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Between Islamic Learning and Philological Nationalism: Mullah Mahmûdê Bayazîdî’s Auto-ethnography of the Kurds

This article deals with the ethnographic and philological works of the nineteenth-cen-tury Kurdish scholar Mullah Mahmûdê Bayazîdî, which mark a crucial stage in the history of vernacular Kurdish-language learning. It turns out that Bayazîdî, although working in the service of the then Russian consul, Auguste Jaba, cannot be called either a “native informant” nor an “orientalist scholar”. After providing some historical background, I discuss Bayazîdî’s main writings and their significance. I then discuss his conceptions of language, literature, local tradition or culture, and history, concluding that none of these bears any traces of modern Western philology or romantic nationalism. Hence, his work cannot be qualified as “internalized orientalism”, but, as it is written in a vernacular language, neither can it be wholly assimilated to classical Islamic learning.


Introduction
Traditions of vernacular learning in the early modern Islamic world have hardly received the scholarly attention they deserve.1 When studied in detail, they turn out to undermine or complicate some widespread beliefs about the spread of nationalism to, and the hegemony of Western orientalism in, the modernizing Middle East. As an example of this, I propose to study the writings of Mullah Mahmûdê Bayazîdî, or Bazîdî (1797-1858 or 1868). These works not only have an inherent interest as probably the oldest local source on Kurdish customs and on the history of Kurdish learning and literature; they also mark a significant stage in the development of Kurdish vernacular learning. Next to a Kurdish translation of and a sequel to Sheref Khan Bidlîsî's sixteenthcentury Sherefname, a Persian-language chronicle of Kurdish principalities, Bayazîdî wrote works on Kurdish grammar, literature, and folklore, and also composed several collections of short prose texts. Despite the number and importance of these works, however, they have hardly, if at all, been discussedor even noticed -by later scholars in Kurdish studies, let alone elsewhere. Thus, despite his inherent interest, Bayazîdî is also absent in such influential works on the Kurds as Martin van Bruinessen's Agha, Shaykh, and State, David McDowall's Modern History of the Kurds, and Hakan Özoglu's Kurdish Notables and the Ottoman State.2 Moreover, Bayazîdî's contributions are rarely, if ever, done justice in historical accounts or the development of Kurdish studies. Even recent overviews, like the one by Sacha Alsancakli, reduce Bayazîdî's role to that of a "collaborator" or "informant". Such accounts risk reducing Kurdish (and other non-Western) scholars to mere "native informants" and reproducing the topos of modern orientalist knowledge as produced primarily, if not exclusively, by Western scholars. 3 In fact, there is a long orientalist tradition in Western scholarship that sees the Kurds as primarily a rural and tribal people virtually without a high literate culture of its own, and that hence pays rather less attention to local authors and cultural and intellectual developments than to ethnography and social and political history. The reception, or marginalization, of Bayazîdî's work marks an early stage in the creation of this ethnographic image and is indicative of the wider process by which European -in particular, imperial Russian -orientalism reduced literate local scholars to anonymous and primarily oral "native informants". Likewise, Bayazîdî is relatively unknown in Kurdish circles of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I have not come across any evidence that Bayazîdî's writings were known to local medrese pupils, either in his own age or in later years, and most of his writings were not published until over a century after they were written. In fact, there is no evidence that any of them reached a Kurdish audience independently from, or prior to being printed in, the Soviet Union from the 1960s.
Thus, Bayazîdî's importance hardly resides in his being widely read by later generations of Kurdish religious scholars or nationalist activists. Here, however, I will not discuss the causes of this lack of impact in detail; my aim is primarily to discuss his work itself, as marking a significant moment in the development of Kurdish vernacular learning against the background of a modernizing and centralizing Ottoman state and of an encroaching Russian empire. I will discuss, first, exactly what conceptions of language, literature, religion, and tradition or culture can be found in Mulla Mahmûdê Bayazîdî's writings; second, to what extent these conceptions have been shaped by the categories of Western philological orientalism, especially as they inform the work of his close collaborator and patron Auguste Jaba; and third, whether such influence amounts to a kind of internalized orientalism or "self-orientalization". Finally, I will briefly discuss the fate of Bayazîdî's writings in later Russian orientalism.4 general, especially regarding its constitutive influence on non-Western European nationalisms, as has been claimed by Stathis Gourgouris concerning the neo-Hellenic movement, and by Marc Nichanian for modern Armenian nationalism. 5 The latter argument builds not only, and most obviously, on Edward Said's critique of orientalism but also on Michel Foucault's archaeological account of the origins of modern philology. Famously, in The Order of Things, Foucault argues that modern Western concepts of language as a historically developing organism, rather than a transparent medium of representation, and of literature as an autonomous and purely aesthetic form or realm of language, developed as part of the rise of the modern human sciences in the nineteenth century. By extension, one might argue that categories like religion, culture (or tradition), and history likewise have their origin in the modern philological human sciences.6 Such claims, however, leave unanswered the question of exactly how these modern categories became universalized, or spread from Western to non-Western settings. Bayazîdî's writings, as I hope to make clear below, form a particularly interesting testing ground for such hypotheses and questions.
Let us first address the more general problematic of non-Western nationalism in somewhat greater detail. There is a widespread belief that newly hegemonic nationalist ideas were based on German romantic-nationalist categories; by extension, they employed new notions of language and literature that had been developed by modern -primarily, German -philologists and, more specifically, orientalists. Further, and following Gourgouris, Nichanian virtually identifies "nationalist" philology with orientalism as defined by Edward Said: modern philological methods, he argues, simultaneously constitute a national self and a non-Western other. This process, however, becomes much more complicated in the case of non-Western European "philological nationalisms", like the neo-Hellenic and Armenian movements emerging out of the Ottoman and, in part, the Russian Empires. Nichanian argues that modern philology and what he calls its "twin sister", literature, imply a redefinition of the (national) self as "native" -that is, as endowed with a national language and literature that are oral as much as literate, and with a folkloric culture or tradition that is pagan as much as Christian. Thus, Nichanian claims that the introduction of nineteenth-century modern philological orientalism constituted the Armenians as local natives possessing a timeless pre-Christian tradition of pagan folklore; in this sense, he argues, Armenian philological nationalism amounts to a "self-orientalization" -that is, to the internalization of hegemonic categories of Western European (in particular, German) orientalism. The Armenian native, that is, is not simply an oriental other but is also, and simultaneously, a national self.7 The accuracy of these claims concerning the Armenians need not concern us here; rather, the question we will explore is whether a similar argument may be made concerning the new forms of Kurdish vernacular learning that emerged around the same time. In earlier studies of Kurdish intellectual history, I have argued, first, that in the eighteenth century, one may witness the first phase of the so-called vernacularization of Kurdish (i.e., the new literate and learned use of the Kurdish language) as part of a wider process of vernacularization in the Ottoman Empire; and second, that in late imperial Russian and early Soviet scholarship, one may observe a "folklorization" of the Kurds (i.e., a reconceptualization of the Kurds as a people endowed primarily with a national oral folkloric tradition rather than a written literature).8 It then becomes tempting to see Bayazîdî -who wrote his main texts arguably under some form of Russian imperial influence -as marking a crucial stage in this development. Extending this thesis, one could then argue that the vernacularization and folklorization of Kurdish culture is a process similar to the one described by Nichanian  categories of philological orientalism, as has been claimed for Greek and Armenian nationalism; and, second, exactly what role Kurdish actors played in this process. In this context, I will explore whether and to what extent Bayazîdî's writings involve translations of Western philological and ethnographic categories of language, folklore, tradition, and nationhood. In doing so, I hope to bring some nuance to -sometimes sweeping -claims concerning Western "orientalist hegemony". In particular, I will trace the extent to which Bayazîdî's categories are distinct from those of modern philology, and the extent to which Bayazîdî's contribution to the development of Kurdish studies has been marginalized by reducing him to the status of a "native informant". It has proved equally tempting to read older Kurdish texts in the light of a later nationalism that posits a distinctly Kurdish language and culture, but one should try to resist projecting back such later conceptions and identities onto an era in which the very categories of romantic nationalism were still in the process of being articulated, let alone universalized. More specifically, we should resist the temptation to systematize the scattered remarks of earlier authors into a unified and coherent "doctrine", and to depict them as "anticipating" some later doctrine (in this case, romantic nationalism).9 Rather, these romantic concepts and doctrines are themselves very much Western European creations of the nineteenth century; hence, one should not assume their universal applicability, but rather explore whether, how, and when they became universalized. For this reason, although I will trace Bayazîdî's views along the four axes of language, literature, religion, and tradition, I do not assume these concepts as in any sense given -that is, as either neutral analytical notions or as categories that unify an entire discursive field.10 Rather, my point is precisely to show how these central notions radically changed meaning and content in the course of the nineteenth century.

