which it was difficult to understand the period from 1005/1596 onwards.
IV
In the original paper two systems of transcription were used and, according, there was a comparative table that showed the two systems in detail. In this edition it was practically impossible, due to technical reasons, to bring about a proper system of transcription. The long and short vowels, thus, are left without any special diacritical marks. The consonants (…) are represented by ch, kh, zh, sh and gh respectively. An apostrophe is used to represent both hamza ( ) and (…).
V
Abbreviations used in this paper are the following:
A.D. Anno Domini
A.H. Anno Hegirae (Qamari, i.e. moon-years).
M & Z Mam û Zîn (Mam and Zin). This abbreviation is used when the epic of M &. "L is meant, but for writing the names of the two characters of the epic, namely Mam and Zin, no abbreviation is used.
1. The Life of Ahmad-î Khanî
Determination of the dates of births and deaths of Kurdish poets of old and getting information about their lives are examples of the difficulties, anyone who does research on Kurdish classical literature faces.
The first written European source about Kurdish classical poets, including Ahmad-i Khanl is a book published by A. Jaba in 1860, in St. Petersburg (now Leningrad). Jaba was consul of the Tsarist Russia in Erzurum between 1855 - 1860 A.D. He obtained his information about the lives and works of the classical Kurdish poets from Mala Mahmud-î Bayazidî, a prominent Kurdish scholar. Besides, Jaba collected several Kurdish manuscripts, which he took to St. Petersburg. It seems that most of the dates given to Jaba by Mala Mahmud-î Bayazidî were wrong, and that they were only approximate estimations.
Few details are known about the date of birth of Ahmad-î Khanî and his life, in spite of the various statements by writers on his works and life that are, unfortunately, contradictory. Q. Kurdo states ...
