1
They tell me: Mahbuba is cross-eyed, lazy-eyed, spoiling for a fight.
Cross- and lazy-eyed or is the scale of her allure a little off balance?Cross- and lazy-eyed or she takes aim at hearts, squinting, she seeks
A straight shot, her eyelashes arrows, to cut the heart’s every leg?Her eyes, drunk night and day, share colors:
One is a violet’s bud, the other, a full lily.You have it upside down: her eyes reflect yours. You
Have the tilted sight. When will you learn?Anyone can throw her lacking face onto a mirror
And cite the witnesses, but who believes the visible?The writer of lovers’ virtue and vice, of intimacy and separation,
Of kindness and sorrow, sees two books at one time.Nali, that wild gazelle falls into no man’s trap
For her peregrine eyes are sharp, always alert.
1.
God, I see.
I deny my own actions.
You gave me a heart and tongue
That desire and lust have made my enemy.I want to empty my heart of all but You,
To remember only You, forget all others.Then, my tongue would chant Your name.
I could become the servant of Your places.
If I remain as I am,
I will sow evil names like seeds.If only Your trance fell over my heart
And I kicked away all and how I was.The head is free as the rooftops.
I fell into the trade of desire, beloveds.
The raider’s crown on my head,
I would rule sea and desert.Or seeing You, that light,
I would be a moth,My soul a moth,
My self a sacrifice.Many are moths for Sham, a beauty.
Let me also burn for beauty.
2.
God without need, without family, without intimates,
Make me proud.
Bring me two good people.
Let the first not be my focus.
Really, no one need be my security.
No one is harmed by my actions.
Hate and horror do not corrode my heart.
With your wrathful arrow, wound
Any mean thing imagined about me.
The second: conviction.
Free me from greed.
Your gift, whatever it is, delights me.
When I need nothing from the world’s people,
I will know You,
You and You alone.
I will weave for no one,
I will leech from no house,
I’m so deaf, God, to knowledge of You.
Give me a ready mind so I may know you.
You lead into good work.
If I don’t sin on my own,
No one forces me to it.If my sin is at Your order,
How can my punishment be as well?
I don’t deny Your justice.
My inner self puts me in the path of sin.
God, accept me.
Forget my wealth or poverty.
God, this heart you gave me,
I don’t want it ever empty of Your remembrance.
I want a flower to rise from my mud,
Colored and scented in remembrance of Your judgment.
The Cause, You plead, “Do it,” yet withhold.
You plead, “Don’t do it,” and put the Devil in it.
3.
The high stars are bright at night.
Like me, they have no joy, no peace, no rest.
For years, we have been friends during these sleepless nights.
We are vagabonds.
At night, we can’t put our heads on a pillow.
I am up and down in the empty hand of misery.
They,
Like the doomed and ruined Kurdish tribes,
Are strays in the sky.
By night, they are dew:
The water the grass drinks.
Dawn lifts the fog of my watery eyes.
Last night, near dawn, they cried over me.
They saw me distraught, between friends and enemies.
I’ve never seen such sincerity as in their tears for me.
It was their tears, but I mistook them for dew.
I charged the wind,
“Why do they consume sorrow?
They are not like us.
They live nearest God’s house.”
They responded in dew on the leaves:
“The sparks of your evil lit the sky.
The great Kurds blew on the flame.
Their breath, their smoke, makes our eyes water.”
4.
It is new year’s day.
Nawroz has come:
An old Kurdish celebration of joy and good news.
Until last year, our hope was caged.
The pale flower of new spring was only the blood of youth.
That red brought morning’s good news from the high horizon
Of the Kurds.
Far and wide, that red took this news.
It was Nawroz that put a fire in their liver
And the youth went lovingly toward old death.
Here, the sun rises from the state’s high mountain.
It’s the blood of martyrs shining in the twilight.
Now, new in the history of this nation,
A girl’s breast is a battle shield.
There’s no need to moan and weep for our homeland’s martyrs.
They don’t die.
They live in the hearts of the nation.
5.
Summer came to us like an oven’s flame
Pouring handfuls of smoke into Shahrazur.
Hair accepted scorched beauty.
The daffodil collapsed.
Pines, like light, fell into smoke.
The violet’s neck became crooked as an animal’s.
The moon’s flash and gleam were few.
The universe was murky as Damawand.
