Between Islamic Learning and Philological Nationalism: Mullah Mahmûdê Bayazîdî’s Auto-ethnography of the Kurds
This article deals with the ethnographic and philological works of the nineteenth-century Kurdish scholar Mullah Mahmûdê Bayazîdî, which mark a crucial stage in the history of vernacular Kurdish-language learning. It turns out that Bayazîdî, although working in the service of the then Russian consul...
Main Author: | |
---|---|
Format: | Electronic Article |
Language: | English |
Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
Journals Online & Print: | |
Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
Published: |
Brill
[2020]
|
In: |
Die Welt des Islams
Year: 2020, Volume: 60, Issue: 4, Pages: 433-472 |
Further subjects: | B
Kurdish studies
B vernacular learning B Russian orientalism B Islamic intellectual history |
Online Access: |
Volltext (Verlag) Volltext (doi) |
Summary: | This article deals with the ethnographic and philological works of the nineteenth-century Kurdish scholar Mullah Mahmûdê Bayazîdî, which mark a crucial stage in the history of vernacular Kurdish-language learning. It turns out that Bayazîdî, although working in the service of the then Russian consul, Auguste Jaba, cannot be called either a “native informant” nor an “orientalist scholar”. After providing some historical background, I discuss Bayazîdî’s main writings and their significance. I then discuss his conceptions of language, literature, local tradition or culture, and history, concluding that none of these bears any traces of modern Western philology or romantic nationalism. Hence, his work cannot be qualified as “internalized orientalism”, but, as it is written in a vernacular language, neither can it be wholly assimilated to classical Islamic learning. |
---|---|
ISSN: | 1570-0607 |
Contains: | Enthalten in: Die Welt des Islams
|
Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1163/15700607-00600A09 |