Qazi Muhammad

Mohammad son of Qazi Ali was born in 1893 in Mahabad to a distinguished religious family: his father was the city's chief Islamic judge and his grandfather the Mufti of Iranian Kurdistan. He received his religious education in Mahabad and then in Najaf, returning to his home city in the 1920s to take up the post of religious judge after his father — from which came the title 'Qazi' (judge) that overtook his personal name. He was a man of learning and quiet spirit, joining Sunni Shafi'i Islam to a clear Kurdish nationalism. He founded the secret Komala party in Mahabad in 1942, which in 1945 grew into the Kurdistan Democratic Party (PDK), the most important Kurdish party in Iran. His vision was that the Kurds deserved a state within a democratic Iran, not a separate one. When the Iranian army withdrew from the Kurdish region in autumn 1945 — because of political shifts after the Second World War and the brief Soviet presence — Kurdish leaders gathered around Qazi Muhammad and on 22 January 1946 proclaimed the Republic of Kurdistan in Mahabad's Çwar Çira Square. Qazi was elected its president and wore a military uniform for the first time in his life. The Kurdish flag — green, white and red with the golden sun — was hoisted for the first time in history. The Republic lasted only eleven months. Yet within it Qazi Muhammad opened the first official Kurdish schools, printed Kurdish books, raised the Kurdish army under Mullah Mustafa Barzani who had come from Iraq, and held court under a tree on the square itself. He refused to flee despite his friends' counsel, saying 'I will not come down from a mountain of my people into an exile where my enemy can keep me safe'. After the Soviet withdrawal and the return of the Iranian army in December 1946, Qazi Muhammad was arrested. On 31 March 1947 he was hanged with his brother Sadr Qazi and his uncle Abu al-Qasim Beygzade on Çwar Çira Square itself — the square that had seen the Republic born saw its end. Before his execution he wrote a Kurdish poem that ends with the line 'I do not fear death; I fear that the sun of Kurdistan may not endure'. Today his house in Mahabad is a museum, 31 March is a day of mourning across all Kurdistan, and his portrait will not leave the walls of Mahabad.