More than a century ago, the English traveler Bannister Soane encountered a remarkable Kurdish couple in Halabja. Figures such as Adela Khatun are well known today, yet they are often portrayed as exceptional anomalies, rare examples of women participating in political or military affairs. In reality, the opposite direction is true in my opinion. Women taking part in battles and political life were likely far more common than surviving sources suggest.
What survives in written form represents only a tiny fraction of the past. Given the social structures, political dynamics, and character of many Kurdish tribes, it would be more surprising if ambitious and influential women had been excluded from military and political affairs. The women whose names have come down to us are therefore unlikely to have been unique exceptions. Rather, they were probably among the relatively few whose lives happened to be recorded in the limited body of sources that has survived.
Bannister Soane writes:
The old Jaf Pashas had been forced to keep upon good terms with the dynasty of Ardalan, and from time to time marriages were effected between the Jaf and Ardalan chiefs and petty chiefs.
These alliances were looked upon with great dis-favour and some alarm by the Turks, whose keenest desire is to see the Jaf on bad terms with their neigh-bours in Persia. Consequently when Uthman Pasha in 1895 announced his intention of marrying into the family of the Ardalan Vazirs, some futile opposition was offered by the Turkish Government. However, he pro ceeded to Sina and brought home to Halabja, then an insignificant village, as bride, a lady of the Vazir family whose father occupied an important position in Teheran. Once installed at Halabja, Lady Adela proceeded, aided by the prestige of her family, to assert her position, a procedure not opposed by Uthman Pasha. She built two fine houses, finer than any edifice in Sulaimania, upon the Sina model, importing Persian masons and artificers to do the work. Her servants were all Persian subjects, and in Halabja she instituted in her new houses a little colony of Persian Kurds, and opened her doors to all travellers from and to that country, and kept continual communications with Sina, five days' journey away. Gradually the official power came into her hands. Uthman Pasha was often called away to attend to affairs, and occasionally had to perform journeys to Sulaimania, Kirkuk, and Mosul on matters of govern-ment. So Lady Adela, governing for him in his absence, built a new prison, and instituted a court of justice of which she was president, and so consolidated her own power, that the Pasha, when he was at Halabja, spent his time smoking a water pipe, building new baths, and carrying out local improvements, while his wife ruled.
She built a bazaar in Halabja, a square construction having four covered rows of shops connected by alleys of more shops, all covered in and domed with good brick arches, and trade flowed in to Halabja, which grew to considerable importance. Such importance did the place attain that the Turks actually grew jealous, and to obtain a hold over it, put up a telegraph line, to which the tribesmen objected, and expressed their objection by cutting down the wire. At the same time Lady Adela advised the Turks not to repair it, for she too objected to the incursion of Turks upon her territory, and warned them that as fast as they built up telegraph wires her people should cut them down. And so to-day Halabja possesses no telegraph line, though a uniformed official lives there and rejoices in the title of Post and Telegraph Master. Every summer, when the climate of Halabja becomes oppressively hot, the court of Lady Adela repairs to a little village in the hills, or to a town in Persian territory, where some three or four months are passed.
In and around Halabja Lady Adela has instituted the Persian fashion of making gardens, apart from the gardens around the houses, and now outside the little town are several of the graceful and thickly treed gardens which are only seen in Persia, gardens which are wildernesses of large shady trees, with unsuspected bowers and flower-beds in their shady depths. So here, in a remote corner of the Turkish Empire, which decays and retrogrades, is one little spot, which, under the rule of a Kurdish woman has risen from a village to be a town, and one hill-side, once barren, now sprinkled with gardens; and these are in a measure renovations of the ancient state of these parts.
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