Tanbur

The tanbur is a long-necked lute with a pear-shaped body carved from a single piece of mulberry and a thin wooden face. It has two or three metal strings, tied frets and a slender neck, and it is played with the fingers of the right hand in a fluid strumming technique called shor, in which all the fingers sweep and flick the strings. Its tone is dry, close and rippling. Long-necked lutes of the same name are played across a vast area, from Turkey to Central Asia, but the tanbur of the Kurds has a particular home and a particular meaning.

The music of the Yarsan

For the Yarsan, also called the Ahl-e Haqq, ‘People of Truth’, the tanbur is a sacred instrument. The Yarsan are a faith community with roots in the Gorani-speaking regions of Kermanshah, around Sahneh, Gahvareh, Kerend and the Dalahu range, and in neighbouring Iraqi Kurdistan, where related communities are known as the Kaka’i. Their sacred texts, the kalam, are poems in Gorani attributed to Sultan Sahak and other holy figures, and at the communal gathering, the jam, they are sung to the tanbur. Members of the community describe these melodies, many of them called maqam, as a repertoire handed down with the scripture itself.

The tanbur is played seated, held almost horizontally, and in the jam it is often played by several people together while the gathering sings. The instrument is treated with respect, and many Yarsan homes keep one. For believers the music is part of worship, a means of remembrance and of opening the heart, not an ornament to it.

From shrine to stage

In the twentieth century, players from Yarsan families brought the tanbur’s repertoire to wider audiences. Ostad Elahi (1895–1974), a jurist and thinker from a Yarsan family of Jeyhunabad, was also a master of the instrument, and his recordings showed its depth to listeners outside the community. Later musicians, among them Seyyed Khalil Alinejad (1957–2001), took it onto concert stages in Iran and Europe. The tanbur’s place in concert life is now well established, and its spiritual repertoire is studied by scholars of Kurdish and Iranian music.

Members of the Yarsan community have reported official non-recognition of their faith in Iran and pressures on its practice, which are documented in the annual reports of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom and in the work of the Minority Rights Group. The tanbur, heard far beyond Kermanshah, has become one of the best-known expressions of their heritage, and of the place of music in the religious life of the Kurdish world.