I wish I could name this flame love
And that it had caught flame in the hearts of patriots.
This elation would have beautified the heart
And burned people’s thornier desires.
I beg you, God of Life and Living,
Don’t let us squander this chance.
Once, now, let the nation’s boys work.
Let them sell only Kurdish products.
6.
The universe doesn’t allow happiness forever.
He who is a man must live door to door.
I see only my stepfather’s sky.
It has no symbol in the shape of the full moon.
He buried everything in that garden with his own hands.
He didn’t leave a tree to throw a shadow.
Spring came.
He didn’t leave us a poet
Whose moans, like a nightingale’s, could affect us.
Fire spreads in the hills and burns
Anyone celebrating Nawroz.
Except the violet and tulip,
Nothing bows like the elderly
Whose pained livers double them over.
Sleep is death.
Even if the wolf of destiny arrives
And sinks his teeth into our legs,
No one wakes.
He hogtied our four limbs and stole us.
Imagine:
You have no Eid.
You wear horns.
They say,
“Count yourself lucky.
A worse day than this might come.”
When I fell into the pond,
I swam to survive,
But I desired the depth,
Not the river’s swift current.
1.
The fall wind brushes my flowers and covers my vineyard.
My liver, like a nightingale, feels fall’s sorrow in a hundred places. When I saw the flower’s petals captured and taken by the wind, I fell, went crazy. Amazed, I lost my tongue.
Waxwings, come. Until we die together, let’s cry together. Your pure cedar is gone. My pure soul is gone. Nightingale, come. Until we have our souls back, let’s moan.
Your rose garden, my heart’s sorrow—both are gone. Oh, mineshaft of milk and sugar, oh, flower-thief, heart-thief, Oh, new flower on the flowering tree in the garden of my heaven,
No one knows the secret of that mouth, the love of that waistline. My tears shed all the heart’s secret speech. Such gossips. You are much sweeter than Leila, so I am this plain’s Majnun, this era’s Farhard.
My work is to moan over my injured heart. My labor is to cry over my heavy illness.
Your hair’s ends hold me captive to your neck.
I am the owl, yet I love morning. They say a smile or kiss of yours gives life. Until I die, I won’t know the secret of that miracle.
Your eyebrows forbid me the pleasure of your alluring glance. My Qibla is gone into the wine of the old, drunken magi.
She pleads, “The minute I come to you, my eyes, give me your soul.”
So, bartender, give me a cup, for I worry and will worry.
Your glances and grins, they came intending to plunder my brain, body, and heart.
She is a crowd of huntsmen and I a new spring. She hunts and hunts me, yet deaf and innocent.
Wafa’i’s wailing made mountains begin to speak and moan,
But not once did they affect you, my sighs and shouts.
2.
From my head to my toes, I cried out, burning, and my beloved didn’t come.
I blackened my eyes with the dust from her path, and my being’s comfort didn’t come.
Her line and mark is a meadow, but I can’t see the colors of my careless beauty.
The Queen of my hopelessness, with her fine hair and pale brown face, didn’t come.
I cried booming like spring clouds, but the laughter of that flower, that tussled hair, didn’t come.
Because my flower has no mercy, bloody eyes drown the Pleiades.
I am hushed, I keen. Why didn't my full moon come?
Her hair, a circling zunnar, became my mihrab.
The striking Turkish infidel, my beloved non-Muslim didn’t come.
I became a crazy, thirsty lip, bewildered in shadows of grief.
The heart-thief in her broad heights, my animals’ water, didn’t come.
The Ka’aba of my soul, my beloved, I’m amazed: still she hasn’t appeared.
The Qibla of my prayers, the physician for my mysterious illness, didn’t come.
I moan like a ney, I mourn like a disciple of the nightingale’s order.
The queen of the flower’s sugared lips and wind-blown hair didn’t come.
I did not see my flower’s desirous smile. The bud of my heart became bloody.
My insides and outsides burned. The voice of my spring lightning didn’t come.
However much I cried from love’s desire, my head was never empty.
I drowned in storms and still the relief for my burns didn’t come.
Like Wafa’i, how much should I cry and mourn and say,
“From my head to my toes, I cried out, burning, and my beloved didn’t come”?
This brief account by an Ottoman explorer from the 17th century is one of the few examples of a contemporary account of the Kurdish dynasty of Palu.
