The Genres of Classical Literature and the Kurdish Language

Rastinews — Throughout world history, in every language, speech and writing have differed greatly. Spoken language, in every tongue, is used lightly and effortlessly, without much thought or design. Writing, by contrast, demands knowledge, comprehension, interpretation and a certain craftsmanship of language. In the history of Kurdistan this contrast is plain: Kurdish has served the life of the people — above all its culture, arts and literature — more through speech than through writing. Spoken Kurdish carries real force and vitality. The clearest evidence of this lies in classical Kurdish literature and in dengbêjî, the oral bardic tradition. This piece looks at the genres of classical literature and the mark they left on the language.

Classical literature, one could say, was a shared literature across the peoples of the Middle East. The rule of the Ottoman state and the Sasanian state lasted a very long time in the region, and both were built on religious authority. These two states brought the peoples of the Middle East under their rule and sustained that rule for centuries. The literature of the region's peoples remained under the influence of these states and of Islamic belief. Across its various genres, literature became essentially one shared literature: the same languages were used, a mixed and monopolized idiom prevailed, writers modelled themselves on one another, and all remained under each other's influence.

In the classical literature of the Middle East, there is little to distinguish Fuzûlî, Bâkî, Ruhî of Baghdad, Hafez of Shiraz and Melayê Cizîrî. All of them wrote in aruz meter, in one and the same idiom — in other words, in the same style.

This is why, in one of his poems, Melayê Cizîrî addresses his contemporary Hafez of Shiraz in this couplet, judging himself the greater poet:

If you want pearls of verse strewn forth,
read Mela's poetry — what need have you of Shiraz?

It is clear that in classical literature the languages of the Middle East became monopolized and mixed together: Kurdish words, Arabic words and Turkic words appear side by side in the same poem. Through these literary genres and styles, the vocabulary, grammar and rules of neighbouring nations entered the written language. For this reason, anyone working to preserve and develop Kurdish should take spoken literature, not classical literature, as the model.

Kurdish intellectuals writing in Kurdish were never far behind the intellectuals of the wider world in literary terms. In every century, Kurdish intellectuals wrote alongside their contemporaries elsewhere, producing and publishing their own works. But across the different literary genres and styles, languages influenced one another. I repeat: writers modelled themselves on each other, wrote in similar ways, remained under mutual influence, and used the vocabulary of neighbouring nations in their own works.

Writers of that era, and their teachers, all came out of the medrese; they were religious teachers and mullahs. They began their education in Arabic and Aramaic script, with religious instruction, before moving on to other branches of learning. The influence of Islam was immense, and weighed heavily on literature. This is why, as far as we know, no surviving works of classical literature show the influence of Zoroastrianism, Yazidism or Alevism. The powers of the Middle East built and sustained their rule on Islamic belief, and the force of that belief still carries enormous influence today.

Under Islamic influence, several literary genres developed: Diwan literature (in Turkish, divan edebiyatı), Sufi literature, and, among the common people, folk literature. Among the pens of Diwan literature, Melayê Cizîrî stands as one of the strongest. Sufi literature never developed as fully among Kurds, though some teachers, such as Melayê Bateyê, drew on it in a number of their poems. In folk literature, the leading figure is, without doubt, Feqiyê Teyra.

In each genre, language was shaped by that genre's own character. Diwan literature, as its name suggests, is the literature of the court and the royal chamber — the literature of the elite, of princes and grandees. It has no connection to ordinary people: it does not speak of their sorrows and troubles, nor of worldly hardship and poverty. It speaks only of love, and of praise for love and the beloved, in a single monopolized idiom, composed in aruz meter (patterns such as faîlatun faîlatun mefaûlun). The literature's harmony comes from these metrical patterns, and it is multilingual by nature — which is why Melayê Cizîrî used Arabic and Turkic words in his poems, along with grammar and rules shared with neighbouring nations. In short, Diwan literature left a negative mark on the language.
Sufi literature, meanwhile, dealt with more abstract subjects — God, the afterlife and resurrection, the self, and the desires and states of the heart and soul — yet it too used a monopolized idiom, and likewise had a poor effect on the purity of the language.
Among all these genres, folk literature is, linguistically, the purest and most authentic. In the poems of Feqiyê Teyra one can see how he used a Kurdish close to the speech of the dengbêj — and how, in particular, it never strayed from the grammar and rules of the Kurdish language.

Dengbêjî is a culture and an art unto itself — an authentically Kurdish art form. Dengbêjî is not simply the singing of songs, nor is it defined by particular melodies or musical genres. Musical modes and styles found around the world carry their own distinct influences — Arabesque, Pop, Raq, the Sufi maqam, the Kurdish-Hijaz maqam, Segah, and nothing beyond these. Dengbêjî songs, which recount events and stories and are preserved and passed down as works of literature, are shaped by the melodic traditions of different regions — Lawik, Heyranok, Şeşbendî, and nothing beyond these. Dengbêjî is its own distinct form, untouched by other literary and musical styles. From the depths of history to the present day, it has used and preserved the grammar and rules of the Kurdish language cleanly and without flaw.

For the reasons set out above, any work undertaken on the language should take the language of the dengbêj as its model. Classical literary styles left a poor mark on the language: they mixed the grammar and rules of neighbouring languages into ours, introduced foreign words into Kurdish in places where they were not needed, in place of Kurdish words, and weakened and pushed Kurdish words out of the language.

Yet thanks to the wealth of dialects, sub-dialects and dengbêj traditions, many words have been preserved and survive within the language. In future pieces, I will look in detail, with concrete examples, at the damaging influence of classical literature — for instance, the treatment of singular and plural forms, or the conjunction "ku" (in my view not really a conjunction at all), examining where this destructive element came from, when it entered our language, and setting out in detail its damaging effect on Kurdish.