Kurdish Women in History: Pen, Throne, and Resistance

At a Glance

Western travellers came back from the Kurdish mountains puzzled. Women went unveiled, received guests, spoke in council, and in some places ruled. The travel books wrote it down.
This article tells seven women through the documents. Not to paint a rosy picture. To show what the record kept.
Mestûre Erdelan (1805 to 1848) lived inside the palace at Sanandaj, wrote poetry, and wrote the history of the Erdelan homeland. She is counted among the first women known to have written a work of history in the Muslim East.
Kara Fatma rode into Istanbul in 1854, at the head of her horsemen, during the Crimean War. Europe's illustrated press printed her portrait.
Adela Khanum (died 1924) ruled Halabja in fact. She built a bazaar to her own plan, raised a prison, and presided over a court. Two Englishmen who knew her, Soane and Edmonds, set her down in detail. Edmonds called her "the uncrowned queen of Shahrizor."
Hapsa Khan (1891 to 1953) opened a school for girls in Sulaymaniyah. She stands among the founders of Kurdish women's organizing.
Rewşen Bedirxan (1909 to 1992) carried the work of teaching and publishing in Damascus, in the founding years of the modern Kurdish alphabet.
Leyla Bedirxan (1903 to 1986) danced on Europe's stages as "the Kurdish princess," carrying a people's name into the world's papers through art.
Leyla Qasim (1952 to 1974) was a university student, hanged in Baghdad at twenty-two. She is among the youngest emblems in Kurdish memory.
From folk song to politics, these names are the visible links of one chain. More names wait their turn in the archives.

The year is 1909. A stranger rides into Halabja, then a lively town inside the Ottoman border, close to Persia. He wears a merchant's clothes and speaks Persian. No one knows the truth: he is an Englishman named Ely Bannister Soane, travelling in disguise to see the Kurdish country up close, the mountain homeland of the Kurds, one of the largest stateless peoples in the Middle East, between 30 and 45 million people across the mountains where Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria meet.

Soane is lodged in the town's great house. There he sees a thing he did not expect. The affairs of the house, the bazaar, the whole town are heard in a divan, the court where a ruler listens to cases and hands down judgment. And the person at its head is not a man. She is Adela Khanum, a bride of the Caf, one of the large Kurdish tribes.

Soane stays. His Persian and his pen are useful, and Adela Khanum takes him into her service as a secretary. For months the disguised Englishman keeps her correspondence, and later he writes down what he saw, one detail at a time. Years afterward another British official, Cecil J. Edmonds, records the phrase that history kept: "the uncrowned queen of Shahrizor."

For a Western reader that scene was an exotic surprise. For the Kurdish country it was exceptional, and familiar. This article tells the recorded faces behind it. Where do we start? With an honest frame.

What Did the Travellers See, and What Did They Miss?

Let us draw the frame straight.

In the notes of Western travellers through the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, one observation repeats. Kurdish women were more visible than the women of neighbouring societies. The veil was thin or absent. Women spoke with guests, worked in the bazaar, and in some tribes held a voice and a rule. Soane wrote it plainly. Other travel books point the same way.

The observation is valuable. It needs two warnings beside it.

First: the travellers measured what they saw against their own world, and their astonishment also measures how narrow that world was. Second, and heavier: visibility is not equality. In the same country there was bride price. There was the woman cut out of her inheritance. There was early marriage. Kurdish society was patriarchal, and it largely remains so. Any pretty picture built without saying this is a false one.

So here is the true sentence. In the middle of a patriarchal world, some doors stood more ajar for the Kurdish woman than for her neighbours. And some women pushed that ajar door all the way open. Let us look at them.

Mestûre Erdelan: Among the First to Write History

Sanandaj, called Senne in Kurdish, was in that age the seat of the Erdelan homeland. Erdelan was one of the strong Kurdish principalities on the Persian side of the mountains. In 1805 a girl was born there into a family of the pen: Mah Şeref Xanım, known to literary history as Mestûre Erdelan.

Mestûre married Xosrew Xan, a leading figure of the Erdelan court, and lived a life inside the palace. But it was not her marriage that carried her into history. It was her desk. Mestûre wrote poetry and left a divan, a collected book of verse. She wrote a treatise on religious knowledge. And she did the greater thing: she wrote the history of her homeland, the Erdelan dynasty.

To see the size of that, remember the age. In the first half of the nineteenth century, in any corner of the Muslim world, a woman sitting down to write a history book was not a thing people had heard of. Most sources name Mestûre as the first woman known to have written a history in the Muslim East. At the most cautious, she is one of the first. The history she wrote is in the hands of researchers today, and everyone who works on Erdelan turns to it.

