A Kurdish creed
D. N. Mackenzie
A Locust’s Leg
Kurdish poets of the seventeenth century and earlier, Ahmade Xani, Malae Jizrî, Mala Ahmade Bate and others, wrote in a Kurdish which may be called “North-eastern”. This was a literary language bearing a heavy load of Arabic and Persian vocabulary, but still recognizable as basically the Kurdish of Bohtan and Hakari and the regions lying to the north. But little information about the separate dialects of these regions can be culled from the literary sources. For the first prose “dialect” Kurdish text we must wait until the beginning of the nineteenth century. As it is a comparatively short text its reproduction in full may not be without interest. That it is here dedicated to H. E. Seyyid Hasan Taqizadeh must, I regret, do it greater ...
A KURDISH CREED
By D. N. Mackenzie
Kurdish poets of the seventeenth century and earlier, Ahmade Xani, Malae Jizrî, Mala Ahmade Bate and others, wrote in a Kurdish which may be called “North-eastern”. This was a literary language bearing a heavy load of Arabic and Persian vocabulary, but still recognizable as basically the Kurdish of Bohtan and Hakari and the regions lying to the north. But little information about the separate dialects of these regions can be culled from the literary sources. For the first prose “dialect” Kurdish text we must wait until the beginning of the nineteenth century. As it is a comparatively short text its reproduction in full may not be without interest. That it is here dedicated to H. E. Seyyid Hasan Taqizadeh must, I regret, do it greater honour than it can impart.
In one manuscript of the Nubar and ‘Aqaid of Ahmade Xani, published in facsimile by A. von Le Coq,1 the last four folios are filled by a prose text entitled Fi bayani arkani l-isldm. It is written in the same hand, and as liberally and ambiguously vowelled, as the preceding poems, but there is nothing concrete to connect it with Ahmade Xani beyond the similarity of language. We are on firmer ground, however, with a similar work published soon after. This is the Xulasa-y ‘aqaid by Sex ‘Abdullah of Nahri, Samdinan.2
Sex ‘Abdullah was one of the celebrated Sayyids of Nahri descended from Sex ‘Abdul Aziz, son of Sex ‘Abdul Qadir Gilani.3 One of the disciples who acquired the Qadiri Path from him was a certain Mala Xalid (b. 1779) of Sarazur, later to acquire fame as Mawlana Xalid, “a personage of great importance in the history of the dervish orders for it was he who first introduced the Naqshbandi Path into Southern Kurdistan”.4 Sex ‘Abdullah, with many other Qadiri teachers, later became a disciple of his own former pupil and, having accepted the Naqsbandi Path from him, returned to Nahri to propagate it. After his death his nephew and successor, Sayyid Taha I, also received his licence to teach from Mawlana Xalid. Since Xalid only taught at Suleimaniye from about 1808 until his final departure in 1820 5 we may assume that Sex ‘Abdullah died shortly after 1810. As there is no indication in his Xulasa of when it was composed we are at liberty to date it about the year 1800.
In 1911 the great-grandson of Taha I, Sayyid Taha II, had a fair copy of the work made by one ‘Umar ibn Jarjis, a teacher at the takya of Nahri, and sent it to Ahmad Ramiz for him to publish.6
When the Xulasa is compared with the text in Le Coq’s manu-script the close connexion between them becomes obvious. If we suppose the text in the manuscript to be the work of Ahmade Xani, or to have been generally attributed to him, then it will have had con-siderable currency, and is the more likely to have been Sex ‘Abdullah’s direct model. His purpose in paraphrasing it was evidently to make its contents more immediately comprehensible to those in his cure, and this we may suppose he did by “translating” it into the vernacular Kurdish of Nahri itself.
Fortunately confirmation of this hypothesis lies at hand. During his tenure of the Russian consulship at Urmiye, in the First World War, the late Basile Nikitine enjoyed the services of one Mala Sa'id inter alia as teacher of Kurdish. The mullah was a native of Nahri and had previously been a teacher at the takya there in the time of Sex Muhammad Siddiq, father of Sayyid Taha II.7 He wrote for his new pupil a number of texts in his mother tongue, of which a few examples have since appeared in print.8 These two sources for the …
1 Kurdische Texte, Erster Teil, Anhang 1, Berlin, 1903.
2 Published by Ahmad Ramiz, Istanbul, 1911, 32 pp. For my knowledge, and the loan, of this pamphlet I have to thank Professor W. B. Henning.
3 B. P. Nikitine, Les Kurdes, Paris, 1956, p. 212.
4 C. J. Edmonds, Kurds, Turks and Arabs, London, 1957, p. 77.
5 Edmonds, op. cit., pp. 72, 77.
6 In print the date of the colophon is given as “14th Muharram 339 = 3rd Kanunu §ani 326”, but as Ramiz states (p. 28) that five years had passed since his first publication (viz. Mawlida kurdi, Egypt, 1906) this evidently contains at least one misprint, and should probably read “14th Muharram (1)329 = 3rd Kanunu Sani (1)326” [= 16th January 1911], assuming the Muharram date to differ by one day from the tables.
7 See “Kurdish stories from my collection”, BSOS, 4, 121, and “The tale of Suto and Tato”, BSOS, 3, 76.
8 Beside those mentioned above, “Une Apologie Kurde du Sunnisme”, Rocznik Orjentalistyczny, 8, 116. M. Nikitine also very kindly placed all the surviving MSS. of Mala Said’s texts at my disposal and these are now nearly ready for publication, in transcription, with translation.a.
D. N. Mackenzie
A Kurdish creed
A Locust’s Leg
A Locust’s Leg
A Kurdish creed
D. N. Mackenzie
Reprinted from
A Locust’s Leg
Studies in honour of
S. H. Taqizadeh
1962
London