Historical Background
The early Tanzimat  In these renderings of native remarks, one hears echoes of the Sufî belief that Iblîs, in refusing to obey God's order of worshipping Adam, is actually most faithful to the divine wish for humans not to worship anyone but God, for which he is punished until he will take his rightful place next to God at the end of time. Apart from such comments, however, Pushkin largely abstains from comments on the local Kurdish rulers or population. Equally famously, Bayazîd also provides the setting for an episode involving the French orientalist and diplomat Pierre Amédée Jaubert. In 1805, Jaubert passed through Bayazîd on his way to the court of Fath Ali Shah in Qajar Iran, where he had been sent by Napoleon in order to negotiate a Russo-Persian alliance. The local ruler, Ibrahim Pasha, finding the foreign visitor suspect, had him imprisoned, but in 1806, the prince succumbed to the plague. His successor, the rather more benign Mahmûd Pasha, had Jaubert released, apparently against the wishes of the Ottoman provincial authorities, who had meanwhile been notified of the matter. 15 We will return to this episode below.
The Tanzimat reforms, preceded by the 1826 destruction of the Janissary corps and initiated by the Gülhane Rescript of 1839, brought major changes to the Bayazîd region, such as military conscription, administrative centralization, and, most dramatically, the end of hereditary local rule. Educational reforms were rather slower in reaching the provinces on the Russian frontier, and major changes in the land regime only materialized after the Land Law of 1858. Despite such differences in timescale, the reforms had dramatic repercussions for the Kurdish region as a whole. April 1846, he bemoans not only the "shameful state" of Bayazîd province, which is "given to the most barefaced rapine of all the rogues of the province", but also the unwillingness or inability of the local authorities to do anything about it. The region is described as having been made unsafe by the pervasive banditry of Kurdish tribes (some of them Sunni Muslims, others consisting of Yezidis), and as knowing no taxation apart from the extortionate practices carried out by local chieftains. Behlûl Pasha, he writes, "Comes into his selamlik for about a quarter of an hour every morning, and after smoking a pipe and drinking a coffee, he retires into his harem, and can no more be seen."19 Brant makes no mention of any active or passive support for the Russians on the pasha's side. Regardless of the accuracy or reliability of his report, the available evidence does indeed suggest that Behlûl was not as ambitious and energetic (let alone violent) a ruler as Bedir Khan Beg or Nûrullâh, but this was actually good news for the central Ottoman authorities -his fiefdom appears to have been dismantled without any great upheaval. The Crimean War (1853-56) marked a new stage in the confrontation between the Ottoman and the Russian Empires. At first, Ottoman troops advanced into the Southern Caucasus, but by the summer of 1855, the Russians started an offensive towards Kars, which eventually fell in November of that year. At the 1856 Treaty of Paris, Russia pledged once again to give up the areas 16 Cf it had conquered in Eastern Anatolia.20 By that time, however, all Kurdish principalities in the region had been dismantled. We know the political history of Bayazîd only in its barest outline; we know even less about the social and economic history of the region. Thus, there are no detailed studies of relations between local Kurds and Armenians; between tribes and the non-tribal population; or between Muslim Kurds and Yezidis. Travellers report that there were distinct Armenian and Kurdish quarters in the town itself. Apparently, the construction of the Ishakpasha Palace had placed a heavy financial burden on the local peasant population, making the rulers rather unpopular; several authors even mention uprisings against the local mîrs.21 According to Oleg Vil'cevskij, there was an uprising in the pashaliks of Bayazîd and Van around 1815, which was joined by nomadic Kurds from the Khoy, Erivan, and Nakhichevan districts; eventually, however, this uprising was suppressed by the serasker of Erzurum.22 Vil'cevskij describes these uprisings as more than just intrigues by local chieftains or brigandage by local tribes, seeing them as led by the obabashi [sic], which he qualifies as an "embryonic local bourgeoisie". Clearly, his analysis is shaped by Marxist doctrines concerning feudal and proto-capitalist modes of production and the development of class consciousness among Kurdish workers and peasants, but it assumes that, rather than exploring whether and to what extent, the region underwent any capitalist penetration in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Not much is known, either, on the political preferences and loyalties of the Kurdish population of the region, except that some Kurdish tribes sided with the Russians or were increasingly suspected by the Ottomans, either of having done so or of being prone to do so.23 Local Kurdish mîrs and tribal leaders 20 For more Russian and English sources on the military aspects of these wars, see seems reasonable to infer that he himself, too, had followed this curriculum, but, as he does not say so explicitly, this is no more than a plausible conjecture. The most remarkable items on this list are a number of elementary Kurdishlanguage textbooks on the Arabic lexicon (Ehmedê Khanî's Nûbihara piçûkan), on the principles of faith (Eqîdeya êmanê, by the same author), and on grammar (Tesrîf, Zurûf, and Terkîb, all of which he attributes to Mullah Yûnus Khalqatînî, d. 1791). The list also mentions a number of Arabic-language authors, like Sa'ad al-Dîn al-Taftazânî and Yûsuf al-Ardabîlî; these are all affiliated with the Shafi'ite madhhab. This enumeration is remarkably consistent with the lists of obligatory textbooks provided by other, more recent medrese graduates from Northern Kurdistan, suggesting that a more or less stable and specifically Kurmanjî and Shafi'î curriculum had crystallized by around 1800 at the latest and survived intact well into the twentieth century.26 According to Jaba, Bayazîdî was highly respected among the local ulama already at an early age. This claim makes it tempting to identify Bayazîdî with a local Kurdish scholar named "haji Mahmûd" whom the Polish-born Protestant missionary Felician von Zaremba repeatedly met during his 1830 sojourn in Bayazid and who, in his words, "is seen as the most learned mullah here".27 Unfortunately, however, von Zaremba provides no further details either of these visits or of the mullah involved. Mehmet Gültekin is convinced that the local scholar is indeed Mahmûdê Bayazîdî. This may well be, but Bayazîdî was only some 33 years old at the time, and we have no independent evidence that he had already completed the pilgrimage to Mecca at that age, so this identification is as tentative as it is tempting.28 From the scanty sources, it is unclear whether Bayazîdî actually worked at Behlûl's court or was in Behlûl's service, but he does seem to have received some sort of support or patronage from the pasha. It is also unclear exactly when this patronage of the last semi-independent Kurdish ruler of Bayazîd came to an end. At some point before 1854, and more probably in the late 1840s, Bayazîdî left his native town for Erzurum. In 1846, Hafiz Pasha, the "military mushir", charged him with an important mission to Bedir Khan Beg, who had revolted against the Ottoman government in 1846 and would eventually be captured and exiled in 1847. A year later, the then governor of Erzurum, Kâmil Pasha, charged Bayazîdî with a similar mission to Nûrullâh Beg, the Kurdish chieftain of Hakkârî. Apparently, the Ottoman authorities were so pleased with Bayazîdî's handling of these sensitive