The Hawar Journal and Celadet Alî Bedirxan: The Birth of an Alphabet

At a Glance

Hawar is a Kurdish journal that began publishing in Damascus on 15 May 1932. The date of its first issue is now marked as Kurdish Language Day (Cejna Zimanê Kurdî).
The man behind it was Celadet Alî Bedirxan (1893-1951): a grandson of the mîrs of Botan, a lawyer, a linguist, an exile.
Hawar means a cry for help in Kurdish. In the first issue Celadet named the direction of the cry: toward language.
The Latin-based alphabet in which Kurmanji Kurdish is written today was built in this journal. Its name comes from there too: the Hawar alphabet.
The alphabet has 31 letters. Celadet worked on it for more than fourteen years, and in eleven years of publishing he made a single correction of one letter.
From 1932 to 1943 the journal produced more than fifty issues; the common count stops at 57.
An illustrated sister publication, Ronahî, joined it. The masthead carried names like Kamuran Bedirxan, Osman Sebrî, Cegerxwîn, and Qedrî Can.
The journal's unseen worker was Rewşen Bedirxan. After Celadet, she carried this legacy for forty years.
The family was no stranger to the printing press. The first Kurdish newspaper, Kurdistan, had been founded in 1898 by Celadet's uncle.
Celadet died in Damascus in 1951. The alphabet he built is now the daily handwriting of millions.

Damascus, 15 May 1932. Nine years after the Treaty of Lausanne, the settlement that drew the borders of the modern Middle East after the First World War. In a corner of the city, in the depths of the Great Depression, the lead type of the Terakki printing house is being lined up on the composing bench.

At the bench stands a man near forty. Tall, bespectacled, exacting. He reads the proofs one by one, because the typesetters are seeing some of these letters for the first time. This script has never before sat in any printing house's case.

By evening a thin journal has taken shape. On the cover, a single word: Hawar.

No one knew it that day, but that thin journal would live eleven years and leave a century's legacy. Today, across the world, Kurds mark 15 May as a language day. How does a journal's birthday become a festival? The answer lies in the story of the man at that bench.

What Does Hawar Mean?

Hawar, in Kurdish, is a cry for help. A person in danger shouts "hawar!"; the one who runs to answer is said to have reached his hawar. As a name for a journal, it is a heavy word. Who was calling for help, and for whom?

Celadet Alî Bedirxan gave the answer himself in the first issue. The founding text survives. In Kurdish it reads:

Hawar dengê zanînê ye. Zanîn ji me re rêya felat û xweşiyê vedike. Her kesê ko xwe nas dike dikare xwe bide nas kirin. Hawara me berî her tiştî heyîna zimanê me dê bide nas kirin. Lewma ko ziman şerta heyînê a pêşîn e.

In English, roughly: "Hawar is the voice of knowledge. Knowledge opens for us the road to deliverance and to well-being. Whoever knows himself can make himself known. Our Hawar will, before all else, make known the existence of our language. For language is the first condition of existence." (translation approximate)

The sentences are short, the claim large. No weapons, no political program. A single item on the agenda: language. Celadet gave the rest of his life to it.

Who Was Celadet Alî Bedirxan?

Celadet was born in Istanbul in 1893, under Sultan Abdülhamid, one of the last powerful Ottoman sultans. His family was no ordinary family. His grandfather, Mîr Bedirxan, had been the mîr, the ruler, of Botan. Botan, centered on Cizre, was a rooted Kurdish authority. Ottoman armies dissolved it in 1847, and the whole family was sent into exile.

Celadet is the child of that exiled house. A grandson of a dynasty that had ruled Cizre, he grew up on the streets of Istanbul. He was well educated and studied law. After the First World War, in 1919, he joined the British major E. M. Noel on a tour through Kurdistan, together with his brother Kamuran. Then the roads closed. Return to Turkey became impossible for the family, and Celadet never set foot in his homeland again.

The years of exile threw him from Cairo to Germany, where he continued his studies and learned languages. Most sources record him as the first president of Xoybûn, a Kurdish political organization founded in 1927. But by the early 1930s Celadet withdrew from the political stage. He settled in Damascus and moved to a different front: the writing desk.

Why the turn? We can follow it in his own hand. In 1933 he published an open letter in Turkish to Turkey's president Mustafa Kemal, later known as Atatürk, the founder of the modern republic. Its subject was not armies; it was schools and language. Celadet had recalculated. What keeps a people standing, he now judged, begins with the written word. And the written word needed an alphabet first.

From 1898 to 1932: A Family's Road to the Printing Press

A question worth asking here: why does the grandson of a mîr become a printer?

