Agha, Shaikh, and Mîr: The Old Order of Kurdish Society

At a Glance

A tribe is not only a web of kinship. In Martin van Bruinessen's classic definition it is a socio-political unit resting on descent and kinship, and it often holds common land as well.
The tribe is layered: household, lineage (hoz), section (tîre), and, at the top, the tribe. The kinship is sometimes real, sometimes built after the fact.
The agha is the visible face of the tribal order: he settles disputes, hosts the guest, and in return takes a tithe and labor.
The dîwanxane, the guest room, was the parliament of this order: assembly, court, and inn in one room.
Not everyone was tribal. Villagers without a tribe were called, by region, misken, guran, or kurmanc, and in most places they were the lower class.
The mîr was the ruler of a principality. The last principalities, such as Botan, Hakkari, Baban, and Soran, were broken up in the middle of the nineteenth century.
In the void the principalities left, the shaikhs rose. This is Bruinessen's thesis, and it runs through two Sufi orders: the Naqshbandi and the Qadiri.
A woman could reach the top of this order too: in Halabja, Adela Xanım ruled the Caf tribe in fact, and her authority held until her death in 1924.
In the twentieth century the tribe began to dissolve: through migration, urbanization, and the hand of the state. But its traces can still be read today.

Evening is falling. Shoes are lined up before the largest house in the village. Inside, cushions run along the wall, and tea passes from hand to hand in the middle. In the place of honor sits the agha. The name of this room is the dîwanxane, the guest room. It is three things at once: assembly, court, inn. The case of two villagers fallen out over a field boundary comes here. The stranger passing on the road spends the night here, and his money is no good. The official from the city calls at this door first.

Today most of those rooms are empty. But whoever wants to understand the last few centuries of Kurdish society, of the Kurds, one of the largest stateless peoples in the Middle East, has to begin from that room. This article tells the world of that room: the tribe, the agha, the shaikh, and the mîr.

What Is a Tribe?

The short answer would be "a big family," and it would be wrong. The definition of the Dutch researcher Martin van Bruinessen, who wrote the classic work in this field, is finer: a Kurdish tribe is a socio-political unit resting on descent, real or believed to be so. Two things at once, then: a web of kinship and an organization of politics. Most tribes also hold land, and everyone knows its bounds.

The structure is layer upon layer. At the bottom stands the household. Households descended from the same ancestor form a lineage; the Kurdish is hoz, and lineages often carry the ancestor's name. Lineages join in sections called tîre, and the tîre join in the tribe. Large tribes may also form confederations; roofs like the Milan and the Heverkan brought dozens of tribes together.

But how real is this kinship? Here is the critical question. Bruinessen's observation is clear: the political bond can become more important than the bond of blood. Outsider lineages that join a strong family are counted "kin" after a generation or two, and their origins are forgotten. The tribe is a system of alliances that looks like a family tree. Dr. Mehrdad R. Izady corrects a mistake here too: the word tribe suggests tents and nomads, whereas the body of the Kurdish tribes has long been settled, farming, town-dwelling.

Who Is the Agha, and His Bond with the Villager?

The agha is the everyday face of the tribal order. But there is no single type of agha. The ladder that Bruinessen draws from the anthropologist Edmund Leach's study of Rowanduz has three rungs. The village agha decides local disputes and collects from the villager the tithe and the land's share. The tithe is a traditional tax taken at around a tenth of the crop. The clan agha hears cases between villages and sees the return on his labor. The tribal agha meddles little in daily affairs; he represents the tribe to the outside.

This bond has two faces, and an honest account shows both. One face is service: the agha provides protection, settles cases, feeds everyone in his dîwanxane. Hospitality in this order is not display; it is an instrument of rule. Bruinessen gives a fine detail: the owner of a dîwanxane was called a xanedan, a household of standing, and not every xanedan was an agha. But anyone who opened a table could gather people around him. Power came partly out of the cooking pot. The other face is exploitation: the tithe can grow heavy, corvée labor can be added, and the agha's men can take the tax by force. In the examples Bruinessen gathers, both faces are documented. Which one weighed more changed with the agha, the era, and the villager's bargaining power.

Let us ask this too: where does the agha's power come from? Before the gun, from the go-between role. The agha is the door between the village and the outside world: the government office, the market, the land deed, the court. The villager who wants to pass through that door needs the agha. That is why, as the road, the school, and the identity card came into the village, the agha weakened; the keys to the door had multiplied.