diplomatic missions that he was made dragoman of Khan Mahmûd, the former mîr of Muks and the third member of the Kurdish triumvirate in revolt, who spoke nothing but Kurdish, and who had been exiled to Erzurum vilayet and placed under house arrest in the village of Khevash (present-day Gevaş, on the south-eastern shore of Lake Van). From there, however, Khan Mahmûd soon revolted, as a result of which Bayazîdî was imprisoned for two weeks.29 Another source, an anonymous article in issue 13 (1898) of Kurdistan, the first Kurdish journal, provides some further information about the diplomatic efforts of one "Mela Efendi", whom Musaelian has plausibly identified as Bayazîdî.30 It suggests that he had an ambivalent intermediary position between the Ottoman court and the local Kurdish rulers, and that he may even have been involved in some form of double dealing. Sent to Bedir Khan's court in Botan, he reportedly asked the local Ottoman commander-in-chief, Othman Pasha, not to attack before his return; Othman, however, had objected to Mahmûd's diplomatic efforts from the start, and attacked without waiting for Bedir Khan's reply. The stiff resistance he subsequently encountered from the Kurdish rebels led him to infer that Bayazîdî had betrayed the secret plan for attack; hence, he had the latter arrested and sent to Istanbul to be tried. Bayazîdî was subsequently sent into exile in Van. Here, he became involved in Khan Mahmûd's revolt, but, according to this report, it was the latter rather than Mulla Mahmûd who was subsequently imprisoned for two weeks. Although Bayazîdî was able to avert a more severe punishment for Khan Mahmûd, he lost whatever trust the Ottoman authorities had had in his loyalty.31 The renewed military confrontation between the Ottoman and Russian Empires that broke out in 1853 also brought personal tragedy to Bayazîdî: his brother was killed in the war, and his son, who had remained in Bayazîd to continue his trade activities, lost all of his possessions. As a result, Bayazîdî was left in Erzurum without any source of income, and, as Jaba writes, "contemplated returning to Kurdistan". But at this time, in 1856 (presumably, following the Treaty of Paris that ended the Crimean War), Auguste Jaba returned to Erzurum as the Russian consul. Soon after, Bayazîdî became the latter's instructor in Kurdish, and subsequently the two started a fruitful collaboration in the collecting and writing of Kurdish-language materials. According to some 29 Jaba From the above, it emerges that Bayazîdî played an important diplomatic role in some of the most dramatic social and political developments of his time -he appears to have been deeply involved in the Ottoman attempts to neutralize three of the most powerful Kurdish chieftains of the mid-nineteenth century. On his actual diplomatic activities, and on the precise character of his relations both with Kurdish rulers and Ottoman authorities, we do not know much at present, but Ottoman and other archives may yet yield further information on these questions. Likewise, although I have not yet come across any evidence that Mahmûd also had contacts with the British consul in Erzurum, it is quite possible that British archival sources, especially those dealing with the Erzurum consulate, contain relevant documents.
Here, however, it is less Bayazîdî's involvement in contemporary politics that primarily interests us than the contents and contexts of his writings. Of these, a good many have been preserved in European libraries, but relatively few have been published. Bayazîdî was one of the most important suppliers, if not the single most important supplier, of Kurdish manuscript materials for the libraries of imperial Russia; thus, of the 84 items listed in Rudenko's 1961 catalogue of Kurdish manuscripts in Leningrad (the vast majority of which had belonged to Jaba's Kurdish collection), no less than thirteen appear to have been written or copied by Bayazîdî.33 They range from elementary works aimed at language acquisition -like a Kurdish alphabet (no. 81, cat. no. GPB, Kurd 6), a model of verbal conjugation "according to the method of sarf and nahw" (no. 78, cat. no. GPB Kurd 46), and a text of conversations (no. 76, cat. no. GPB Kurd 50) -to Kurdish translations of Bidlîsî's Persian-language Sherefname (no. 84, cat. no. GPB, Kurd 37) and a Turkish-language version of the story of Layla and Majnûn (no. 49, cat. no. GPB, Kurd 31), and several collections of tales (hikâya), as well as a description of Kurdish customs, the Adat û Rusûmâtnameyê ekradiyye (no. 82, cat. no. GPB, Kurd 34). Only some of these works have appeared in print; even fewer have been published in scholarly editions. All of these texts were written in Kurmanjî or northern Kurdish, but Bayazîdî is known to have written a number of works in Persian and Turkish as 32 This is not the place to discuss Jaba's life and career in detail, but see more like modern ethnographic and philological exercises specifically written for, and commissioned by, Western readers. This may tempt us to infer that the categories they employ have been supplied or shaped by those of modern Western philology and orientalist ethnography. It may seem difficult to believe that Bayazîdî, who by then already had a solid reputation among the local ulama, would have written all these works for Jaba alone; but, as noted above, he was unemployed and destitute at the time of his encounter with Jaba, so is likely to have been paid for his services. Apparently, these services included not only private instruction in Kurdish but also help on a Kurdish-French dictionary and the writing of commissioned texts on various topics. Vasilyeva discusses the question of whether Bayazîdî received any financial or other remuneration for these services, but she concludes we have no concrete information on these matters.41 The material preconditions for some kind of patronage on Jaba's part, however, are rather straightforward: after the dissolution of the Kurdish principalities, Bayazîdî no longer enjoyed the patronage of local rulers like Behlûl Pasha; his brother had lost his life and his son had lost his fortune in the war, so he could not turn to his own family for support either; and, as he himself observes, the local population neither showed the respect nor provided the material support for learning and scholars it had done in earlier times.42 Thus, apparently, he was without any major source of income when he met Jaba in 1856. The publishing history of these works is revealing in itself: they were first sent to the Imperial Academy in St. Petersburg in Russia, and in part made available in a bilingual edition published in 1860, which consisted of Arabicscript Kurdish texts plus French translations by Jaba. Significantly, this collection of Bayazîdî's writings was published as Jaba's work. It was not until the mid-twentieth century that Bayazîdî's works started appearing in Russian under his own name. It was even later, during the 1980s and 1990s, that the first Kurdish versions of Bayazîdî's writings were published either in Turkey or Iraq; most of these, in fact, were based on published Soviet editions rather than on the original manuscripts.
Most of Bayazîdî's texts on the Kurdish language appear to have remained unpublished; the most important of these seem to be the Tuhfet al-khillan fî zimanê kurdan or "Gift of friends in the language of the Kurds",43 and a 476page manuscript entitled "Kurdish dialogues", in particular a section "On the knowledge of languages", which, according to Musaelian, also contains Russian and Soviet Kurdology appears to reflect the belief, quite widespread at the time, that Western scholars, although obviously dependent on locally educated informants, should not overly rely on the grammatical or linguistic information provided by the latter. I will return to this point below.
