Ehmedê Xanî

If the Kurds had been a united people, wrote Ehmedê Xanî more than three centuries ago, the Turks, the Arabs and the Persians would all be in their service. These words were written by a stateless poet in a conquered land, and they make Xanî the first voice of the Kurdish nation — a man who dreamed of a free and united Kurdistan while his people lay divided between two empires.

Born in 1651 in the mountains of Hakkari, Xanî studied in the great medreses of Kurdistan and mastered Kurdish, Arabic, Persian and Turkish. He served as a scholar and teacher in the princely cities of Bayazid and Cizre, but he refused to bow to any sultan. In 1683 he wrote Nûbihara Biçûkan, the first dictionary ever written in the Kurdish language — a verse vocabulary composed so that Kurdish children could learn in their mother tongue. He also composed Eqîdeya Îmanê, a profession of faith in Kurdish verse, and even wrote on astronomy and geography, proving that no field of knowledge belonged only to the masters of the Kurds.

Xanî’s supreme achievement is Mem û Zîn (1692), the national epic of the Kurds and the most famous work of Kurdish literature in the world. In its famous introduction he breaks with every convention of his time: he does not praise a ruler, as was customary, but speaks of the tragedy of his own people with burning honesty. The Kurds, he laments, are a great nation without a king, without a state, without unity — and so they are devoured by their neighbours. The tragic love of Mem and Zîn is an allegory of the Kurdish homeland itself: buried, divided by thorn and stone, and kept apart by those who profit from Kurdish weakness.

When the Kurdish national movement rose after the First World War, the very first book it ever published was Mem û Zîn, printed by the Kurdish Teali Society in Istanbul in 1919. Celadet Bedirxan, the father of modern Kurdish letters, hailed Xanî as the prophet of the Kurdish national faith, and every generation since — poets, rebels, writers and statesmen — has drawn courage from his verse. He died in 1707 and lies buried at Bayazid, near the great Ishak Pasha Palace, in a tomb that Kurds still visit as a place of pilgrimage.

Ehmedê Xanî gave his people what no army could: the knowledge that they are one nation, with one language, one history and one destiny. He is honoured across Kurdistan as the founder of Kurdish national consciousness — the poet of the awakening, whose words still summon his people to unity and freedom.