Kurds

The Kurds, Kurd in their own speech, are one of the oldest peoples of the Iranian world and one of the largest without a state of their own. Their homeland, Kurdistan, runs along the Zagros and into the Anatolian highlands and is divided today between Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria. In Iran it covers Kurdistan province and much of Kermanshah, Ilam and West Azerbaijan; a second Kurdish world lies far to the east in North Khorasan, where Kurds were settled by the Safavids in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to guard the frontier.

Languages and faiths

Kurdish is a family of north-western Iranian languages rather than a single tongue. Kurmanji is spoken in the north, around Urmia and in Khorasan; Sorani around Mahabad, Sanandaj and in Iraqi Kurdistan; Southern Kurdish, including Kalhori and Feyli, around Kermanshah and Ilam. Hawrami (Gorani), the old literary language of the Ardalan court, survives in the high valleys of Hawraman, whose terraced villages became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2021. Most Kurds of Iran are Sunni Muslims of the Shafi’i school, but Kermanshah and Ilam are largely Shia, and the Yarsan (Ahl-e Haqq) faith, with its sacred music on the tanbur, is rooted in Kurdish country. The Faiths section tells their story.

What is kept

Newroz, the Kurdish new year, is the great day: fires on hillsides, the circle dance (halparke in Sorani, govend in Kurmanji) with linked little fingers and a leader swinging a handkerchief, and the story of Kawa the blacksmith, who overthrew the tyrant Zahhak, told as a Kurdish story as well as a Persian one. The dengbêj sings long histories unaccompanied; the daf frame drum is used in Sufi gatherings from Sanandaj to Sulaymaniyah. Kurdish weavers of Senneh, Bijar and the Kurdish villages are among the great names of Persian carpet history, and Kurdish dress, men’s wide trousers and sash, women’s layered and sequinned gowns, is worn with pride on feast days. Kurdish literature includes the poets Nalî and Mawlawi in the nineteenth century and Mastoureh Ardalan (1805–1848), poet and historian of the Ardalan principality, one of the few women of her time to write a history. In the twentieth century Hejar and Hêmin, both from Mukriyan around Mahabad, wrote in Kurdish and translated between Kurdish and Persian.

History, plainly

The Ardalan dynasty ruled from Sanandaj as semi-autonomous lords until the nineteenth century. In 1946 a short-lived Kurdish republic was declared at Mahabad; it fell within the year, and its president, Qazi Muhammad, was hanged in 1947. Since then Kurdish political movements and the Iranian state have clashed repeatedly. Amnesty International and successive UN Special Rapporteurs on Iran have reported that Kurds are disproportionately represented among political prisoners and among those executed on security charges. In September 2022 the death in custody of Jina Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman from Saqqez, set off nationwide protests under the Kurdish-born slogan Jin, Jiyan, Azadî (‘Woman, Life, Freedom’); the UN’s independent fact-finding mission reported that the crackdown fell especially heavily on Kurdish areas.

Across the borders, Kurds in Iraq, Turkey and Syria have their own histories and institutions, and define themselves. What links them to Iran is old and deep: a shared language family, Newroz, and centuries of poetry and carpets that belong to both.