Ahmad Khani, also spelled Ahmad-i Khani (Kurdish: Ehmedê Xanî‎; 1650, Hakkari – 1707, Doğubayazıt), was a Kurdish writer, poet, astronomer and philosopher.[1] He was born amongst the Khani’s tribe in Hakkari province in present-day Turkey. He moved to Bayezid in Ritkan province and settled there. Later he started with teaching Kurdish (Kurmanji) at basic level. Khani was fluent in Kurdish, Arabic and Persian. He wrote his Arabic-Kurdish dictionary “Nûbihara Biçûkan” (The …

NALÎ (Pers. Nāli), the pen-name of Mela Khidrî Ehmedî Šaweysî Mikâʾîlî (b. Ḵāk o ḵol, 1797 or 1800; d. Istanbul, 1855 or 1856), Kurdish poet who contributed immensely to making Sorani the literary language of southern Kurdistan, that is, most of present-day Iraq and the neighboring districts in Iran (FIGURE …

MAWLAWI, ʿAbd-al-Raḥim Maʿdumi (b. 1806, d. near Ḥalabja, 1882-83), a leading Kurdish poet of the 19th century who wrote in the Gurāni dialect of southeastern Kurdistan (FIGURE 1). He used the pen name Maʿdumi, but he is better known as the Kurdish Mawlawi (Mawlawi-e Kord). He was born in the …

    Hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were executed during a systematic attempt to exterminate the Kurdish population in Iraq in the Anfal operations in the late 1980s. They were tied together and shot so they fell into mass graves. Their towns and villages were attacked by …