Was Everyone Tribal? Kurmanc, Misken, Guran

No, and this is the fact least known from outside. In Kurdish society there was a sharp line between the tribal members and the villagers without a tribe. The tribal ones were the side that bore arms and boasted of their descent. The villager without a tribe, in most places, lived dependent on them.

The names change by region. In the south these villagers were called misken; the word carries the sense of poor and servile. Bruinessen records the shares the misken paid in the Sulaymaniyah region: between a tenth and a fifth of the grain, and as much as three quarters of the fresh vegetables. The misken was not necessarily poor; there were wealthy misken too, but they had no voice. In other regions the same class was called guran or reaya, the common subjects.

The most striking name is in the north. In the Şatak district the villagers without a tribe were called kurmanc, while the tribal ones who ruled them called themselves eşîret, the tribesmen. The villagers Bruinessen asked had divided society in two: axa and kurmanc. So the word that today names the largest branch of the Kurdish language (Kurmanji, an Iranic tongue) and millions of Kurds meant, in that district, "the laborer without a tribe." That a class name should turn into the name of a people tells of the labor in this society's history. The distinction is now largely erased, but if talk of who comes from the "noble tribe" still passes at gatherings, this is its root.

Who Was the Mîr, and How Did the Principalities End?

Above the tribes there was one more tier: the principality. The mîr was the ruler of several tribes and towns at once, and principalities like Botan, Hakkari, Baban, and Soran lived half-independent for centuries. The record of this world from the inside is the Sharafnama of 1597, which we told in a separate article. Its echo in literature is familiar too: the story of Mem û Zîn unfolds in the court of the mîr of Botan.

The mîr was a balance above the tribes. Bruinessen's phrasing is striking: the rule of the mîrs was harsh, but it usually kept a dependable order. In the nineteenth century Ottoman centralization removed this tier; in the wave of reform begun under the sultan Mahmud II, governors appointed from the center broke up the principalities one by one, and by the middle of the century the last of them passed into history.

The result was not order but a void. Bruinessen's record is clear: where the mîrs went, security went too; the tribes broke into pieces where petty chiefs contended, and blood feuds spread across the land. The state could not fill the void. So who did fill it?

How Did the Shaikhs Rise?

The answer is the last of the three that give Bruinessen's book its name: the shaikh. A shaikh is the local leader of a Sufi order. The order is the organized form of the mystical path, and in Kurdistan there were two great orders: the Qadiri and the Naqshbandi.

What made the shaikh a mediator was precisely that he stood outside the tribe. The agha is his own tribe's man; the ruling he gives is partial. The shaikh is a native authority with religious standing, at a distance from tribal organization. In a blood feud, the one hand both sides could kiss was often the shaikh's. When the mîrs went, the need for that hand grew like an avalanche.

The timing fits the history too. Mawlana Khalid, who spread the new branch of the Naqshbandi, sent deputies to every quarter before his death in the 1820s; a deputy here means the shaikh's authorized representative. This network spread across Kurdistan in the years of the principalities' collapse. Bruinessen's thesis is this: the shaikhs were both the fillers of that void and its winners. Shaikh families like the Nehri and the Barzan turned into regional centers of power. Some shaikhs in time reached toward political leadership; Bruinessen gives the last chapter of his book to the Sheikh Said movement of 1925, and shows the leadership in the shaikhs and the base in the tribes. Let us record this much and leave the politics to the documented histories.

One question remains: what did it do to a society for a man of religion to carry so much worldly power? The answer is not one color. The shaikhs stopped blood feuds and founded schools of learning, but shaikh families that gathered land and disciples could also turn into a new kind of agha-hood. The documents show both examples.

Was There a Place for Women? Adela Xanım

The tribal order is the order of the man's word; there is no need to dress that up. But history recorded the examples that broke the mold too, and the most famous of them is a woman.

In the early twentieth century the Caf tribe was among the strongest in southern Kurdistan. In Bruinessen's account, at the top of this layered pyramid sat a surprising figure: Adela Xanım, that is, Lady Adela. She came from the vizier family of the Ardalan court; she went as a bride to Halabja and built the town up. Even while her husband lived, the real rule was in her hands. Taxes were gathered in her name, and cases were heard in her divan. Her authority went unquestioned until her death in 1924.