Mestûre died in 1848, only forty-three, in Sulaymaniyah, where she had lived in exile. Her grave is there. Her pen is the quietest and the firmest document in this article. Can a single book outlast a throne? Hers has.

Kara Fatma: The Rider Who Entered Istanbul in 1854

These were the years of the Crimean War, the Ottoman state's war with Russia, and volunteers poured toward Istanbul from every side of the empire. One of the companies that entered the city in 1854 was unlike the rest. The commander at the head of the horsemen was a woman.

The records of the day call her Kara Fatma: a woman leader from the Kurdish country who brought her own tribal riders to the war. In Istanbul she drew every eye. The European press sketched her portrait and carried it onto the page. In the illustrated news of that year a woman stands on her horse, armed and upright.

An honesty note is owed here. Ottoman history holds more than one Kara Fatma. In later generations, in the years of the Turkish War of Independence, other women commanders went by the same nickname. Ours is the Kurdish Kara Fatma who came to Istanbul in 1854, and what we know of her is bounded by the newspapers and engravings of the time. The whole of her life is in the dark. She stepped onto the stage of history once, left a mark, and withdrew. Does one scene prove a pattern? No. But it says at least this: a woman before the riders was not a sight that country found strange.

Adela Khanum: The Lady of Halabja

Return to the divan in our opening scene.

Adela Khanum was not born into the Caf. She came from a rooted family that had raised viziers for generations at the Erdelan court, and she grew up knowing the palace and pen culture of Sanandaj. When she married Osman Pasha, a leading man of the Caf, she came to Halabja. And she began to remake the town.

Thanks to Soane's book we know her works in detail. She brought craftsmen from Sanandaj. She built a new bazaar to her own plan. She raised gardens and mansions in the Persian style, drew merchants to the town, and turned a dusty place into one of the region's trading stops. More: she built a new prison, and she set up a court that she herself presided over. Soane's record is clear. When Osman Pasha travelled on state business to Sulaymaniyah, Kirkuk, or Mosul, his wife ran the town, and even when he was in Halabja the rule was in fact in her hands. Osman Pasha died in 1909. Adela Khanum's authority ran on after him, until her own death in 1924.

What came after is on record too. When British administration reached the region after the First World War, it found Caf-run Halabja beside it rather than against it, and British papers gave her the honorific "Khan Bahadur," a title carried over from their empire in India. But was this loyalty? No. As the British left local rulers less room, Adela Khanum's power was trimmed, and relations tightened. The uncrowned queen bargained with a crowned empire as well. When she died in 1924 she left behind a rebuilt town and testimony written in two languages.

Adela Khanum is neither a fairy tale of exception nor a rule. How far could a woman walk, in that society, in that age? She is the best-documented answer: the measure of the ajar door.

Hapsa Khan: The Woman Who Opened the School Door

Sulaymaniyah, the start of the twentieth century. Hapsa Khan, daughter of one of the city's respected families, looks at the world of the women around her. No reading, no writing. No school. Public life shut.

Hapsa Khan did not take it for fate. In 1926 she led the opening of a school for girls in Sulaymaniyah and turned her own house over to the education of women. The city's first steps of women's organizing carry her name. Sources count her struggle among the opening links of the modern Kurdish women's movement.

A people's awakening does not always happen in great squares. Sometimes it happens in the courtyard of a house, in the voices of women just now spelling out their letters. Is that a smaller thing than a battle? Hapsa Khan died in 1953. The door she opened stayed open.

Rewşen and Leyla: Two Continents of One Family

The Bedirxans are the great surname of Kurdish modernization, and it was the exiled generation of this family that launched the first Kurdish newspaper. We tell that story in a separate article. Here we look at two women of the family, one who stood in Damascus and one in Paris.

Rewşen Bedirxan (1909 to 1992) was the wife and road companion of Celadet Alî Bedirxan, the architect of the modern Kurdish Latin alphabet. But to name her only "the wife" would be an injustice. Their home in Damascus became, in the 1930s, the workshop of the Kurdish language and its publishing, and Rewşen was a labourer of that workshop. She was a teacher. She made the schooling of girls her cause. After her husband's early death she carried both her family and this inheritance. Her memoirs and writings are a woman's-eye witness to those founding years.

Leyla Bedirxan (1903 to 1986) stood on a very different stage: the stage itself. She was raised in Europe and became a dancer, known through the 1920s and 30s, in Paris above all, as "the Kurdish princess." European papers reported, through her, a people most of their readers had never heard named. A people's name sometimes travels not in a diplomat's briefcase but on a dancer's poster. Which carries farther?