Evliya Celebi (17th century):
The emir of Palu made his voluntary submission to Bıyıklı Mehemmed Paşa, the vizier of Sultan Selim I, in 921/1515, and in return was granted possession of the district in perpetuity, as an autonomous government (hükûmet) in the province of Diyarbakir. Rulership remains in the family. In official correspondence, the ruler is addressed with the honorary title Cem-cenab. The entire revenue of the district is granted to the ruler himself; no villages have been made into fiefs (timar, ze`amet) to support sipahi troops and their officers. There are no Janissaries or other central government troops in Palu either. In time of war, the ruler joins the imperial campaign with 2000 mounted soldiers.
Palu is the seat of a qadi with salary of 150 aqchas, but it has no mufti or naqib al-ashraf. There are however a market inspector (muhtesib) and a tax collector (şehir voyvodasi).
The fortress is small, unconquerable stronghold built on a steep rock beside the Murad (upper Euphrates) river. Not even Timur succeeded in taking it. The only inhabitants of the fortress are Ibrahim Beg and his soldiers. The fortress is not fit for ordinary habitation, for the ascent to it is extremely demanding. It has a secret tunnel leading down to the river for water-supply, and besides cisterns for [rain-] water. The town itself, below the fortress, consists of some thousand houses with clay roofs.
Roads connect Palu with Ergani and Egil in the west, each at a day's distance, with Harput in the north, also a day away, and towards the south with Diyarbakir at two day journeys' distance. Behind Palu is a village named Baghin, which is like one of the gardens of Paradise, and which belongs to the domains of the begs of Palu. It is famous in Kurdistan as a pleasure resort. A crystal-clear river springs from the rocks here, one of the three sources of the Euphrates.
1.
Is tonight the year’s longest or just pitch dark?
Far from you, my eyes are without light tonight.My heart is a secluded judge, dear one.
Your arrival, a gift, is looked for tonight.You’re the king of the tilted crown, the drunk sight.
What do I care of Caesar and Emperor tonight?My tears trace the contours of your name:
I stand in Hallaj’s place tonight.My heart desires your eyes. That’s why
All is savage, wild, and distant tonight.Did you just wake up? Are your eyes confused?
Are they always so? Or simply drunk tonight?Your distance has me keening like a nightingale.
Your arrival makes a whole world rejoice tonight.The eyelash army, armed with eyebrow swords—
Is defeated by separation and waiting tonight.If dear ones ask after Kurdi’s state,
In the corner, with no one, he is abandoned tonight.
The first illustrated edition of Husein the Kurd (Kord), a Persian popular romance, was published in the nineteenth century. The plot revolves around the adventurous life of the hero (Gord), Husein. Kord and Gord are inextricably intertwined in Persian literature, as evidenced by several examples. The relationship between Gord and Kord is expanded upon in several versions of the popular romance. The attributions are used interchangeably in some instances. One contention to several allusions of Kurds in Arabic literature is that the Persian Gaf has been transcribed as Kaf. For example, the Kurdish word "Gorani" becomes "al Kurani" (the Gorani) in Arabic. When it comes to Iranian mythology in early Arabic literature, the same argument may be made, suggesting that they may simply signify "hero" rather than the Kurd designation as an ethnonym. This is, at first glance, a clever point. The suggestion reflects a lack of acquaintance with the relationship between these two meanings in the oldest documented attestations of the various legends, though. For a long time, Persian literature has drawn a deep connection to Hero and the Kurd-label.
The Kurdish caliphal ambassador, Suhrawardi, was on an official mission in Ayyubid land. However, when the routine work was completed, what did Suhrawardi do? According al Khazraji (13th century), he met with Ali Kurdi.