In all, Bayazîdî's life, career, and writings appear to have been crucially shaped by the dramatic political developments of his age -on the one hand, the centralizing Tanzimat reforms, which in the Kurdish provinces led to the pacification or abolition of the hereditary principalities and the introduction of military conscription; and on the other, the expansion of Russian imperial influence, whether in the guise of diplomatic representation like the consulate at Erzurum or in the shape of military occupation, as at Bayazîd during 1828 and 1829. Politically, Bayazîdî was heavily involved in these events -witness his missions for the Ottomans to the rebellious Kurdish chieftains and his extensive contacts with the consul of an enemy state. Below, we will discuss how his writings reflect these dramatic developments. His works, it will emerge, are neither simply part of traditional Islamic learning nor a mere carbon copy of modern Western forms of knowledge; rather, they mark a distinct moment in both descriptive content and theoretical vocabulary.

Language
To determine the character of Bayazîdî's writings, let us now have a closer look at Bayazîdî's concepts of language, literature, religion, and culture or tradition. The first question to be discussed is whether Bayazîdî has any sense of Kurdish as a distinct language, and of the Kurds as a distinct people defined by their language. More concretely, we should ask in exactly which sense, or senses, Bayazîdî uses expressions like Kurd, Ekrad, Kurmânc, and others. We cannot assume a priori that he uses these terms interchangeably; nor can we assume that he uses them in the present-day sense of an ethnic group or nation defined in terms of its language. To begin with, Bayazîdî rarely, if ever, uses the noun Kurd or the adjective kurdî, rather more often employing either the Arabic plural ekrâd or the Kurdish term kurmânc.46 Next, he consistently refers to 44 Musaelian, "First", 4. 45 For a more detailed discussion of Teremaxî's Tesrîf, cf. Leezenberg, "Teremaxî", 715-20. 46 The fact that Bayazîdî, like Khanî and other early Northern Kurdish authors, uses the term Kurmanj rather more often than Kurd somewhat limits the usefulness of Özoglu's Nota-the vernacular spoken by the Kurds as "the Kurmanjî language" (lîsanê kurmâncî), or more briefly as "Kurmanjî"; only once in ARE does he use lîsanê kurdî. He seeks the etymological origin of the name Kurd or ekrâd in the Persian word gird "'collection' , that is, 'to collect or to gather'" (gird, yanî berhev û cemi' kirin).47 As a people, however, he sees the Kurds as having not a Persian but an Arab origin, and as being "a part of those Arab peoples from whom they have become distinct" (ji wan tayifêd ereban miqdarek cuda bûyîne).48 In MZ, he even speaks of "the Kurmanc community of the Arabs" (ta'îfa kurmancêd 'ereban) -that is, "Arab Kurds".49 He sees no contradiction or confusion here, but reproduces the long-standing practice of members of the Kurdish elites to claim a noble Arab descent, as in the case of the Kurdish rulers of the Botan emirate, who traced their genealogy to the Prophet's companion Khalid ibn Walîd. Likewise, in Ehmedê Khanî's romance Mem û Zîn, the fictitious prince Zeyneddîn is said to be of Arab origins, without this fact appearing to make him any less Kurdish: Nesla wî 'Ereb emîrê ekrad.../ Mensûb û muselselê Khalid. A prince of Kurds, whose pedigree was Arab…/ Related to and descended from Khalid.50 Unlike these earlier sources, however, Bayazîdî claims Arab descent not only for the Kurdish rulers but also for the Kurds as a people. At first, he claims, they belonged to the Arab tayîfa and generally spoke Arabic, but at some point they became a separate tribe (qabîle) and developed -or rather, started speakinga separate language. Bayazîdî has no detailed account of how, if at all, this Kurdish language grew out of Arabic, other than through the "mixture" of Arabic and Persian elements: he claims that Kurdish is a "mixed" or "combined" language -"that is, it is blended, that is, put together from Persian and Iranian [or: by Persians and Iranians]" (zimanê berhev, yanî mexlutiye, yanî girdkiride ye ji Faris û Îraniyan),51 reflecting the belief, widespread among premodern Christian and Islamic authors, that languages are originally pure and only change as a result of corruption by its speakers, or through contact with other peoples, which results in "mixed" or "impure" languages.52 More details of Bayazîdî's views on the Kurdish language emerge from his discussion of the different Kurdish dialects in the introduction to TCK.53 Here, he distinguishes four main dialects or dialect groups of Kurdish: the Rawendî dialect (spoken in the northern regions of Çaldiran, Kars, Bayazîd, Mush, Bitlis, and Van; this variety, he claims, is also the "language of the Kurdish re'âyas" in Harput -Elazig -and Diyarbakir54); the Hakkârî dialect (which, he claims, differs but little from the Rawendî dialect and is spoken in the provinces of Botan, Muks, and Hakkârî, in Ushnuwiyeh in present-day Iran, and further south, in what is presently called the Bahdinan region; it is in this dialect, he writes, that all Kurdish books and all Kurdish poetry have been written55); the dialect of Sulaymaniya (spoken by the Baban, Bilbas, Zerzan, and Shukriyan tribes living in the Sulaymaniya and Shahrezor area); and Zaza, which is characterized as "also a Kurdish language, but very different from the other three". Kurds from Zaza-speaking areas, he states, write in the Hakkârî dialect but speak their own dialect among themselves. He adds that, no matter how different this dialect may be, "it is not separate from the Kurdish language" (ji zimanê kurdî cuda nabe), and that the "foundations" of all these dialects are one and the same; by the latter claim, he appears to mean that basic terms, like those for "water", "bread", "come", "go", and the like, are identical.56 Presumably, Bayazîdî reproduces an existing folk-theoretical distinction between the Rawendî and the Hakkârî dialects here, but his distinction corresponds neither to the (equally folk-theoretical) distinction between the Botî, Mihemmedî, and Silevî dialects in Khanî's Mem û Zîn (bayt 2480) nor to the modern philological and political distinction between the Kurmanjî, Badînî (or Bahdînanî), and Soranî dialects. Intriguingly, Bayazîdî nowhere mentions the forms of Goranî or Gûrani spoken and written at the Erdelan court, let alone the Lori and Lakki dialects spoken further south. This once again confirms the impression that he had little familiarity with conditions and developments in Southern Kurdistan. 53 Reproduced in Dost, Adat, 221-22. 54 It is not entirely clear whether by "Kurdish re'âya", Bayazîdî specifically means Kurdishspeaking Christians, and more specifically Armenians, or also includes non-tribal Kurds (whether Sunni Muslim or Yezidi) among them. But in ARE, he generally appears to use the term re'âya for Christians, and goran for sedentary and/or non-tribal Kurds: Dost, Adat, 226. 55 This would imply that Bayazîdî's own works are also written in a dialect different from that of his native Bayazîd (which forms part of the Rawendî group); a further study of the dialectal features of his writings, and of the question of early modern attempts at creating a written standard for Kurmanjî, however, awaits another occasion. 56 Dost, Adat, 221-22.
In short, Bayazîdî's concept of the Kurdish language can hardly, if at all, be assimilated to those of philological nationalism -he does not appear to see it as the origin, basis, or criterion of a distinct identity, and he conceives of it in terms of purity, mixture, and corruption rather than in romantic terms of expression and organic growth. To the extent that Bayazîdî talks about the Kurds as a distinct nation or people, that is, he does so independently from the categories of modern Western philology or romantic nationalism.

5
Literature or Folklore?
