From the point of view of the interest of the student, it is most regrettable that Kurdish has so little literature; indeed, it is commonly supposed to have none. As has been mentioned before, however, there is a large amount of written matter.
Nor has the Kurdish nation, popularly supposed to be so obscure and savage, been deficient in supplying eminent men to the Government and army of Turkey. Probably few people know that the famous Saladin was a Kurd, or that Edrisi, the minister of the Sultan Selim, was of the same race.
As to their part in military affairs, the instinct of the race has given its members pre-eminence wherever as leaders they have sought it, and Turkey has counted among its bravest generals several Kurds of the north.
Bayazid, the frontier town of Turkey in Asia, close under Mount Ararat, is nowadays practically a Kurdish town, and as early as 1591 there was resident there one of the most celebrated Kurds of his time, Ahmadi Khani of the Hakkari, who built a mosque, wrote a number of philosophical, religious, and poetical works in his native tongue, and conducted a large school at which Kurds were the students, and their own language the chief subject of instruction.
KURDISH LITERATURE
One of the first books was a curious little vocabulary of Arabic, written in verse, as he says himself, for the instruction of “Kurmanj,” i.e. Kurdish, children when they have finished their course of the Quran, “when it is well that they become acquainted with reading and writing.”
The little volume begins with the admonition:
“If your grammar and lessons you fail to construe,
No fame nor renown is in store for you.”
The text is cleverly written in various metres, the name of which the author states at the head of each stanza, and which it is impossible to imitate in translation:—