Elî Teremaxî and the Vernacularization of Medrese Learning in Kurdistan

Abstract

Eli Teremaxi's Serfa Kurmancî has not yet received the critical attention it deserves. It was dismissed by Auguste Jaba as a text of “minor interest,” but in fact it is of paramount importance both for the study of the Kurdish language and for the history of Kurdish learning. Not only does it contain the oldest extant detailed remarks on Kurdish grammar, in all likelihood preceding even Garzoni's 1787 Grammatica; it is also among the first examples of Kurdish-language prose writing. The rise of prose texts of learning in Kurdish in the eighteenth century is an aspect of so-called “vernacularization,” i.e. the use of a vernacular language for new purposes of written literature and learning. Vernacularization is, this article argues, a crucial prerequisite for the rise of a national language. The article also briefly discusses traces of a similar development in some of Teremaxî's near-contemporaries.

Notes

¹Maurizio Garzoni, Grammatica e vocabulario della lingua kurda (Rome, 1787).

²Cf. Reshîd Findî, Elî Teremaxî yekemîn Rêzimannivîs û pexshannivîsê Kurde (Baghdad, 1985), 5ff.

³Alexandre Jaba, Receuil de notices et de récits kourdes (St. Petersburg, 1860), VI–VII.

⁴In ibid., vii.

⁵Incidentally, the commission also recommended against the publication of Bayazîdî's summary of the Mem û Zîn tale. Bayazîdî's summary was published in Latin transcription as Mele Mahmudê Bazîdî, Mem û Zîn (Diyarbakir, 2007); although clearly based on the written version rather than on any of the numerous oral versions sung by Kurdish bards, it omits the mystical dimension of Xânî's text.

⁶Cat.nr. C 1958, Petersburg Oriental Institute.

⁷M. Khaznadar, ed., Destura erebî bi zimanê kurdî (Baghdad, 1971); reprinted with Latin transcription as Mele Elî Teremaxî, Serfa Kurmancî, ed. M. Khaznadar and Z. Zinar (Stockholm, 1997).

⁸Findî, Elî Teremaxî yekemîn Rêzimannivîs û pexshannivîsê Kurde; Mamoste Qedrî, “Eliyê Teremaxî û Dîtinên wî yên li ser Rêçikên Rêzimana Kurdî li Gor Pirtûka wî ya bi Navê Destûra Zimanê Erebî bi Kurdî Digel Hinde Nimûneyêd Farisî û Kurdî,” Bîr, Hejmar 1 (Bihar 2005): 192–8.

⁹Amir Hassanpour, Nationalism and Language in Kurdistan, 1918–1985 (San Francisco, 1992), esp. 81; Mehmed Uzun, Destpêka edebiyeta kurdî (Ankara, 1992), esp. 15–16.

¹⁰Below, I will indicate quotations from or references to Khaznadar's and Zinar's editions of the Tesrîf by, respectively, “Kh” and “Z” followed by a page number.

¹¹Sagnıç's brief sketch of Teremaxî's life and works, included in Feqî Huseyn Sagniç, Dîroka wêjeya kurdî (Istanbul, 2002), 387–90, appears to be largely based on Bayazîdî's account.

¹²R.H. Kevorkian and P.B. Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l'Empire Ottoman à la veille du Génocide (Paris, 1992), 550; J. Verheij (personal communication, Skype message, May 12, 2014.6). The Russian orientalist Hovsep Orbeli (1887–1961) conducted ethnographic research in pre-war Muks, posthumously published as Folklor i byt Moksa (Moscow, 1982), translated into Kurdish as Li Muksê folklore û jiyana rojane (Istanbul, 2011).

¹³M.B. Rudenko, Opisanie kurdskikh rykopisei leningradskikh sobranii (Moscow, 1961), 101–2.

¹⁴Cat no. Kurd 18, State Library, Petersburg; Ms. Or. Quart. 1057, SB Marburg/Berlin. Cf. Rudenko (Opisanie kurdskikh rykopisei leningradskikh sobranii, 102–3); and K. Fuad, Kurdische Handschriften (Berlin, 1970), 114–15.

