“Why are mustaches so important to the Ahl-e Haqq?” I asked Taher, remembering the Yezidis’ mustaches. The Ahl-e Haqq wore theirs equally thick and long.
We were walking back to the front of the complex. To one side were dormitories for pilgrims; to another, a white-tiled room with meat hooks, where worshipers brought their sheep and goats to be sacrificed.
“So we can recognize each other; it’s a sign of our faith,” he said. “And when someone comes here whose mustache is too short, I don’t let him in.”
It took me a moment to realize that he was joking.
“Do you know why Muslims fast for thirty days, but Ahl-e Haqq fast for only three?” he asked.
I shook my head, though I had heard that the Ahl-e Haqq, along with the Yezidis and Alevis, did not observe Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting.
“Because the Holy Prophet Muhammad’s hearing was not so good! And when God said you must fast three days, he thought he said thirty!”
I tried to ask more questions about the Ahl-e Haqq, but Taher declined to answer, saying he was no expert. I suspected there was more to it than that. Like the Yezidis, too many painful memories of persecution have taught the Ahl-e Haqq to keep their beliefs deeply hidden.
Nearing the front of the complex, Taher invited us into his home for tea, and we entered a spare room where his wife was already heating water and preparing plates of fruit and fresh white cheese. Made from curdled milk flavored with herbs, the cheese is a staple throughout Greater Kurdistan.
In one corner of the room lay a tambur, a kind of long-necked lute. One of the world’s oldest instruments, originating thousands of years ago, the tambur far predates the Ahl-e Haqq faith and is popular throughout Iran. But the instrument has become central to the religion, so much so that a tambur can be found in virtually every Ahl-e Haqq home, and most of Iran’s best tambur players are Ahl-e Haqq.
The Ahl-e Haqq believe that when God created Adam and Eve, God wanted to put a piece of His soul inside Adam, but the soul didn’t want to go, a musician told me later in Tehran. So God said to Gabriel, “Go inside Adam’s body and play the tambur.” Gabriel obeyed and played a beautiful song called “Tarz,” which is still played today. The piece of God’s soul became bewildered. He liked the song very much, but where was it coming from? He approached Adam, and the music pulled and pulled, finally pulling the piece of soul inside.
I asked Taher and his wife if it was difficult for them to live so far away from any settlement, at the end of a road that would become impassable with snow in the winter, mud in the spring. Taher looked confused at my question, then shrugged. Sometimes it was lonely in winter, he said, but in spring, summer, and fall, the shrine was always busy. Didn’t I know that the Soltan’s shrine was as important to the Ahl-e Haqq as Mecca was to Muslims? Pilgrims came from all over, and on major holy days, the place was so crowded that you couldn’t even find a place to sit! Even Shiites and Sunnis believed in Soltan Sahak, and came here when they were sick, leaving a few hours later, miraculously cured.
As he spoke, I suspected that I was talking to a happy man.
ONE SUNDAY IN Istanbul, my new friends Ali, an economist, and Sheri, an architect, took me to a cem—an Alevi religious ceremony. Ali and Sheri were both Alevi Kurds, but they had never attended a cem before and were going only on my behalf. Like many younger urban Kurds in Turkey, and Americans, organized religion did not play much of a role in their lives. They could answer few of my questions about the Alevi faith, and they had as little curiosity about it as I have about Christianity.
Of Turkey’s perhaps 3.5 million Alevis, almost half are Kurdish. Their heartland is Tunceli, known as Dersim in Kurdish, a hardscrabble city some distance north of southeast Turkey, where most Sunni Kurds live. The Alevis have a strong humanist tradition, celebrating their religion with song and dance, and often educating their daughters as well as their sons. The Alevis are also known for their leftist politics, which have often pitted them against Turkey’s rightist government, with disastrous consequences.
The Alevi Turks and Alevi Kurds are two separate groups, in frequent disagreement with each other. Historically, however, the chasm between the Alevi Kurds and the Sunni Kurds has been far greater. Traditionally, the Sunni Kurds have viewed the Alevis as irreligious and unclean, abhorring their lack of mosques, ritual ablutions, and prayer. And the Alevi Kurds in turn have often viewed the Sunni Kurds as ignorant and backward. God is in the heart, not in ritual and prayer, they say, and ridicule the Sunnis for “hitting the ground with their heads five times a days.”
