Feqiyê Teyran

Born around 1590 in the mountain village of Werezûz in Miks (Bahçesaray) in Hakkari, Feqiyê Teyran — born Mîr Mihemed, the son of Abdullah — is one of the founders of Kurdish literature and the living bridge between the two great masters of classical verse, Melayê Cizîrî and Ehmedê Xanî.

His name means the scholar of the birds, and the tradition of his people tells how he could speak with the birds of the mountains. The birds of his poetry are never mere ornaments: they are the soul of a caged people, singing of freedom. Feqiyê Teyran was educated in the medreses of Hizan, Finik, Heşete and Cizre, where he is said to have studied in the circle of Melayê Cizîrî, the prince of the Kurdish lyric. Rather than seek the comfort of a mullah’s position, he chose the wandering life of a dervish, carrying his verses from assembly to assembly across the Kurdish lands and giving his words to the people.

His works form the sacred foundations of remembered Kurdish poetry: Çîrroka Şêxê Sen’an (1621), a mystical epic of forbidden love and longing; Qewlê Hespê Reş, a masterpiece of folk legend; Bersîsê Abid; Zembîlfiroş; and Beyta Dimdim, the first literary telling of the Battle of Dimdim of 1609-10, in which the Kurdish defenders of the Dimdim fortress refused to surrender to the Safavid empire and chose death before submission. Through his poem Feqiyê Teyran turned that heroic last stand into an immortal legend and taught Kurds to remember their defenders rather than their masters.

He wrote in plain, song-like Kurdish that shepherds and rebels could understand and remember, weaving nature, divine love and the pain of separation into verses that Kurds still sing today. His songs crossed the mountains of Müküs, Cizre and Hizan to the banks of the Tigris, and Kurds have called him their Yunus Emre — the voice that carried the heart of a people. He died around 1660 in his native Miks; his tombstone was rediscovered only in 2013 in the village of Şandis in Hizan. Even in death, as in life, the voice of the Kurdish people waited patiently to be found again.

Feqiyê Teyran stands at the threshold of Kurdish greatness. To read him is to hear the Kurdish language discovering its proud and unbreakable voice — the voice that Xanî would soon lift to the summit of the world’s literature.