A second question to be discussed concerns the concept of literature implied in Bayazîdî's work. Some aspects of his writings appear to reflect or suggest a modern literary sensibility; for example, his summary of the tale of Mem and Zîn is clearly based on Ehmedê Khanî's written text rather than on any oral version of the story, but he strips the narrative of all mystical content and allusions. Thus, he paves the way not only for more secularized and nationalist readings of the epic but also for a secularized concept of literature or fiction. Accordingly, his writings, and in particular the collection of tales gathered in CRH, have led Hakim to call him "the true pioneer of Kurdish prose".57 Farhad Pîrbal has argued more specifically that Bayazîdî's tales, alongside his prose summaries of Mem û Zîn and other texts, are not only among the oldest samples of Kurdish prose texts but also the first specimens of the Kurdish short story (çîrok).58 The former claim appears to be largely correct, if one disregards a small but significant number of eighteenth-century didactic prose texts written exclusively for use by medrese pupils, notably Eli Teremaxî's Tesrîfa Kurmancî, Mulla Yûnus Khalqatînî's Terkîb û Zurûf, and a short medical text by Melayê Erwasî. The category of the short story, however, presupposes a modern notion of literature as essentially fictional, and this assumption does not appear to inform Bayazîdî's writings -witness the fact that he calls the tale of Jaubert's imprisonment in Bayazîd a hikâya, even though he clearly believes that the events he describes there had actually occurred. Famously, Michel Foucault has emphasized the distinctly modern character of the concept of "literature", but he hardly discusses its specifically national character. According to him, the notion of literature as a specific, purely 57 Hakim, "Mem", 189. aesthetic modality of language independent of any representation or mimesis of an outside world, is new to the nineteenth century.59 In this period, a neologism adabiyya/edebiyat, derived from classical adab, "humanistic learning" or "cultivation", but referring to literature in this objectified and national sense, was also introduced in the Islamic world, apparently first in Ottoman Turkish and subsequently in Arabic innovators and Persian. Late nineteenth-century Kurdish authors still use the term edebiyat; the present-day Kurmanjî term for "literature", wêje, appears to be an import from the Southern Sorani dialect and was only codified in Kurdoev's 1957 Kurdish grammar.60 Likewise, the term çîrok was used for "short story" for the first time in 1913,61 and the Kurmanjî Kurdish neologisms for "poetry" and "prose" (respectively, helbest and pexşan), both likewise originating in Sorani, appear to be of an even more recent date. In Bayazîdî, none of these romantic-nationalist categories of literature can be found -he consistently uses traditional Arabic terms like shi'ir and hikâya, rather than Kurdish neologisms, nor does any nationalized or nationalist notion of "literature" emerge from his Risaleyeke di behsa şâ'ir û musannifê di Kurdistanê (Essay on the poets and authors in Kurdistan), which may well be the oldest source for discussing the history of Kurdish literature in existence. It is a brief discussion of the lives and writings of eight poets writing in Northern Kurdish in the 1860 Jaba collection.62 The first of these poets, Alî Harîrî, is stated to have lived between 400 and 471 AH (1009/10-1078/79 CE); the second, Shaykh Ahmed, better known as Melayê Cezîrî, is described by Bayazîdî as having fallen in love with the sister of the emir of Botan, and as having died in 556/1161. Bayazîdî dates the next poet, Feqiyê Teyran, a full two centuries later, even though he was in all likelihood a near contemporary of Melayê Cezîrî. 63 We find few, if any, qualifications of an aesthetic nature here, beyond brief characterizations like that of Feqiyê Teyran's verse as "recherché and colourful" (mulamma' û rengîn).
The same holds for the brief remarks on Ehmedê Khanî, undoubtedly the best known among the poets listed in this text. 64  Khanî was the best loved of Kurdish poets, there is nothing to suggest that he thought of the latter's Mem û Zîn as anything like a Kurdish national epic, as Kurdish intellectuals from the later nineteenth century onwards would do. Instead, he just describes it as a poem "about a lover and a beloved".65 On closer inspection, Bayazîdî can hardly even be said to have a notion of a national literature or a national history at all. To begin with, his is not the teleological or revivalist language of a national literary awakening; after Murâd Khan, he writes, there have been no more Kurdish poets,66 implying that the heyday of vernacular Kurdish poetry already lay in the past. Likewise, his brief description is a far cry from the historicist notion of a national literary history as it was becoming current in the nineteenth century -he talks of Kurdish poets, not of Kurdish literature. Thus, this short text may be characterized as the first "history of Kurdish literature" only with the proviso that Bayazîdî had a concept neither of "literature" (let alone a "national literature") nor of literary history that went beyond the bare chronological ordering of authors who happened to be writing in the Kurmanjî language.
Neither in this short text nor elsewhere is Bayazîdî any more concrete regarding Kurdish oral "folklore" than he is about Kurdish "literature". Most remarkably, he is completely silent regarding the oral literary traditions that have come to be seen as a proverbial part of Kurdish culture -witness Nikitine's and Vil'cevskiij's remarks on an allegedly uniquely Kurdish "hypertrophy of folklore".67 Rather, the short essay on Kurdish poets focuses on written texts rather than on sung performances, even though poems like Feqiyê Teyran's have long been used in folk songs. On the other hand, the narratives in CRH, qualified by Bayazîdî himself as hikâya, are, for the most part, neither short stories nor folk tales in the present-day sense; in fact, a good many of them are non-fictional and have a decidedly political character. They discuss contemporary events, like religious and tribal conflicts, and confrontations between local Ottoman rulers and tribal chieftains. They rarely explicitly address the recurring wars between the Ottoman Empire and Qajar Persia, or the increasingly frequent military confrontations with the expanding Russian Empire, although these unmistakeably provide the political and military context for some of his tales. Tale 39, in particular, refers or alludes to the ambivalent loyalty of Kurdish tribal leaders in the recurrent Ottoman-Persian wars. It relates how in 1235/1819-20, two Kurdish chieftains, Sulayman Agha of the Sipikî and Husayn Agha of the Zilan, come to the court of Abbâs Mîrza, the Qajar crown prince 65 Jaba, Recueil, 10Fr/15Kd. 66 Ibid., 11. 67 Cf. Nikitine, Kurdes, 255. and military commander. There, however, they are insulted by a Persian dignitary, Zeman Khan, who calls them "whores" (qehbe).68 Sulayman is so enraged by this insult that in the subsequent Battle of Alashkir, he turns against the Qajars and captures and personally decapitates Zeman Khan, along with a thousand of his soldiers. Another significant tale in this respect is the story of Jaubert's 1805 imprisonment by Ibrahim Pasha in Bayazîd. It is instructive to compare this hikâya with Jaubert's own version of events.69 Jaubert's narrative largely reproduces the stereotypical image of the Kurds as thieves and robbers who, despite claiming a tradition of considering hospitality a sacred duty, are willing to betray even their guests, with the significant exception of the noble prison ward who saves Jaubert's life. For obvious reasons, it avoids any hint that the pasha's suspicions against his French visitor (who, after all, was on a secret mission to broker an alliance between Russia and Qajar Persia, the Ottomans' two most important regional enemies) might be justified. Bayazîdî's version, remarkably, largely reproduces Jaubert's framing of the story, which emphasizes that the friendship between Jaubert and his prison ward transcends the political and diplomatic confrontation between the pasha and a French diplomat on a secret mission in enemy territory. There are a number of minor divergences, however, which may suggest that Bayazîdî also based his account on local (and, probably, oral) Kurdish sources. Thus, the brave prison ward, whom Jaubert calls Mahmûd, appears under the name of Qasim Agha here. It is, of course, very well possible that Bayazîdî, through Jaba, was himself familiar with Jaubert's travel account. He must certainly have had access to the latter's Turkish grammar, as it was from this work that he translated a number of Turkish proverbs into Kurdish.70 Bayazîdî clearly signals his disapproval of the pasha's behaviour; by contrast, Jaubert's noble qualities, he writes in conclusion, have become proverbial in Kurdistan, and most Kurds in Bayazîd know his story (ekserê ekrâdêd bajêrê pê dizanin).71 In other words, and despite appearances, both the philological concept of literature and the ethnographic concept of folklore or folk tales are absent from Bayazîdî's writings. All this suggests that the category of "Kurdish folklore" or "Kurdish folk tales" was not simply a given of Kurdish everyday life but had to be constructed -apparently, with some effort -by foreign scholars. Bayazîdî's collection of tales and his comments on the cultural customs of the Kurds mark a very early stage in this process. 68 Jaba, Recueil, 103, discreetly renders this term as "canaille". 69 Jaubert, Voyage, esp. pp. 37-73. 70 Lerch, Forschungen, vol. I: X; 25 of these proverbs are reproduced ibid., 92-97. 71 Jaba, Recueil, 102Fr, 119Kd.
