Magin_Edward-thesis

9
The most revered poet among Kurds of Northern Kurdish is Ahmed Xanî. He was
born around 1650 in the town of Khan in the Hakari province of southeastern Turkey, and
most scholars believe that he died in 1707 in Bayazid, Turkey. While he played an active
role in intellectual life, having established a Kurdish school of literature and worked to
build unity in the society, he is best known as the “unrivalled pioneer of the Kurdish
national ideology” (Saadalla 2008:11).
When Xanî wrote his long romantic epic Mem û Zîn in 1694 (Shakely 2002),
which seems to have been inspired by a Kurdish epic called Meme Alan (Kreyenbroek
2005), he introduced into Kurdish society the idea of Kurdish nationalism (Hassanpour
1996: 21). Xanî desired for the Kurds to have their own leader who had an appreciation
for science, art and poetry, books and dîwan 6 (Shakely 2002). While Mem û Zîn is
certainly a love story, Xanî addresses many other facets of society in the poem (Saadalla
2008:10, 11). In an interview with the Kurdish Globe, Farhad Shakely (2002) stated:
He not only told a most beautiful love story, but also expressed his own
political and philosophical ideals and described the political, economic,
social and cultural aspects of a very important period in Kurdish history.
Concerning the methnawî (or masnavî) form of the poem, Hassanpour (1996:49) writes,
“Although the poetic form is borrowed from Persian literature, the details of the plot,
names, characters and setting are mostly Kurdish.” 7 In the preface to his English
translation of the story, Salah Saadalla (2008:10) writes:
The poetical story is more than a tragic Romeo and Juliet…The pages of
the book are full of thoughts, often dominated by philosophy, particularly
sufism, in which shades of meanings, double-meanings, metaphors, and
symbolic expressions, play a major role, and require extra care in
interpreting.
6 Dîwan means ‘an anthology of poems’ (Chyet 2003:161).
7 The story takes place in Cezîra, Turkey. Scholars have inferred that, due to the detailed descriptions of the
geography of the city, Xanî must have lived in Cezîra at some point in his life (Saadalla 2008:10).