Ahmedê Xanî

Ahmedê Xanî was born in 1651 in Bohtan, east of Amed, into a religious family from a Kurdish mountain region then contested between the Ottoman and Safavid empires. He received his religious education in the madrasas of Bohtan and Bitlis, studying jurisprudence, logic, astronomy and classical literature, and then moved between the villages of Bayazid and Amed as teacher and guide. In 1692 Xanî completed his immortal epic Mem û Zîn, the tragic love story of Mem, son of the prince of Bohtan, and Zîn, sister of the prince of Cizîrê. But the story was no mere romance. In the preface Xanî states openly that he wrote the epic in Kurmanji Kurdish to prove 'Kurdish is a language of poetry like other languages', and that the Kurds 'are no less than any other people, save that they have no king of their own to defend them'. This preface is considered the first written Kurdish national manifesto, a century and a half before European nationalism. Xanî also wrote Nûbara Biçûkan ('the Spring of the Little Ones'), in 1683 — the first Kurdish-Arabic dictionary for children, teaching them both languages systematically. He wrote religious treatises, prophetic praise poetry and dozens of classical poems that are still taught in every Kurdish madrasa. He was an ascetic, lived simply, never married, and devoted his life to writing and teaching. Xanî died in 1707 and was buried in Doğubayazıt at the foot of Mount Ararat in today's Turkey, where Kurds raised a small domed shrine that still receives thousands of visitors every year. He is called 'the king of Kurdish poets'; in 2007 UNESCO designated the year of his commemoration the 'Year of Ahmedê Xanî'. Mem û Zîn has now been translated into more than twenty languages, is staged in every Kurdish capital, and is the Kurdish text that — bans notwithstanding — every Kurdish generation has known by heart for three hundred years.