These tales and other writings also give an idea of Bayazîdî's political loyalties. He repeatedly accuses tribal chieftains or aghas of injustice (zulm) against both Kurdish and Christian peasants, and he implies that the ongoing centralization of Ottoman government is a beneficial development for the local population. Thus, in ARE, he mentions the oppression and injustice (cebr û te'eddî) of the nomadic Kurds against both sedentary villagers (apparently assumed to be Muslim or Yezidi Kurds) and Christian re'âya. This injustice, he continues, had been brought to an end only in recent years, as a result of the reforms initiated by Sultan Abdülmecid I: thanks in particular to the creation of the asâkiri nizamiyya [i.e., the new Ottoman army formed in 1841], he writes, the (tribal) Kurds have gradually been 'set aside' (berteref bûyîn), and oppression and injustice have gradually disappeared.72 Likewise, tale 40 of CRH relates the story of Hafiz Agha, a strongman of the Levend, or Ottoman irregular cavalry troops, who, in systematically oppressing the re'âya and revolting against the provincial governors, commits all kinds of violence and injustice (cebr û zulm). Through clever scheming, however, the Kurdish mîr Shemdîn of Akra, and even more importantly his wife, Meleke, succeed in ambushing and killing Hafiz Agha and subsequently send his head to the vali of Mosul. Such and similar stories suggest that Bayazîdî viewed Ottoman military reform and governmental centralization as a beneficial process that brought injustice in the Kurdish provinces to an end -surely, a rather optimistic reading of the local developments of that period. The removal of the Kurdish mîrs in the 1840s, in particular, had actually had the effect of increasing oppression, both through new -and higher -taxation and through increased lawlessness and insecurity at the hands of marauding tribes that now faced even fewer constraints than before. Bayazîdî, writing in the late 1850s, is unlikely to have been wholly unaware of these negative consequences; perhaps, then, we can construe his words as being ideologically driven, and as expressing support for centralized and centralizing Ottoman rule.

Ethnography
Now let us turn to Bayazîdî's discussion of more recognizably ethnographic topics, like gender relations, tribal structure, and ethnic identity. ARE may well be said to be the first extended ethnography of Kurdish customs, if we disregard the rather less comprehensive earlier observations by Ottomans like Evliya Çelebi and foreigners like C.J. Rich and Carsten Niebuhr. We should specify more concretely, however, the kind of ethnography to be found here. It would 72 Dost, Adat, 114-15.
be an exaggeration to infer that ARE is based on anything like ethnographic field research; rather, it presents a number of cultural stereotypes and Kurdish self-perceptions, most of which appear to be based on hearsay and on local folk beliefs rather than on participant observation or systematic data collecting. Thus, Bayazîdî's descriptions of various local Kurdish habits or customs in tribal warfare, marriage rites, games, horse breeding, and so forth, follow each other in no clear order of argument or exposition. The text is also somewhat repetitive: Bayazîdî repeatedly returns to previously discussed topics, like weddings and games. Finally, the text appears to show traces of the conversations that Bayazîdî and Jaba must have had, most clearly visible in repeated statements that, in some particular respect, the Kurds are "just like the French" (wekû ifrancan or wekû miletê Efrenciyê).73 There is no evidence that Bayazîdî was familiar with any contemporary written work on the French or originating in France, let alone evidence of any travels to that country; he is more likely to have acquired whatever knowledge he had about contemporary French customs from his conversations with Jaba rather than from any French book, or even from a work like Rifā'a al-Ṭahṭāwī's Takhlīṣ al-ibrīz ilā talkhīṣ Bārīz, even though the latter had been translated into Turkish soon after its first Arabic publication in 1834.74 The most remarkable among these comparative remarks is undoubtedly Bayazîdî's claim that Kurdish women are as free (serbest) as French women, because they never get kidnapped: "Their women and daughters are not kidnapped by anyone. They are free just like the French people" (jin û keçêd wan ji kesî narevin. Wekû miletê Efrenciyê ew jî serbest in).75 Here, we have one of the earliest mentions of the modern Kurdish self-image that Kurdish women are freer than women from among the neighbouring Muslim peoples. He immediately adds, however, that if a woman does something wicked, she will inevitably be killed (îlla eger yekê ji wan şola xirab kirîn, çare nînin elbette ewê dikujîn) -which indicates that the alleged freedom of Kurdish women may in fact be rather restricted.76 Elsewhere, he states that Kurdish men did not traditionally practise sodomy (liwât), and that they had only recently started drinking alcohol, due to the pernicious influence of the Turks.
It should be noted that Bayazîdî's knowledge is limited largely to Northern Kurdistan. Thus, the list of tribes he presents, like most of his other writings, focuses on the North, and nowhere in his preserved writings does he betray 73 Ibid any detailed familiarity with Kurdish inhabited areas south of the Bahdinan region. He does note, however, a number of differences between the Kurds living in the regions of Bayazid, Kars, Erzurum, and Van, and those living further South, in Hakkârî, Botan, Bahdinan, and Amadiyya, writing that among the Southern Kurds, more people own guns, and distinct relations obtain between tribal and sedentary populations.77 Apart from the brief mention of the Sulaymaniya dialect78 in the introduction to the TCK, however, he nowhere elaborates on the tribes, tribal confederations, or emirates of Southern Kurdistan (except, possibly, in chapter 6 of that lost chronicle), let alone the linguistic and historical particularities of Hawramî or Goranî varieties, in particular as spoken and written at the court of Erdelan, even though the latter is mentioned in the Sherefname. Bayazîdî's writings are informed by a generic distinction between urban and rural, and between tribal-nomadic and sedentary. The Muslim Kurds in the cities, he writes in the introduction to TCK, "are good Muslims; among them are learned and brave 'ulamâ".79 However, this does not boil down to a simple binary opposition between Islamic learning articulated in the Arabic language and local Kurdish customs, or between urban Arab-Islamic orthodoxy and rural Kurdish ignorance -he also describes the formerly flourishing tradition of rural religious learning in the Kurdish language. In ARE, Bayazîdî does not hint at, let alone discuss in any detail, any such written literary tradition or a vernacular literate tradition of learning among the Kurds, but he was clearly aware of its existence, as appears from his two short texts on Kurdish poets and Kurdish learning already dicussed above. His strict separation between a learned vernacular literature and an ignorant oral culture may be a factor preventing him from seeing the Kurds, like the modern Armenians, as a "philological nation", defined by a shared language, oral tradition, and literature, as discussed by Nichanian. This suggests, once again, that his methods, conceptions, and normative assumptions are clearly neither those of modern (orientalist) philology nor those of romantic folklore-oriented nationalism.