Leyla Qasim: Twenty-Two

The youngest name in this article is its heaviest page.

Leyla Qasim was born in 1952 and was a university student in Baghdad. She took part in the Kurdish student movement. In the spring of 1974, as the tension between the Iraqi regime and the Kurdish movement turned to fighting, Leyla and her friends were arrested in Baghdad. The trial was short. On 12 May 1974, Leyla Qasim was hanged together with the friends beside her. She was twenty-two.

Her last words on the scaffold pass from mouth to mouth, told in different forms, and we do not know which is exact. What we know is this: the regime designed her death as a warning. What did the people make of it? In Kurdish memory Leyla Qasim became not a warning but a vow. Her name is given today to schools, to streets, to poems, and to girls.

History sometimes grants the shortest lives the longest span.

The Chain's Unseen Links

We have counted seven names. The honest question is: why only seven?

Half the answer is about the state of the archives. Women are the double victims of history writing. They were kept off the record while they lived, and they were skipped when the records were written. For the Kurdish woman a further layer was added: when a people's history is suppressed, its women's history is buried twice. Researchers are digging that ground now. Collected academic work such as the volume edited by Shahrzad Mojab shows that the field is being worked with seriousness at last.

The other half of the answer is about this article's borders. The women dengbêj, the bards who carried the folk songs, we tell in a separate article. The radio-age voices such as Meryem Xan and Eyşe Şan we tell in another. The political women of recent history are a subject of their own.

This article did not set out to complete a list. It set out to show that a chain exists: from pen to throne, from school to stage, from there to the scaffold, every link speaking with a document. The chain did not break. Links are still being added.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Adela Khanum? A woman from the vizier family of Erdelan who married into the Caf tribe and ruled Halabja in fact in the early 1900s (she died in 1924). She built a bazaar to her own plan, raised a prison, and ran a court she presided over. Soane and Edmonds, who knew her, wrote her down; Edmonds called her "the uncrowned queen of Shahrizor," and the British administration gave her the title "Khan Bahadur."

Why does Mestûre Erdelan matter? Living from 1805 to 1848, Mestûre wrote, alongside her poetry, the history of the Erdelan dynasty. She is counted among the first women known to have written a work of history in the Muslim East, and her work is still used as a source today.

Why was Leyla Qasim executed? She was arrested in 1974 for taking part in the Kurdish student movement in Baghdad and was hanged with her friends on 12 May 1974. Her death at twenty-two turned her into one of the emblems of resistance in Kurdish memory.

What was the place of women in Kurdish society in the past? Western travellers recorded that the Kurdish woman was more visible than in neighbouring societies: unveiled, heard, in some places ruling. But that visibility was not equality; the society was patriarchal. The true summary: an ajar door, and the women who pushed it open.

Sources and Further Reading

Primary sources (from the Bedel Boseli Collection):

Martin van Bruinessen, "From Adela Khanum to Leyla Zana: Women as Political Leaders in Kurdish History"; the figures and quotations in the Adela Khanum section come from here.
Ely Bannister Soane, To Mesopotamia and Kurdistan in Disguise (London, 1912; expanded edition 1926).
C. J. Edmonds, Kurds, Turks and Arabs (1957).
Rohat Alakom, Folklor û Jinên Kurd (Women in Kurdish folklore).
Dr. Mehrdad R. Izady, The Kurds: A Concise Handbook (4th edition), the society chapters.

Social Media Summaries

The following summaries are ready to share; copy and use them.

In 1909 a disguised English traveller reached Halabja and found, at the head of the court, a woman handing down judgments: Adela Khanum. He wrote his astonishment into a book. The book is now a document: bedelboseli.com/en/kurdish-women-in-history
In the first half of the 1800s, a woman in the Muslim East sat down and wrote a history book: Mestûre Erdelan. She was among the first known to do it. Her pen is still a source today: bedelboseli.com/en/kurdish-women-in-history
1854, the Crimean War. One of the volunteer companies riding into Istanbul was led by a woman: Kara Fatma. Europe's papers drew her portrait. A woman before the riders was no stranger to that country: bedelboseli.com/en/kurdish-women-in-history
Leyla Qasim was twenty-two when she was hanged in Baghdad on 12 May 1974. The regime wanted a warning; the people took a vow. History sometimes grants the shortest life the longest span: bedelboseli.com/en/kurdish-women-in-history
Women are history's double victims: off the record while alive, skipped when it was written. The Kurdish woman's history was buried twice. Now it is being dug back up: bedelboseli.com/en/kurdish-women-in-history