Adela Xanım was the exception, not the rule. But the exception shows that the rule was more flexible than we suppose. We tell the story of Kurdish history's women leaders in a separate article; Adela Xanım is not alone there.

What Remains of the Tribe?

The twentieth century pulled out the stones of this order one by one. Borders cut across the geography of the principalities. Debates over land reform, the tractor, and the market economy loosened the old bond between agha and villager. The states ruling the Kurdish regions sometimes fought the tribes and sometimes armed them for their own account; we leave that sentence here and keep the detail for the documented histories. The greatest solvent of all was migration. The Norwegian anthropologist Fredrik Barth had already noted in the 1950s that the great aghas were moving to the city and that the dîwanxane was losing its function for the villager. Later generations moved to Istanbul, to Baghdad, to Germany.

So did the tribe die? It did not; it changed shape. In the city it became networks of home-town solidarity, chains of work and mutual aid. In the mediation of blood feuds the tribal elders are still sought. Anyone who follows the region knows that when candidate lists are drawn up in election seasons the tribal balances are watched, whatever the party. In surnames, in the seating order at wedding halls, in the tents of mourning, the trace of the old order can be read.

Let us end by returning to the dîwanxane. That room is now empty in most places, but its question is not empty: where the state is far, the court slow, the road closed, how do people come to trust one another? The tribe, the agha, the shaikh, and the mîr were the old answers to that question. The answers have aged. The question still stands where it stood.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are a tribe (aşiret) and a clan the same thing? In everyday speech they blur; in the Kurdish context researchers separate the layers. The household, the lineage (hoz), and the section (tîre) are the sub-units; the tribe is their political roof. Bruinessen defines the tribe as a unit of kinship plus politics.

Is every Kurd tied to a tribe? No, and in history too the answer was no. Villagers without a tribe were in some regions the greater part of the population; they were called misken, guran, or kurmanc. Today, with urbanization, the tribal bond has loosened greatly.

What is the difference between an agha and a mîr? The agha is the leader of a village, a clan, or a tribe. The mîr is the ruler of several tribes and towns at once; principalities like Botan and Baban lived until the middle of the nineteenth century. The settled correct title for a Kurdish ruler is this: mîr.

Why did the shaikhs grow strong in the nineteenth century? When the principalities were broken up, no higher authority remained to settle disputes. Shaikhs, standing outside the tribe and carrying religious standing, rose in that void as mediators. This is Bruinessen's classic thesis, and the network of Naqshbandi deputies sped the rise.

Do the tribes still exist today? They do, but not with their old functions. The land order and migration largely ended the agha-villager bond. The tribe today lives more as a network of solidarity, a reference of identity, and an institution of mediation; its trace shows in elections too.

Sources and Further Reading

Primary sources (from the Bedel Boseli Collection):

Martin van Bruinessen, Agha, Shaikh and State: The Social and Political Structures of Kurdistan; the definition of the tribe, the misken and kurmanc distinction, the break-up of the principalities, and the thesis of the shaikhs' rise.
Martin van Bruinessen, "From Adela Khanum to Leyla Zana"; the chapter on the Caf tribe and Adela Xanım.
Dr. Mehrdad R. Izady, The Kurds: A Concise Handbook (4th ed.); the "Tribes and Clans" chapter and the entries on social order.

Social Media Summaries

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

In one room: assembly, court, and inn. The dîwanxane. We told the old parliament of the Kurdish village and the order that held it up: tribe, agha, shaikh, mîr: bedelboseli.com/en/agha-shaikh-and-mir-kurdish-society
A tribe looks like a family tree; up close it is a system of alliances. In Bruinessen's classic definition, kinship plus politics. The anatomy of the tribe: bedelboseli.com/en/agha-shaikh-and-mir-kurdish-society
In the Şatak district the tribal called themselves eşîret and the villager without a tribe kurmanc. How did a class name become the name of millions? The kurmanc, misken, and guran question: bedelboseli.com/en/agha-shaikh-and-mir-kurdish-society
When the principalities were broken up, no hand was left to stop the blood feuds. The Sufi shaikhs filled the void. Bruinessen's famous thesis and the story of two orders: bedelboseli.com/en/agha-shaikh-and-mir-kurdish-society
At the top of the Caf tribe sat a woman: Adela Xanım. She built up Halabja and heard cases in her divan; her authority went unquestioned until 1924: bedelboseli.com/en/agha-shaikh-and-mir-kurdish-society