Regarding social organization, Bayazîdî's category of Kurdishness is as inclusive as it is in linguistic terms. He nowhere gives any hint of considering the tribal (rewend) and the sedentary non-tribal (yerlû, goran) population groups as different groups, nations, or races, in the way that Claudius James Rich and, possibly, some of the latter's local informants in Sulaymania had done. According to Rich, the Goran or Miskên were distinguished by their language, physical 77 Ibid., 127, 117. 78 Ibid., 221. 79 Ibid., 229.
traits, and customs from the Kurds proper, and formed the region's original population, which had been overrun and reduced to a subordinate status by invading Kurdish tribes.80 Bayazîdî's remarks, admittedly focusing on North-Eastern rather than Southern Kurdistan, offer little, if any, support for this theory. In ARE, the term Goran is employed only once, without any clear ethnic significance,81 let alone any connection to the Goranî or Hawramî dialects, and this single occurrence appears in the context of a generic opposition between ekrad, here identified with nomadic (rewend) Kurds, and yerlû, or sedentary, peasants. The former, Bayazîdî adds, call the latter Goran, considering them weak and cowardly, and rarely intermarrying with them. He does not, however, mention any linguistic, genealogical, or racial distinction between the two, and he explicitly denies that any opposition exists between tribal rewend and sedentary, non-tribal goran in the regions of Hakkârî, Botan, Amadiye, and Soran.82

Religion and Religious Groups
Bayazîdî's writings on religion among the Kurds are equally revealing of his distinct categories. He has no clear-cut notion, let alone a modern anthropological or philological concept, of religion. He uses the term millet, which indicates not a body of doctrines or ritual practices, but rather a group of people; this term, in fact, is ambiguous, denoting what in modern vocabulary would be called either "religion" or "nation".83 Moreover, he nowhere hints at religious beliefs or customs he sees as typical for, or originating with, the Kurds. Thus, Newroz, the celebration of the spring equinox celebration that in later decades would come to be seen as a specifically Kurdish national holiday, is notably absent in ARE.84 In fact, Bayazîdî's description of Newroz in his prose summary of Mem û Zîn suggests that he not only does not see the festival as specifically Kurdish, but is in fact actively trying to Islamicize it, as he emphasizes that it is in complete agreement with religious laws. Both in the tales collected in CRH and in the preface to TCK, Bayazîdî expresses remarkably mild opinions concerning Christians and Yezidis. It is possible that he moderated his comments on, for example, Armenians, Nestorians, and Yezidis with an eye on his Russian and Christian readership, but we have no way of knowing. Here and elsewhere, he virtually identifies Christians (fellâh) with the re'âya or "flock", even though the latter could also include Muslim Ottoman subjects who did not belong to the askerî class just as well as dhimmîs. In the introduction to TCK, he writes that "in Kurdistan, there are around 70,000 houses [i.e., families] of Armenian re'âya, 15,000 houses of Nestorians [Assyrians], and 200 houses of Jews". He adds that "the re'âya of Kurdistan speak Kurdish",85 and even that their women and children know no language other than Kurdish, implying that only Armenian males with some degree of education knew the Armenian language (presumably, the classical language variety usually called Grabar); only the Nestorians are listed as having a language of their own.86 More generally, he claims that the "re'âya and Armenians in Kurdistan are in all respects like the Kurds".87 Despite this apparent lack of linguistic and cultural differences, however, Bayazîdî nowhere classifies Christians as Kurds. In the introduction to TCK, he further writes that Christians "live well together with the Kurds", with whom they exchange kirîvs, or godfathers at circumcision ceremonies (implying a belief that Christian re'âya are circumcised).88 The Yezidis are a rather more complicated case. Although Bayazîdî is clearly reluctant to write about them, he generally appears to list them alongside Sunni Kurds, or as a specific ta'îfa among the Kurds, without hesitation.89 In ARE, he does not give any detailed descriptions of Yezidi customs, but merely characterizes them in the briefest of manners: In Kurdistan, there is also the Yezidi group (ta'îfe) of the Kurds, who are not Muslims but Yezidis. Their rites and ceremonies and manners and 85 Ibid nation, but rather as an indication of the decadence of his own age. Earlier generations of shaykhs, he writes, were pious and venerable (salih û şêx bûne), but their successors are ignorant and uncultivated (cahil û bê edeb).99 These remarks are in line with his comment elsewhere that the virtual disappearance of learning in Kurdistan is a sign of the imminent end of time (elametê axirî).100 Clearly, Bayazîdî's sense of historical temporality is shaped by religious eschatology rather than by nationalist notions of progress and emancipation. It would therefore be an overstatement to characterize Bayazîdî as a secular or modernist author, but his critical attitude towards his co-clerics' ignorance and corruption is nonetheless significant. Incidentally, it should be noted that he nowhere refers or alludes to the religious reform movements that swept through the early nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, such as the Wahhâbî and the Khalidiyya Naqshbandî movements, but it seems unlikely he was unaware of them.101

History
Finally, let us explore the kind of historiography Bayazîdî writes. He explicitly states that his translation of the Sherefname was made at the request, and with the support, of "Monsieur Jaba" (bi istidâ û xwaheş û himmeta Misyo Jabayî).102 Perhaps it was also Jaba who had bought the manuscript copy of the again, the fact that this text appears to have been written exclusively for Jaba makes such hypotheses, attractive as they may be, rather speculative. Bayazîdî's own sequel to the Sherefname, the TCK, covers the period of 1200/1785 up to 1274/1857-58, the year in or before which it was actually written. The existing sources give no clear reason why this work starts in 1200 AH, long after the end of the period covered by Sheref Khan Bidlîsî. The table of contents of this work, reproduced by Dost and Avci from Vasilyeva,104 lists eleven chapters dealing with different Kurdish emirates or districts, opening with a chapter on the vilayet of Erzurum, and includes chapters on regions like Bayazîd (where Bayazîdî himself was born), Rawanduz (presumably, dealing with the rise and fall of the nineteenth-century strongman Muhammad Pasha), and Botan (presumably, focusing on Bedir Khan Beg's rule), and on the Russian siege and temporary occupation of the city of Kars. The inclusion of these topics makes the loss of this work all the more deplorable. A separate chapter is devoted to "Azerbaijan" (i.e., the Kurdish regions falling under Persian rule).
Remarkably, Bayazîdî appears not to give any detailed attention to the Kurdish principalities south and east of Rawanduz, like the Baban and Erdelan dynasties. About the reasons for this omission, and about the written and oral sources at his disposal, we can only speculate.
Superficially, Bayazîdî might seem to be engaged in the kind of nationalist historiography typical of nineteenth-century Europe. For example, in the onepage preface to his translation of the Sherefname, he writes that Every past people and nation have a separate history and a known noble descent and lineage, except for the people of the Kurds, who until the year 1000 AH [1591-92 CE] did not have an independent history.
