Zeynelabidin Zinar, Medrese education in Northern Kurdistan

Abbas Vali (ed.), Essays on the origins of Kurdish nationalism, Costa Mesa, Cal.: Mazda Publishers, 2003, pp. 40-57., 2003

Working Paper no. 13, Islamic Area Studies Project, Tokyo, Japan, 1999., 1999

Kurdish Studies Archive, 2018

In the closing decades of the 11th/17th century, two Turkish translations of the Sharafnāma were produced in the Kurdish princely courts of Bidlīs and Pālū. The translators were Muḥammad Bēg b. Aḥmad Bēg, a great-great-grandson of Sharaf Khān II, the author of the work, and Sham'ī, a secretary at the court of Amīr Yanṣūr Bēg, prince of Pālū. While their works differed in style and purpose, both men offered a reflection on the demise of Persian and increasing prestige of Turkish in Ottoman Kurdistan. In the case of Sham'ī, this was supplemented by a more general observation on the various languages of the region. Evidence also suggests that while Persian was replaced by Turkish in the princely courts of Ottoman Kurdistan, some Kurdish literati and scholars instead chose to write part of their works in Kurdish. This article is a comparative study of Muḥammad Bēg and Sham'ī's translations, followed by a brief analysis of the associated sociolinguistic developments.

Hasanpoor, J. 1999: A Study of European, Persian and Arabic Loans in Standard Sorani. Reports on Asian and African Studies (RAAS) 1. XX pp. Uppsala. ISBN 91-506-1353-7. This dissertation examines processes of lexical borrowing in the Sorani standard of the Kurdish language, spoken in Iraq, Iran, and the Kurdish diaspora. Borrowing, a form of language contact, occurs on all levels of language structure. In the pre-standard literary Kurdish (Kirmanci and Sorani) which emerged in the pre-modern period, borrowing from Arabic and Persian was a means of developing a distinct literary and linguistic tradition. By contrast, in standard Sorani and Kirmanci, borrowing from the state languages, Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, is treated as a form of domination, a threat to the language, character, culture, and national distinctness of the Kurdish nation. The response to borrowing is purification through coinage, internal borrowing, and other means of extending the lexical resources of the language.

The position of the 19 million Kurds is an extremely complex one. Their territory is divided between 5 sovereign states, none of which has a Kurdish majority. They speak widely divergent dialects, and are also divided by religious affiliations and social factors. It has taken the tragic and horrifying events in Iraq this year to bring the Kurds to the centre of the world stage, but their particular problems, and their considerable geo-political importance, have been the source of growing concern and interest during the last two to three decades.

This chapter seeks to analyze the role of religion in the peace-building efforts in Turkey related to the so-called “Kurdish Opening” (2013–2015). It asks the question whether Islam has been a constituent of peace-building given its unique place in the Turkish polity, both paradoxically incorporated in the governance of a legally secular state through the Turkish Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) and spanning a vast horizontal system of networks through numerous Islamic schools, civil society organizations, and various tariqas. Since the majority of the Turks and Kurds belong to the dominant Sunni Islam which has enjoyed unprecedented material and ideological support in the last decade by the governing Justice and Development Party, the chapter seeks to establish to what extent the Islamic leaders and actors have utilized their resources to diversify the top-down approach to the Kurdish–Turkish peace process and to bring the two divided communities closer together, while also reaching out to the smaller ethnoreligious groups. Drawing on original ethnographic research, the author argues that Islam was infrequently and selectively employed as a mobilizing force in the cause of peace, and its employment differed significantly between the Diyanet and the Kurdish Islamic actors. As for the minority religions, they saw little opportunity for participation in the peace process, even though they had certain expectations from it. The chapter contends that the peace process in Turkey needs to be pursued in a holistic way that goes beyond the solution of the “Kurdish issue” alone and guarantees equal rights and inclusive citizenship for all. While the “Kurdish Opening” remains central in efforts to bring stability and peace to the polarized society in Turkey, it also needs to address the problems of other minority groups.