Abulfeda, on the origin of the Kurds & Kurds as "Persians"

Abulfeda, the fourteenth-century Ayyubid prince of Hama, sets forth his preferred view on the origins of the Kurds amid a sea of competing and often contradictory traditions. In his conception, the Daylamites, Gilaks, and Kurds are all connected, each representing a branch of the broader category of "Persians."

Abulfeda writes: 

The Persian nation is in the middle of the inhabited world, and it is called the land of Persia, and from it are Kerman, Ahvaz, and other regions that would take too long to mention. There has been disagreement about the lineage of the Persians. It has been said that they are from the descendants of Faris b. Aram b. Sam and the Persians say that they are from the descendants of Gayōmart. Gayōmart, according to them is the progenitor of mankind, like Adam according to Muslims. They mention that the kingdom remained among them from Gayōmart, and he is Adam, until the dominance of Islam, except for a break that occurred in short periods that are not to be taken into account, like the dominance of Zahak. The kings of Persia were the greatest kings of the world. They had a kingdom that no other king had ever achieved. The Persians have many subgroups, among them the Daylamites, who are the inhabitants of the mountains, and the Gilaks, who inhabit the valleys that make up the Daylam Mountains, and their lands are on the coast of the Sea of Tabaristan. Among them are the Kurds, and their homes are the mountains of Shahrazur.

Abulfedaʾ's conception is better understood when read alongside more detailed works that make similar claims. One such example is the eleventh-century Andalusian author al-Andalusi. In this framework, there is little resemblance to modern linguistic classifications. Before "Kurdish" came to be recognized as a distinct linguistic category, the languages now grouped under that label were often subsumed under broader designations, one of which was "Persian."

This categorization extended beyond language. The ethnonym "Persian" could also be applied to regions inhabited by Kurds and other Iranian peoples. In Abulfedaʾ's account, the Daylamites, Gilaks, and Kurds are the only nations explicitly identified as Persian. This is intriguing for several reasons. He certainly possessed the vocabulary to distinguish speakers of Dari or Farsi in the narrower sense in which those terms are understood today, yet such categories are absent from his discussion. Instead, his use of "Persian" appears to reflect a broader ethnogeographic conception rather than a precise linguistic one: 

Şāʻid4 has said: Persians were the first nation. Their abodes were in the centre of the inhabited world. Their country extends from the mountain in the north of Iraq, near to the mountain pass (aqabah) of Hulwān, wherein is Media (al-Māhāt), to al-Kurğ, al-Dīnawar, Hamadān, Qum, Qāšān, and other places, to Armenia and Derbend, which is close to the Sea of the Hazar, and further to Azerbaijan, Tabaristān, Müqān, al-Baylaqān, Adān, al-Šābirān, Rayy, al-Talaqān, and Ğurğān, extending to the area of Hurāsān, such as Nīsābūr, al-Marw, Sarahš, Herat, Hwārizm, Balh, Buhārā, Samarqand, Fargānah, al-Šāš, and other areas of Hurāsān, and still to the area of Siğistān, Kirman, Fārs, al-Ahwāz, Işbahān, and the adjacent areas. All these formed one kingdom under one king, and under one language, Persian, although they differed from one another in some few words (lugāt), but their language had the same number of consonants and they combined them together in the same manner. This considered, their differences separated them from one another in other matters of this language. (These languages were) such as Fahlawiyyah, Dariyyah, and other variants of the languages of Fārs.