Because the trace of that road already ran in the family. Thirty-four years before Hawar, in 1898, the first Kurdish newspaper had appeared in Cairo: Kurdistan. The man who founded it, Mikdad Midhat Bedirxan, was also a son of Mîr Bedirxan, which made him Celadet's uncle. We have told that story separately on this site. The newspaper was born in exile; so was the journal.

The line between them is straight and thin. A dynasty whose sword had been taken from it turned, within two generations, to the pen. The uncle began with a newspaper; the nephew deepened the work with an alphabet. Both printed in foreign cities, one in Cairo, the other in Damascus. Both had their readers across a border.

Damascus in those years lay under the French Mandate. A mandate is the administrative trusteeship the League of Nations granted to a great power. That oversight, for its own reasons, tolerated a Kurdish journal. Hawar lived in that narrow gap.

How Was the Alphabet Built?

This was Hawar's true cargo: a new alphabet. But how does one make an alphabet?

Celadet began with sound. In his own book he states his principle in a single sentence: a language should have as many letters as it has sounds. In the Kurmanji branch of Kurdish he counted 31 basic sounds, and built the alphabet on 31 letters. He gave eight vowels their own separate letters. The Arabic script had struggled to carry those vowels; Latin type offered a mark for every sound.

This reckoning was not done in a night. According to the journal's own publisher, Celadet worked on the alphabet for more than fourteen years. He examined foreign languages and neighboring scripts one by one. Then he serialized it in the journal: across the first twelve issues, and again in issues 17, 18, and 23, lesson by lesson. Grammar lessons ran from issue 27 to issue 54. The journal worked like a school; whoever subscribed also received reading and writing.

The measure of his care is this. Between 1932 and 1943 Celadet made only a single correction of one letter. The rest stayed as it was on the first day, and stays so now.

At one point honesty is called for. The first Latin-letter Kurdish alphabet was not made in Damascus. The record is clear: the first attempt came in 1928 in Soviet Armenia, from the educator Îshak Marogulov and the writer Erebê Şemo. A schoolbook in these letters was printed in 1929, the newspaper Reya Teze in 1930. When those reached Damascus in 1932, Celadet welcomed them in his journal and wrote that they were "older than ours." Not envy, but a record set down. The Soviet alphabet was later switched to Cyrillic and narrowed; that branch continues in our article on Radio Yerevan. The alphabet that lived and spread was Hawar's.

Who Wrote in the Journal, and How Did It Survive?

Was Hawar a one-man journal? It was not, and yet it stood on one man's shoulders.

At its core was his brother, Kamuran Alî Bedirxan: poet, doctor of law, later a teacher of Kurdish in Paris. Osman Sebrî wrote for it; the young Cegerxwîn sent his poems; Qedrî Can and Nûredîn Zaza plied their pens. The French Kurdologist Roger Lescot also gave his labor to the journal, and the thorough Kurmanji grammar he prepared with Celadet was later printed in Paris. Celadet wrote some of his own pieces under a pen name, the best known being Herekol Azîzan.

The journal lived in two breaths. It halted in the mid-1930s and began again in 1941. In the second period an illustrated sister publication joined it: Ronahî. Its date is given with small variations in the sources; the common view is a 1942 start. Kamuran, for his part, launched the newspaper Roja Nû in Beirut in 1943. In those same years the Levant Radio in Beirut had begun broadcasting in Kurmanji twice a week; letter and voice breathed the same air.

The content was broad: alphabet and grammar lessons, folklore collections, fragments of epics, poetry, news of the world. The first issues even carried a section in Arabic letters, to bring the reader of the old script across into the new. In time the journal went fully over to Latin letters.

And who read it? The record of Dr. Mehrdad R. Izady is plain: the journals were smuggled from French-ruled Syria into Turkey. The border could not stop paper. Hawar produced more than fifty issues; the common count stops at 57. But every issue was a school carried in a suitcase.

Rewşen Bedirxan: The Unseen Labor

The cover shows one signature. In the kitchen, a woman was at work: Rewşen Bedirxan (1909-1992).

Rewşen was a teacher. She married Celadet in 1935. The house in Damascus was also the journal's office: the writing was copied clean there, the subscriber ledger kept there, guests received there. Family testimony assigns much of that labor to Rewşen. Writings on women's lives appeared in Hawar's pages, and researchers of women's folklore cite those issues today.

Her real test came after 1951. Who guarded the archive, who kept the letters, who held Celadet's name upright for forty years? Rewşen. She went on teaching, wrote her memoirs, and turned her home into a room of memory. In Kurdish cultural history this kind of labor often stays invisible. Our article on Kurdish women in history keeps the account of exactly that invisibility.