Only in the modern era have the Alevi Kurds and Sunni Kurds become more closely aligned—and largely because of the Kurdish-Turkish civil war. Whatever his faults, PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan succeeded in uniting various disparate Kurdish elements, and many Alevi Kurds joined with Sunni Kurds in their armed struggle against the Turkish state.
Ali, Sheri, and I arrived at the Shakulu Sultan Cemevi around midday. The large, whitewashed complex was filled with inviting gardens, cobblestone courtyards, towering leafy trees, and hundreds of men, women, and children. Near the entrance was a modern bookshop, tables loaded with books and CDs, and an animal pen crowded with sheep. The sheep were available for purchase and sacrifice.
Following a voice drifting out of loudspeakers overhead, we entered a twelve-sided room filled with worshipers. Most of the women sat on one side, most of the men on the other, but there was some intermingling and much informality, as children came and went and adults whispered to one another. Some of the women were covered in head scarves and long dresses, others wore tight blue jeans and T-shirts. By the door, directing traffic, reigned a portly man with a cane.
At the front of the room sat a frail old man with a full white beard, three-piece olive green suit, dapper hat, and dark sunglasses, swaying gently. He was known as a “grandfather,” or dede, Sheri whispered. Beside him sat another bearded old man, this one wearing a cap, and a somewhat younger man in a suit, with a beard and mustache.
The dede started chanting through a microphone, “Allah, Allah, Allah,” while the other old man joined in with words of prayer. All of the supplicants sat up on their knees and bent their heads, while a man on a saz, or lute, started a disjointed strumming. “Ya Allah, Ya Allah,” the worshipers prayed.
As I enjoyed the peaceful scene, I contrasted it in my mind with the Alevis’ difficult history, beginning with the rise of the Ottoman Empire in 1514, when Sultan the Grim massacred about forty thousand Alevis, whom he suspected of supporting the Safavids. Ever afterward, the Ottoman Sunnis treated the Alevis with utmost contempt, an attitude that lingers among some in the modern era. Throughout the twentieth century, the Alevis were the frequent targets of violence, with the most brutal campaign occurring in 1937–38, when Turkey’s President Atatürk used poison gas and heavy artillery to quash an incipient rebellion. Perhaps forty thousand Alevis died in the attack. And in 1978, at least 109 Alevis were massacred and 176 badly injured during a rampage by the right-wing Grey Wolves, who ripped children from the bellies of pregnant mothers and hung up dead men on electricity poles, saying that it was their duty to wipe out “the enemy within.”
The most recent large-scale Alevi tragedy occurred only ten years ago in the ancient Turkish town of Sivas. Here dozens of intellectuals gathered one July 1993 day for an Alevi literary festival honoring Pir Sultan Abdal, a sixteenth-century poet, mystic, and social rebel, executed by the Ottomans. The Alevis have long likened the pir’s struggle with the Alevi one, while, in more recent decades, many Alevi Kurds—and the Turkish authorities—see a connection between him and the Kurdish struggle. Among the festival’s honored guests was the noted satirist and leftist Aziz Nesin, a Turkish Alevi, who opened the celebration with a passionate speech filled with anti-Islamic overtones. The next day, an angry Islamist crowd surrounded the hotel in which the intellectuals were staying. Frantically, the Alevis telephoned for help from the local police, the security forces, and the capital of
Ankara, but no response came. Finally, shouting “Allah-u Akbar, ” God is Great, the frenzied crowd set fire to the hotel. Thirty-seven writers, artists, and thinkers perished in a tragedy that the Alevis blame as much on the authorities as they do on the perpetrators.
Ironically, Aziz Nesin survived the inferno. He was mistaken for the police chief and rescued by a fire engine ladder.
CHAPTER NINE
From Kings to Parliamentarians
FROM DOHUK TO ERBIL, THE HEAD QUARTERS OF THE KDP and seat of the Kurdish Parliament, was a five-hour drive. I had been planning on hiring a car to make the trip, but, at the last minute, Dr. Shawkat put me in touch with a KDP official on his way to Erbil. He had his own car and driver, and offered to give me a ride.