¹⁵The undated manuscript of the Tesrîf shown to me by Muhammad Ali Qaradaghî is written in a fully vocalized script and features extensive marginal comments. This version appears to display a number of significant deviations from the text as edited by Khaznadar and transcribed by Zinar; but as I do not have any manuscript copies of the entire work at my disposal, I cannot discuss these matters here.

¹⁶For brief introductory remarks, see the lemmata “Nahw,” “Sarf,” and “Tasrîf,” all by C. Versteegh, in the Encyclopaedia of Islam (2nd ed., Leiden, 1960ff.). For more on the origins and basic vocabulary of the Arabic linguistic sciences including sarf or tasrîf, see Jonathan Owens, The Foundations of Grammar: An Introduction to Medieval Arabic Grammatical Theory, Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, no. 45 (Amsterdam, 1988). See also Michael Carter, “Sarf et khilâf: Contribution à la grammaire arabe,” Arabica 20 (1973): 292–304; Michael Carter, “When did the Arabic word nahw first come to denote grammar?,” Language and Communication 5 (1985): 265–72. These and similar works generally focus on the early phase of Arabic language studies up to the establishment of a grammatical “orthodoxy” by the so-called Basra school.

¹⁷Cf. Owens, The Foundations of Grammar, 99.

¹⁸Cf. Bernard Weiss, “A Theory of the Parts of Speech in Arabic (Noun, Verb, Particle): A Study of ‘ilm al-wad‘,” Arabica XXXII (1976): 23–36.

¹⁹I have not been able to trace this quotation; most likely, it comes from a (rhymed) Turkish-language sarf text. With Khaznadar, I read the second line as okuyan darrâk gerek, rather than okuyandır onu gören, as does Zinar.

²⁰Mulla Mahmûdê Bayazîdî, Adat û Rusûmetnameê Ekradiye. MS 1858/1274, cat.nr. Kurd 34, published by Margaret Rudenko as Nravy i obyčai kurdov in the Gosydarstvennaya pyblitsnaya biblioteka (Leningrad (Petersburg), 1963); Latin transcription edited by Jan Dost, Adat û Rusûmetnameê Ekradiye (Istanbul, 2010), 36–38.

²¹For a brief comparative statement, see S. Pollock, “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History,” Public Culture 12 (2000): 591–625; for a more detailed description, see Pollock's breathtaking The Language of the Gods in the World of Men (Berkeley, CA, 2006).

²²See especially M. Silverstein, “Language Structure and Linguistic Ideology,” in The Elements, P. Cline et al., eds. (Chicago, IL, 1979), 193–247. For a discussion more directly relevant to the present paper, see R. Bauman and Ch. Briggs, Voices of Modernity (Cambridge, 2003).

²³The present paper forms part of a larger work, From Coffee House to Nation State: The Emergence of National Languages in the Modernizing Ottoman Empire, currently in progress. For an initial statement of its general argument, focusing on religious dimensions and philosophical implications rather than linguistic particulars, see my “The Structural Transformation of the Coffeehouse: Language, Religion, and the Public Sphere in the Modernizing Muslim World,” in Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality, ed. D. Houtman and B. Meyer (New York, 2012), 267–81.

²⁴Halil İnalcık, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age (London, 1973), 201. Teremaxî remarks that “in every language, this science of sarf exists and is practiced” (Kh29; Z14), implying that a Persian sarf already exists, and that it, like Arabic sarf, can provide the vocabulary and examples for the grammatical description of Kurdish (ibid.). It does not become clear from the text if Teremaxî is basing his argument on any existing descriptions of Persian, as neither he nor later authors like Bayazîdî, Zinar or Öztoprak (to be discussed below) lists any work dealing specifically with Persian sarf as part of the Northern Kurdish medrese curriculum.

²⁵Kâtib Chelebi, The Balance of Truth, trans. G. Lewis (London, 1957), 26. In La science chez les turcs ottomans (Paris, 1938), esp. 92, 106, Adnan Adıvar, apparently based on Çelebi, makes similar claims.

²⁶Khalid al-Rouayheb, “The Myth of the ‘Triumph of Fanaticism’ in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Empire,” Die Welt des Islams 48 (2008): 196–21, esp. 210ff.

²⁷Hassanpour, Nationalism and Language in Kurdistan, 73.

