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. | 