When the shaykh and imam al-Suhrawardī came to Damascus on a mis-sion from the caliph to invest al-Malik al-'Adil with the robe of honor, neckband, and so forth, he said to his companions, 'I want to visit 'Alī al-Kurdi,' but the people said, 'O' master, do not do that for you are the imam of existence and that man does not perform the canonical prayers and walks around naked most of the time!', to which he replied, 'It is necessary for me to do so.' Now, shaykh 'Alī al-Kurdī used to inhabit the Grand Mosque of Damascus, but when a muwallah called Yāqūt entered it, by sunset the very same day 'Alī had already left Damascus and set up residence in the cemetery near Bāb al-Şaghir. He remained there until his death and Yāqūt prevailed in the Grand Mosque. I saw this Yaqūt in the Grand Mosque after 'Alī's departure. When the shaykh Shihab al-Din al-Suhrawardī searched the Grand Mosque for 'Alī, Yāqüt told him that he was now living in the cemetery and so he mounted his donkey and with a guide set off to find 'Alī. Upon reaching the place, he dismounted and walked towards him. When 'Alī al-Kurdī saw him drawing near, he defiantly displayed his nudity, but the shaykh Shihab al-Dīn said, 'This is not a thing which will stop me, for you must see me as I am your guest!" And so he approached and sat with him. Later, some porters came bear-ing savory food, and they were asked, 'who do you want?', to which they replied, 'the shaykh 'Alī al-Kurdī'. He said, 'put it before my guest!', and then turning to the shaykh Shihāb al-Dīn said, 'Did you not say that you were my guest? In God's name, eat! This is your reception.' And so the shaykh ate and he held him ['Alī al-Kurdī] in great esteem.
The Baban prince Osman was a curious person. He was keen to learn from the experiences of the European states in his conversation with James rich. He was extremely pleased to hear that clans existed in England and that the religious class had been relegated to a corner there. Perhaps realizing that the patronage and formation of the religious classes for control purposes was more harmful than beneficial.
James Rich (19th-century):
I hope," he (Osman) added, "you will not take amiss the questions I ask." I told him that our conquests in India proceeded from the very principle I had just laid down. We were not the first Europeans who had conquered places in India. Some of the places we now held we had taken from those Europeans, in consequence of our wars with them in Europe; others they had ceded to us; some we had purchased; others we obtained from the natives by treaty, in return for services or other advantages. Thus, from small beginnings, a mighty empire was formed, which bordered on the territories of many powerful princes. Some of these profited by us, and were friendly to us, others again were jealous of our power, and envied a prosperity, which they were not enlightened enough to attain. When people are neighbours, interests must frequently jar, and subjects of quarrel arise; and though the English are peaceably inclined towards those who are similarly dis-posed towards them, yet they are not a people to be imposed upon. The necessity of defending our rights, or vindicating our honour, had often produced wars, in which it had generally pleased God to grant us the victory; but that in all such contests, it would be found, we were never the aggressors. He seemed much struck with this view of the subject, and confessed he had, previously, always imagined that the English had at once sent a large army to conquer India, and carried on their conquests without cause, or even pretext, whenever they chose. He then asked me about air-balloons; and said he had been told they were machines capable of conveying detachments of soldiers to any given point. We then came back to England. Nothing delighted him so much as the knowledge that we had clans among us. He was very minute in his inquiries into the manners, language, and character of our ashaier or tribes, and requested me to tell him some of the names of the clans. He was charmed with the idea of clan regiments, with their own costume and officers, but wondered that the reigning caste should be English, who were sheherlis or townspeople, and of no tribe; and still more that they should make good soldiers.
His asking me where we got our rice, introduced the mention of the New World; and he immediately requested me to tell him how it was discovered. "By astronomy and geometry," said I, "it was ascertained that the world was globular like an orange." This part of my explanation I illus-trated by holding up my clenched fist: "Here is Frenghistan-there is India-this is the way we come from Frenghistan to India; but some people began to inquire, why can we not go round the other way to India? Some said it might be done, others that it could not. An individual more enterprising than the rest said he would try it, and he found a prince who gave him ships and means to make the experiment. In endeavouring to go round this untried way to India, the new continent was found." This he entirely comprehended.
In explaining to him the nature of the American republic, he said, "This is like the tribes in Khoshnav, where each village has its own head, and they all meet together to consult for the good of the whole community." When I told him no one sat in the presence of our king, "What!" said he, not even your ulema"*? No, said I. "You see," said he, turning round to some of his people present, with an air of satisfaction, "Mullas have not much power in his country." He talked much of the state of Koordistan. My country is in a wretched state," said he. "If you serve the Turks, they insult and depose you when they choose; if you serve the Persians, they are con-tinually teasing you for money." He is a good Koord; but of the two rival powers, it is evident he prefers the Persians. At parting he was extremely friendly, said he considered me as of the same tribe with himself, and hoped for a continued intimacy between us.