Kafeyê tewâyîf û milelêd borî her yekî cuda cuda tewarîx û meşhûr heseb û neseb heyin, îlla ku tayifeyêd kurdan heta tarîxa hezarê hicretê ewan tewayifêd ekradiye bi xoser tewarîx tunebune.105 In the same year of 1000 AH, he continues, Sheref Khan of Bidlîs wrote a chronicle of the Kurdish rulers and tribes in the Ottoman and Persian Empires, but of this work, only two or three very expensive manuscript copies, which cost up to a thousand qurush, circulate in all of Kurdistan. Bayazîdî's further comment that the Sherefname was written in Farsi106 makes it tempting to see him Die Welt des Islams 60 (2020) 433-472 as a romantic nationalist who believes that a truly national history should be written in the national language, and that the Sherefname should therefore not be considered a genuine national history. But his own motivation for writing a history in the Kurdish language may equally well, and in fact more probably, have been the practical concern that, because of both its language and its price, this work was out of reach for the Kurdish-reading public, which at that time consisted primarily of medrese-educated males and local rulers; or he may have had an even more down-to-earth motive in the fact that a Kurdish translation of Sheref Khan's work had been commissioned by Jaba.
What does become clear from Bayazîdî's writings, however, is that the year 1000/1591-92 occupies a special place in his conception of Kurdish history. It was around this year, he writes, that Sheref Khan wrote the first Kurdish chronicle;107 that Eli Teremaxî pioneered the writing of Kurdish as a language of learning;108 and that Ehmedê Khanî settled in Bayazid, where he was to compose the first major mathnawî poem in Kurdish109. These claims vary in their degree of accuracy: the date of 1000 AH is approximately correct in the case of Bidlîsî, whose Sherefname is dated 1005/1597; it is possible, but not very plausible, in the case of Teremaxî, whose undated Tesrîfa Kurmancî is not attested before the late eighteenth century;110 and it is clearly false in the case of Khanî, who himself explicitly indicates his year of birth as 1061/1650, and who writes that he has finished his Mem û Zîn at the age of 44 -that is, in the year 1107/1695: should take Bayazîdî's use of the year 1000 AH as no more than a convenient, or conventional, demarcation of a significant development in Kurdish history. More importantly, it also suggests that he was well aware of the vernacularization of Kurdish in the not too distant past, and of its cultural-historical significance. This makes it tempting to view Bayazîdî as a modernist who thinks of this vernacularization process in terms of historical progress, emancipation, and national awakening. But we should resist this temptation. Not only is the revivalist vocabulary of liberation or religious or national awakening after a centuries-long slumber entirely absent from his writings; he notes the historical significance of the year 1000 AH but nowhere describes it as marking a radical break, rupture, or revolution, or even as an example of cultural innovation (tajdīd) or reform (iṣlāḥ), the conventional terms for significant change wrought by cultural or religious innovators (mujaddids). On the other hand, Bayazîdî no more betrays a cyclical view of history (as can be found in, most famously, Ibn Khaldūn) than he gives any hint of a belief in historical progress. Instead, he sees his own era as marking a substantial cultural decline, not with respect to any divinely sanctioned origin or any mythical Golden Age, but with respect to the more recent past. Thus, he claims that after Murâd Khan (1150/1737-38 -1199/1784-85), the eighth and final poet discussed in his short overview, "no poets have emerged from among the Kurds until now" (paşê wî ji kurmanciyan aydî şâ'ir pêda ne bûye heta niha).112 Likewise, he writes in his introduction to Teremaxî's Tasrîf: Nowadays, madrasas, teachers and learning have disappeared almost entirely in Kurdistan, or have at least become quite rare. Surely, it is a sign of the end of the world when one sees the sciences and the learned men diminish.
Given the scarcity of sources, it may be difficult if not impossible to determine whether these remarks are factually correct. It is tempting to link his 112 Jaba, Recueil, 11Fr/16Kd. 113 Ibid., 14Fr/19Kd.
Die Welt des Islams 60 (2020) 433-472 laments to the broader social and political upheavals of the time, like the disappearance of local court patronage, Ottoman attempts at centralization, and Russian imperial encroachment. But although he notes these developments, he does not himself appear to see them as actual causes of Kurdish cultural decline. More to the point in the present context is the sense of historical time implicit in Bayazîdî's pessimism, which appears to amount neither to a cyclical temporality, as in Ibn Khaldūn's Muqaddima, nor to a notion of linear progress, as may be found in modernist and/or nationalist historians. Nor does it seem based on modernist concepts of "progress", "civilization", or "evolution"; rather, it reflects a conservative belief in the decline of morals paired to an eschatological (and, one may perhaps add, conventional religious) expectation that the end of times is imminent.

Kurdish and Russian Learning
As suggested above, Bayazîdî's writings amount to a somewhat hybrid genre. They not only mark an important moment in the vernacularization of Kurdish but also belong to an early chapter in the history of Russian orientalism. To all appearances, they were never intended for a Kurdish audience, but were commissioned by, and composed exclusively for, the Russian consul, Auguste Jaba. As such, they fit into the broader pattern of early Russian oriental studies -in the mid-nineteenth century, Russian scholars or officials (more often than not working directly for the imperial Russian state) would specifically commission written works from local scholars among various Eastern peoples.114 The authors of these texts are not precisely "native informants" in the standard sense of the word -they were not illiterate, and could successfully claim some form of local epistemic authority. But in the process of incorporating their writings into Russian orientalist learning, this authority was clearly and unequivocally rendered subordinate to that of Western scholars. The first Russian philological and folkloric explorations of the Kurds, as those of other peoples in the empire, were purely in the service of language acquisition and were less concerned with what was specific or unique to Kurdish customs or culture. Thus, the 44 "basic sentences" produced in Lerch's Forschungen are in fact Kurmanjî and Zaza translations of the sample sentences contained in Bacmeister's famous 1773 Idea et desideria; the stories are in fact translations from Dieterici's and Letellier's collections of Turkish folk tales; and the 25 Kurdish proverbs he reproduces are simply Bayazîdî's translations of Turkish sayings included in Jaubert's 1823 Turkish grammar. The text even includes a translation of a Finnish rune inscription.115 These translations into local languages, too, are a regularly recurring phenomenon of early Russian oriental studies. One encounters various specifically commissioned translations of famous works of Persian literature, first and foremost Sa'dî's Golestan, into local vernacular languages, written with the apparent purpose of facilitating the acquisition and systematic philological study of these languages by Russian scholars who already have a command of Persian. Thus, Lerch in his discussion of the ongoing project of a Kurdish translation of the Golestan, also mentions an "Afghan" (presumably, Pashtun) and a Mazanderani rendering of that work commissioned by Russian scholars. Ironically, this use of the Golestan for facilitating the learning of vernaculars closely mirrors the use of Sa'dî's book among some of these very same peoples to learn Persian.116 The importance of Russian-imperial and Soviet scholarship for the more recent revival of interest in Bayazîdî can hardly be overstated. In fact, most, if not all, recent Kurdish-language editions of Bayazîdî's works are transcriptions, translations, and/or photographic reprints of earlier Russian and Soviet publications.117 Yet, in many earlier Russian writings, the role of Bayazîdî and other local scholars like him is curiously downplayed. This holds especially for writings by native scholars on vernacular languages, which were generally seen by nineteenth-century European scholars as at best a source of raw linguistic material yet to be properly analyzed and rendered academically respectable by Western scholars, and at worst a cause of confusion, as they were held to be based on inadequate linguistic doctrines and methods of transcription. Thus, Eli Teremaxî's Serfa Kurmancî, a short work of morphology copied by Bayazîdî for Jaba, was dismissed by the committee of the Russian Academy of Sciences, that had been put in charge of publishing Jaba's materials, as being a derivative 115 Lerch