A Life That Ended at a Well

Hawar fell silent in 1943. War had wrapped the world, there was no money, no paper. Celadet's last years were narrow. How does a dynasty's grandson fall into worry over a living? In exile, he falls. He had no income, and got by working a garden near Damascus.

In July 1951 work was under way at the water well in that garden. The common account is this: Celadet had an accident at the wellhead and could not be saved. He was laid to rest in Damascus. He was fifty-eight.

The notice of death was small; the funeral was crowded. To those who asked what he left behind, no property could be shown. What could be shown was this: 31 letters, more than fifty issues of a journal, a grammar, and a generation that had learned to read in those letters.

What Remained of Hawar?

How do you measure a journal's success? By print run, or by lifespan? Hawar's print run was small, its life short. The measure lies in a third place: what lasts.

Today Kurmanji Kurdish is written everywhere with the Hawar alphabet. Books, newspapers, school notebooks, phone messages. From Nûbihar, published in Istanbul, to books printed in Stockholm, the road runs through the same letters. The novelist Mehmed Uzun named a book Hawara Dîcleyê: the Hawar of the Tigris. The word settled into literature along with the memory of the journal.

The journal itself came out of the archives too. Facsimile editions were made, and its pages are now within a researcher's reach. The publisher who reissued the alphabet gave Celadet a title: the mîr of modern Kurmanji. His grandfather's title had come back to the grandson, this time through language.

And every 15 May, a festival is kept. The date of Kurdish Language Day is not the founding day of a state; it is the day of a journal's first issue. The lead type melted long ago. The writing stands.

Frequently Asked Questions

When and where was Hawar published? The first issue appeared in Damascus on 15 May 1932. The journal lived, with interruptions, until 1943 and produced more than fifty issues; the common count is 57. The 15th of May is now marked as Kurdish Language Day.

What is the Hawar alphabet, and how many letters does it have? It is the Latin-based alphabet Celadet Alî Bedirxan built to match the sound system of Kurdish; it has 31 letters. It is today the standard script of Kurmanji Kurdish.

Did Hawar make the first Latin-letter Kurdish alphabet? No. The first attempt came in 1928 in Soviet Armenia, from Îshak Marogulov and Erebê Şemo, and Celadet welcomed it in his journal. The alphabet that lasted and spread was Hawar's.

What is the Ronahî journal? It was Hawar's illustrated sister publication, also directed by Celadet. Its start date is given with small variations in the sources; the common view is 1942.

How did Celadet Alî Bedirxan die, and where is his grave? In July 1951 he had an accident at the wellhead of the garden he worked for his living, near Damascus, and died. He was buried in Damascus.

Sources and Further Reading

Primary sources (from the Bedel Boseli Collection):

Celadet Alî Bedir-Xan, Elfabêya kurdî & Bingehên gramera kurdmancî (Nefel, Stockholm, 2002; with a preface by Arif Zêrevan). The 31 letters of the alphabet, the serialization issues in Hawar, and the "single letter correction" record are in this book.
Dr. Mehrdad R. Izady, The Kurds: A Concise Handbook (4th ed.). The dates of Hawar and Ronahî and the record that the journals were smuggled into Turkey.
Kurdish Radio Broadcasting in the Middle East (study in the collection). The first Latin alphabet in Soviet Armenia, Reya Teze, and Celadet's piece welcoming the Yerevan publications.
Kurdish Library (Stockholm) web archive records (the KurdishLibrary files in the collection). Catalogue traces of the journals and publishers living on in the Hawar alphabet.

Social Media Summaries

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

Damascus, 15 May 1932. A thin journal came off the press: Hawar. It carried a brand-new alphabet. That alphabet is now the daily handwriting of millions of Kurds. The story of how a journal became a festival: bedelboseli.com/en/hawar-journal-celadet-bedirkhan
Hawar means a cry for help in Kurdish. In the first issue, Celadet Alî Bedirxan wrote where the cry was aimed: "Hawar is the voice of knowledge. Language is the first condition of existence." A cry still echoing a century on: bedelboseli.com/en/hawar-journal-celadet-bedirkhan
The uncle founded the first Kurdish newspaper in Cairo in 1898. The nephew founded the first Latin-letter Kurdish journal in Damascus in 1932. One family, two cities of exile, a single concern: language. bedelboseli.com/en/hawar-journal-celadet-bedirkhan
Celadet Bedirxan worked on his alphabet for more than fourteen years. In eleven years of publishing he made a single correction of one letter. That 31-letter document of patience is still in daily use: bedelboseli.com/en/hawar-journal-celadet-bedirkhan
Hawar fell silent in 1943; its alphabet did not. Today 15 May is Kurdish Language Day. A journal lived eleven years, and the writing it left became a people's everyday hand: bedelboseli.com/en/hawar-journal-celadet-bedirkhan