Jan Dost (born 1965, Kobani), a prominent Syrian Kurdish writer, has described his work as a “fictional story about a real poet.” Mulla Ahmad Jaziri, the poet who appears as the protagonist of this novel, plays a historic role among the Kurds. He ...
Jan Dost (born 1965, Kobani), a prominent Syrian Kurdish writer, has described his work as a “fictional story about a real poet.” Mulla Ahmad Jaziri, the poet who appears as the protagonist of this novel, plays a historic role among the Kurds. He is the founder of classical Kurdish poetry, and Kurdish scholars consider him the greatest poet in the history of their literature and accord him a position similar to that of Hafez in Persian literature. The story of this novel begins with the poet’s infatuation in his youth. He is a student of jurisprudence when he falls in love with the beauty of a princess from the emirate of “Jazira,” the largest Kurdish emirate during the Ottoman Empire. However, he realizes that his dream of marriage is nothing more than a mirage. Although the princess fell in love with the young student after just one meeting, she later, at the behest of her family and in her own words, “gives in to what was destined for her” and marries one of the Kurdish emirs. The young student later became a famous poet and in his old age narrated the story of his failed but still burning love affair to one of his students.
In his account of the poet’s life, Jan Doost reveals the deep literary connections between the Kurdish community and Iranian culture and literature at that time. From his account, we learn that Persian was so common in the literary circles of this region, which was part of the Ottoman Empire, that it was recognized as the dominant literary language in poetry and prose.
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