²⁸Cf. M. van Bruinessen, “Les Kurdes et leur langue au XVIIe siècle: notes d'Evliya Çelebi sur les dialectes kurdes,” Studia Kurdica no. 1–5 (1988): 13–34, http://www.let.uu.nl/~martin.vanbruinessen/personal/publicaties.html (accessed March 23, 2012).

²⁹English trans. Dankoff (Leiden, 1990: 97).

³⁰English trans. ibid., 153.

³¹Bateyî's Mawlûd was recently republished as 173–234 of Xalid Sadînî, Mela Huseynê Bateyî: Jiyan, berhem û helbestên wî (Istanbul, 2010); a recent bilingual Kurdish–Turkish edition of Cizîrî is Melayê Cizîrî, Dîwan, ed. Osman Tunç (Istanbul, 2010).

³²Van Bruinessen, “Les Kurdes et leur langue au XVIIe siècle,” 24.

³³Recently, Kadri Yıldırım has republished both the Nûbihara piçûkan and the ‘Eqîdeya îmanê in book form, both with extensive commentaries (Ehmedê Xanî külliyati, vols. I and II, Istanbul, 2008). Another aqîda text, the Eqîdeya islamî, is conventionally ascribed to Xanî as well (e.g. by Hassanpour, Nationalism and Language in Kurdistan, 54, who in fact thinks this text is identical to the Eqîdeya êmanê); it is also included in a recent edition of Xanî's works (Hemû Berhem, Diyarbakir, 2007, 349–65). There are good reasons, however, to doubt this identification. First, it is partly written in prose, unlike any other work by Xanî; second, it displays substantial doctrinal differences with the Eqîdeya îmanê, but is virtually identical in doctrine—and, at times, wording—to two nineteenth-century aqîda texts from Khalidiyya Naqshbandî circles, namely Mawlana Khalid's Aqîdetnamey kurdî, originally written around 1800 in Sorani Kurdish, and a short aqîda text in the Hakkarî dialect (for the former, see the edition by Muhammad Mala Karim, Aqîday kurdiy Mawlânâ Khâlidî Naqshbandi, in Govârî korî zanyârî ‘îrâq-dastay kurde 8 (1981): 199–222, reprinted in Kemal Re’ûf Muhammad, Eqîdey ‘îmân—‘eqîdey kurdî (Arbil 2004); for the latter, see D.N. MacKenzie, “A Kurdish Creed,” in A Locust's Leg, ed. W.B. Henning and E. Yarshater (London, 1962), 162–70.

³⁴The Nehcul Enâm was published in Latin transcription by Zeynelabidin Zinar (Stockholm); another transcription was published by the Mezopotamya Institute of Istanbul in 2002.

³⁵Z. Zinar, Xwendina medresê (Stockholm, 1993). 79; an English-language summary of this work was published as Z. Zinar, “Medrese education in Kurdistan,” Les annales de l'autre Islam, no. 5 (1998): Islam des Kurdes, 39–58. The Milli Kütüphane in Ankara has an Arabic-language manuscript of a short introductory text by Sêrtî in its possession (cat.no. 9572, fols. 25–37); I am indebted to Khaled al-Rouayheb for this information. That library also lists one other work by Sêrtî: the Manzûme-i aqâ’id, which may or may not be identical to the Nehcul Enâm (cat no. 5752). Manuscripts of other works by Sêrtî may yet emerge from state libraries or state collections.

³⁶Rudenko, Opisanie kurdskikh rykopisei leningradskikh sobranii, 102–3; Fuad, Kurdische Handschriften, 114–15. The Marburg/Berlin manuscript of the Zurûf opens with a discussion of the two distinct grammatical schools (madhâhib) of Basra and Kufa, thus showing a basic familiarity with early theoretical debates on nahw.

³⁷Jaba, Receuil de notices et de récits kourdes, 12–13.

³⁸Cf. ibid., 12.

³⁹M. Said Ramazan al-Buti, Babam Molla Ramazan el-Buti: Hayatı, Düşünceleri, Mücadelesi (Istanbul, 2011), 23.

⁴⁰Zinar (Xwendina medresê, 48) states that in the medrese he attended, although the works studied were mostly written in Arabic, the teachers would translate and explain them in Kurdish.

