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Shouting Loudly: Reflections on Linguistic Smear Campaign Against the Use of Kurdish Language in the Ottoman Empire from A Historical and Literary Perspective
Abstract by Seerwan Hariry On Session I-28  (Culture and Nationalism)

On Thursday, November 2 at 3:00 pm

2023 Annual Meeting

Abstract
The status of the Kurdish language during the medieval and Ottoman periods lacks an accessible rich body of scholarly literature and continues to be ambiguous without the aid of classical Kurdish poetry. Prose being rare, written Kurdish only appeared in literary works. A renowned Kurdish poet, Ahmede Xani (1650-1706), for instance, defies the claim of the deficiency of Kurdish. As he puts, “if this fruit is not juicy, it is Kurdish that has a value. If this child is not charming, it’s the first-born, dearest to me.” In the similar vein, Nali (1797-1877), appeals to literary community not to stigmatize his Kurdish poetry, “Do not question my words: are they Kurdish? Are they local?” It appears that the Kurdish language was a subject to sever oppression during the poets time. The picture of this oppression becomes even more clear when we framed it in historical records. The Kurdish scholar, Ibn Adam Balaki (1750-1844), once, was ashamed of writing a prolegomenon for his book in Kurdish (Mohmammad 2:187). Having translated Quran into Kurdish, the Kurdish poet, Xanay Qubadi (1668-1754) was expelled from his town (Al Mudarris 338). Despite many Kurdish dynasties and ruling houses, Persian and Turkish became official languages and Kurdish chiefs communicated with one another in Persian ( Wahbi 2022: 1.318). The Kurdish language did not become a central point, particularly for the majority of the Kurdish scholars, who produced voluminous manuscripts in various fields of knowledge in non Kurdish during those periods (al-Mudarris 1983). There must have had to be a very strong reason for Kurds to show a lack of interest in cultivating their mother tongue, in favor of writing in “other” languages. This paper argues that the immediate appeal of classical Kurdish poetry in particular, made by poets to write in Kurdish, shall not be limited only to the presence of early Kurdish nationalism (Hassanpour 2003, Shakely 1992, Chyet, 1991), nor be examined in the sense of emergence of vernacularization (Leezenberg 2019), but also, should be scrutinized through the lens of extant discourses and myths surrounding the Kurdish in the form of disparaging remarks and stereotypes. By textualizing the classical Kurdish poems with several historical accounts, I will substantiate this argument by presenting the classical Kurdish poetry as a defining moment, capturing a linguistic smear campaign exercised by local and regional elites against the use of Kurdish as a medium for knowledge construction.
Discipline
History
Literature
Geographic Area
Iran
Iraq
Islamic World
Kurdistan
Ottoman Empire
Sub Area
None