I said good-bye to Majed and his family, and to Dr. Shawkat, whose attentions were no longer annoying me—I would miss him and all my friends in Dohuk. And I wondered, as I often did when departing from people in Kurdistan, what the status of their world would be the next time we were in touch. The specter of war hung over everything.
Around midday, the KDP official and I came to the wide expanse of the Greater Zab River, the main tributary of the Tigris. The river’s waters churned in ropes of brown and white as it raced alongside us, toward snowcapped Qandil Mountain. Passing over a small bridge, we entered a passageway bordered by rock cliffs to one side. And as we did so, we passed out of Bahdinani Kurdistan and into Sorani Kurdistan, where Kurds speak a different dialect.
The Greater Zab marks the dividing line between the two main dialects of the Kurdish language. North of the river, including northern Iraqi Kurdistan and much of Turkey, Kurds speak Kermanji. South of the river, in southern Iraqi Kurdistan and much of Iran, they speak Sorani. Sub-dialects also exist, including Zaza, spoken primarily in central-eastern Turkey, and Gurani and Kermanshahi, spoken in Iranian Kurdistan. Interestingly, Zaza and Gurani are closely related, even though they are at the opposite geographic ends of Kurdistan. Many Kurds are also bilingual, speaking Arabic, Persian, or Turkish in addition to Kurdish.
All Kurdish dialects belong to one of two branches of the Iranian languages and are related to Persian. Nonetheless, they differ considerably from one another, so much so that many Kermanji speakers cannot understand Sorani speakers, and vice versa. Lacking a standard language has been yet another barrier to Kurdish political and social unification.
Tents of the seminomads
However, this barrier is breaking down, largely because of television, and partly because of war and upheaval. Perhaps two-thirds of Iraqi Kurds now have access to satellite dishes, as do many Kurds in Iran and Turkey, with which they watch the KDP’s Kurdish Satellite TV, where announcers speak in both Kermanji and Sorani; the PUK’s Kurd Sat, usually broadcast in Sorani; and the PKK’s Med TV, a Kermanji station broadcast from Europe. War and upheaval has also meant more intermingling between speakers of Kermanji and Sorani, both within Kurdistan and the diaspora.
Complications remain, most notably that of written Kurdish. Iraqi and Iranian Kurds, like their compatriots, use the Arabic alphabet, while Kurds in Turkey, like the Turks, use the Roman.
In the safe haven, Kurdish was the primary language being taught in the schools, where a “Kurdicized” curriculum was also being developed. Parents who learned their lessons in Arabic were delighting in children learning theirs in Kurdish. But the practice has dangers. Many of today’s younger generation cannot speak Arabic, a considerable liability in a land with many Arabic-speaking neighbors.
A similar understandable but nonetheless irrational distaste for Arabic also runs deep in Iran, where many Kurds feel oppressed by their Islamic government. One intelligent, ambitious high school student I met there recoiled in horror when I asked him if he spoke Arabic. “I have to learn some in school, but I will never speak it, it is evil,” he said.
The teaching of Kurdish in the Iraqi schools has enormous resonance for the Kurds of Iran and Turkey, where Kurdish-language schools scarcely exist. A few universities and private institutes in Iranian Kurdistan do offer courses in Kurdish language, history, and culture, but the language is not taught at the lower public school levels. And in Turkey, the teaching of Kurdish has been a red-hot political issue—only very recently easing—with Kurds at times arrested and imprisoned for promoting Kurdish language rights. In late 2001 and early 2002, for example, students at twenty-five Turkish universities signed 11,837 petitions arguing for optional Kurdish lessons. In response, 1,359 students were arrested, 143 imprisoned, and 46 suspended.
FROM THE GREATER ZAB, we continued south, passing through Harir, once ruled by a seventeenth-century woman warrior named Princess Zad, and Shaqlawa, a leafy Christian town. Behind Shaqlawa rose brooding Sefin Mountain, the site of a decisive peshmerga victory over the Iraqi army that paved the way for semiautonomous Kurdistan.