⁴¹Recently, a Kurdish-language rendering of the contents of three Arabic-language works on shafi‘ite aqîda and fiqh (the Hashiyet al-jamal, on shaykh Sulayman al-Jamal's Sharh al-manhajî; Yûsuf al-Ardabîlî's al-anwâr li a'mal al-ebrara; and shaykh Muhammad Shirbînî al-Khatîb's Mughni'l-muhtaja) was published by M. Burhan Hedbî as Eqîde û Fiqha Zelal (Istanbul, 2011).

⁴²For more information and further literature on al-Kâtibî and al-Taftazânî, see the brief descriptions in EI2, by respectively, M. Mohaghegh and W. Madelung; see also Brockelmann's Geschichte der arabischen Literatur (Weimar, 1897–1902), I: 466 and S.I: 845 on the former and II.278–80 and S.II: 301–4 on the latter. For an Arabic text edition and English translation of the Shamsiyya, see A. Sprengers, First Appendix to the “Dictionary of the technical terms used in the sciences of the Mussulmans” [by Mohammad ‘Alī al Tahānawī], containing the Logic of the Arabians in the original Arabic, with an English translation (Calcutta, 1854); the Shamsiyya is discussed in somewhat greater detail by Tony Street in The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy, ed. Peter Adamson (Cambridge, 2005), 247–65.

⁴³Istanbul, 2003. For a full list of the textbooks used in the Kurdish medrese curriculum, see Zinar, Xwendina medresê, esp. 63–100.

⁴⁴Oddly, Teremaxî's Sarf is absent from this list; Bayazîdî must either accidentally have left it out, or erroneously ascribed this Tasrîf to Mulla Yûnus. The latter explanation may be the more plausible one, as no tasrîf text by Mulla Yûnus is known from other sources.

⁴⁵The French translation in Jaba (Receuil de notices et de récits kourdes, 13–14) erroneously lists the Hisamkatî as a work on rhetoric, the Qawl Ahmad as the Qur'an and the Sharh shamsiyya as “a commentary on the religious laws” rather than as a logic textbook.

⁴⁶See Dost, Adat û Rusûmetnameê Ekradiye, 156, for a few very brief general observations on nineteenth-century Kurdish medrese life. Intriguingly, Bayazidi, writing in 1857, observes that both the number of medreses in Kurdistan and the use of Kurdish there has significantly decreased in comparison with Teremaxî's times. We have few if any means of independently verifying this remark, which appears to reflect a belief that the end of days is imminent.

⁴⁷Zinar, Xwendina medresê, 63–100.

⁴⁸In a footnote to his summary of Zinar's book, Van Bruinessen (“Les Kurdes et leur langue au XVIIe siècle,” 55n28) notes that the philosophical text named by Zinar as Sa‘d Taftâzânî's Mukhtasar is not listed in Brockelmann's Geschichte der arabischen Literatur. The Milli Kütüphane in Ankara, however, contains two manuscripts by Taftazânî bearing this title, both dated 989AH (respectively, cat 26 Hk 801 and 26 Hk 1088). This work may be the same as the Mukhtasar al-ma'anî, dated 988AH; it is also preserved in Ankara (01 Hk 90) and in the University of Leiden.

⁴⁹Öztoprak (2003, 185–9); in the list of curriculum text added as an appendix to his work, the Nûbihar is erroneously referred to as an Arabic–Turkish dictionary (ibid., 185).

⁵⁰Ibid., 185–6. Item no. 41 on Zinar's list is a Tesrîfa erebî (“Arabic tasrîf”), written by one Mele Elî; it is not clear whether this text is not identical to no. 10, the Tesrîfa kurmancî, also ascribed to a Mele Elî (by whom, undoubtedly, Eli Teremaxî is meant).

⁵¹Thus, Jan-Just Witkam (personal communication, conversation, January 16, 2012) informs me that the number of manuscripts of the Ishârât to be found in former Ottoman lands is negligibly small, which belies the widespread view that it was through this work that Ibn Sîna's philosophy remained in circulation among later Islamic mystics and religious scholars.

⁵²Al-Rouayheb, “The Myth of the ‘Triumph of Fanaticism’,” 210ff.

⁵³Mustafa Dehqan, “Kurdish Glosses on Aristotelian Logical Texts,” Philosophical Quarterly 60 (2009): 692–7.