Later in my stay, I would be invited to a picnic on Sefin and was surprised to find a broad grassy plateau on top, sprinkled with daisies, purple thistles, and big red wild tulips with pointy leaves. All around Sefin bobbed hills of dark red and gray, resembling giant clam shells, due to prominent vertical ridges, and hillocks streaked with bright yellow, white, and green— as if cans of paint were spilled down their sides.
Beyond Shaqlawa, the road zigzagged up a steep, distinctive ridge to Salahuddin. Visible from miles around, Salahuddin had been a resort pre-1991, but since the uprising, had served as the headquarters of the KDP. A huge party seal, dominated by a fierce-eyed eagle, stood at a central crossroads on the mountain’s top. To both sides stretched the offices and homes of top officials, including KDP President Massoud Barzani and Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani. The massif was also an important meeting site. In October 2002, after the Gulf War, various disparate elements of the Iraqi opposition first met here to form the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a major anti-Baath coalition. In February 2003, one month before the Iraq war, the 65-seat Iraqi opposition committee convened on the summit to discuss plans for post-Saddam Iraq.
Visible from Salahuddin, and accessible via another zigzagging road, was Erbil, or Hawler, as it is known in Kurdish. The two towns were less than a half hour apart, and closely connected, with politicians and bureaucrats often traveling between them several times a day. Traffic jams along the interconnecting road were common, as were traffic jams in Erbil itself. I was many miles away from sleepy Dohuk.
LIKE AMADIYA, ERBIL is another of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities, dating back about eight thousand years. The Sumerians called it “Urbilum” in their cuneiform tablets of the 3000s B.C.; while under the Assyrians, the city became known as Arbailu, or “Four Gods,” as it served as the empire’s religious capital and home to the shrine of the goddess Ishtar.
It was to Erbil that Sennacherib, perhaps the most famous of all Assyrian kings, made a pilgrimage in 692 B.C. to pray to Ishtar for his coming battle with the Babylonians; his prayers were answered. It was also to Erbil that the supporters of Teumman, a would-be usurper to the Assyrian throne, were brought and brutally flayed alive in the mid-600s B.C. In 608 B.C., the Medes conquered the city, followed over the next six centuries by the Persians, Greeks, and Parthians, under whose rule Erbil became Christian. Mentioned in the Bible as Arbela, the city was also an important crossroads for caravan routes.
However, it was the famous 331 B.C. battle between the Greeks and the Persians for which ancient Erbil is most known. One of the most decisive battles of all time, pitting Alexander the Great against the Great King Darius III, the battle caused all of Asia as far east as the Hindu Kush to fall under Greek rule, thereby ending the powerful Achaemenian Persian dynasty. The battle of Arbela was also a brilliant military achievement in which Alexander and his army defeated a force many times their size, losing about twelve hundred men to the Persians’ loss of perhaps forty thousand.
Despite its name, the battle of Arbela was actually fought on the plain of Gaugamela, meaning the “Camel’s Grazing Place,” about fifty miles northwest of Erbi
l. The Great King Darius had reached Gaugamela well before Alexander, but made critical tactical errors, such as neglecting to occupy hills that could have been used as lookout posts. A few days before the battle, Darius also learned that his wife, a prisoner in Alexander’s camp, had fallen ill and died. He tried to make a last-minute peace settlement, offering a huge ransom for his other, still-captive family members. Alexander refused, and the battle began, with the Persians finding themselves in more and more desperate circumstances as the day wore on.
When the battle reached a crescendo, Darius and his immediate followers fled to their base camp in Arbela, from which they continued north into the Kurdish mountains and Iran. Alexander entered Arbela the next morning, to find the Great King gone, but he seized his chariot and weapons, and proclaimed himself King of Asia. The Greeks then buried their dead and marched on to Babylon and the Persian capitals of Susa and Persepolis. Thousands of Persian corpses were left to rot on the battlefield.
In A.D. 196, the Romans conquered Erbil, only to succumb to the Persian Sassanians thirty years later. Under their enlightened rule, however, the city’s Christian community continued to flourish. Erbil was the see of a bishopric until the ninth century, two hundred years after the arrival of Islam, when it was moved to Mosul.
A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Page 18