Melayê Cizîrî and Feqiyê Teyran: Poets of the Medrese Age

At a Glance

Melayê Cizîrî and Feqiyê Teyran are the two founding names of classical Kurdish poetry. Both were raised in the medrese; both wrote in Kurdish.
Melayê Cizîrî's real name was Şêx Ehmed. He is known by the pen name that means "the mela of Cizre." His divan is still read and annotated today.
The century he lived in is disputed; most sources place him from the later sixteenth century into the earlier seventeenth. Dr. Mehrdad R. Izady gives the span 1570 to 1640.
Feqiyê Teyran's real name was Mihemed. His name is usually rendered "teacher of the birds," and folk memory says he knew the language of birds.
The two poets traded verses in 1621. This exchange, called "Mela û Feqî," hides its own date inside a line.
Their styles were opposites. Mela wrote in a heavy, learned tongue; Feqî in the language people spoke. Both endured.
Feqî was the first poet to write the defense of Dimdim Castle, and his poems that speak with birds and water entered the dengbêj repertoire.
Ehmedê Xanî named both poets in Mem û Zîn. Xanî's road is the road these two pens opened.
Mela's grave is in the Medresa Sor in Cizre. Two districts compete for Feqî's grave, and folk memory settles it with a legend of two coffins.

The year is 1621. Five years after Shakespeare died far away in England, in Cizre, on the bank of the Tigris, two men sit facing each other.

One is elderly, a turbaned teacher, the respected mela of the town. The other has come from the direction of Van, a dervish poet dusty from the road. They are not talking. They are trading poems. One recites a stanza; the other answers in the same rhyme. They build riddles from letters, and the listeners sink a layer deeper with every couplet.

The text of this exchange survives. In one line Feqî even names the day's date: one thousand and thirty-one. In the Islamic calendar, 1031; in the common calendar, 1621.

For four centuries every Kurdish speaker has known these two names. So who were the poets? And why are they still read?

A World of Schools in Botan

First, the stage. Cizre was the center of Botan, the town of the Botan mîrs, the district's rulers. In it and around it a network of schools was at work: the medreses.

The medrese was the school of the age. Its student was called a feqî, its teacher a mela or a seyda. A feqî wandered village to village, wherever a good teacher could be found. Instruction was mostly in Arabic, and in poetry the prestige of Persian was great. Kurdish was spoken but little written. The reader curious about that balance can look to our article on whether Kurdish is a language or a dialect.

Why did this world begin to yield poets in the sixteenth century? The record of Dr. Izady points the way: almost all the Kurmanji poets whose works we hold wrote after the century of wars. After the Battle of Chaldiran in 1514, where the Ottoman and Safavid empires clashed, the Kurdish princedoms built a broad internal order under the Ottoman roof. The mîrs fed the medrese; the medrese fed the pen. And the pen, one day, turned to its own language.

Melayê Cizîrî is the name of that turn.

Who Was Melayê Cizîrî?

His real name was Şêx Ehmed. Because he was from Cizre, he was called Melayê Cizîrî: the mela of Cizre. Today, when a Kurdish speaker says "mela," it is often him who comes first to mind.

When did he live? Here scholarship divides in two. Some older sources, leaning on a couplet by Jami, the great Persian poet, pulled him back into much earlier centuries. Later researchers rejected that reading. The Kurdish literary historian Ebdulreqîb Yûsuf showed that Mela lived long after Jami and named him in his divan. Today most sources meet in one span: the later sixteenth century into the earlier seventeenth. Dr. Izady gives 1570 to 1640. To force an exact year would be dishonest; we hold no census record.

What is in our hands? The witness of the poetry. The 1621 exchange "Mela û Feqî" shows Mela alive and productive in Cizre that year. By the divan commentator Mele Ehmedê Zivingî, he was a contemporary of Mîr Şeref, ruler of Cizre until 1605. At the other end of that generation, in Bitlis, a town in the mountains to the north, Şerefxan was writing the first Kurdish history in 1597. Mela is the poet of the ripest age of the Kurdish princedoms.

His grave is in Cizre today, in the Medresa Sor, the Red Medrese. Folk memory says he taught there. That his classroom and his grave meet in one courtyard is a summary of his life.

What Is in the Divan?

Mela's legacy is a divan. A divan is the book that gathers a poet's poems. What has held this one upright for four centuries?

The mixture inside it. Mela writes of love, but under each love couplet lies another layer: tasavvuf, that is Sufism, the path to God through love. In Mela the beloved's face is at once a face and a mirror; wine is at once wine and the cup of divine rapture. He plays with letters, reaches toward stars and philosophy. At his poems' close he sometimes calls himself by name: Ehmed.

This density has a price. Ebdulreqîb Yûsuf writes it plainly: Mela's poems are heavy, and the people cannot keep pace with every couplet. So the divan does not travel without a şerh, a book that explains a text line by line. For generations the medrese taught this divan, and scholars like Zivingî wrote thorough commentaries on it. The people kept even the couplet they could not follow. Because one thing was certain: this heavy cloth had been woven in Kurdish.

Imagine a language of which it is said "it will not come to writing." Then a mela appears, and in that language philosophy and love ride in a single couplet. Mela's divan is, on its own, a proof.

Feqiyê Teyran: Where Does "Teacher of the Birds" Come From?

Our second poet's real name was Mihemed. In his poems he calls himself sometimes by name, sometimes by two letters: Mîm and Ha. But no one calls him Mihemed. On every tongue there is another name: Feqiyê Teyran.

The name is usually rendered "teacher of the birds." Word for word it means "the feqî of the birds." Where does it come from? Folk memory tells it this way: Feqî was a holy man who knew the language of all the birds, and spoke with them as if holding class. The document points to a plainer door. Ebdulreqîb Yûsuf records a village called Teyran in the Miks region of Van, between Miks and Hîzan, and ties the poet there. Teyran, in Kurdish, already means "birds." Legend and village name meet in one word; no need to erase either.

His birth and death years are not certain. An old source had placed him in the fourteenth century; Ebdulreqîb Yûsuf plainly corrects it. Dr. Izady gives the span 1590 to 1660. Feqî's own line is a witness too: in a poem written in 1631 he says "one thousand and forty-one years have passed." In the Islamic calendar, 1041, meaning he is alive and counting.

The Poet of Water: Feqî's Pen

Feqî studied in Miks, in Cizre, and in the Finik medrese on the Tigris. The people of Botan still tell it: one of his most famous poems, "Ey av û av," "O water, O water," he recited by the Tigris near Finik. In it he calls out to the flowing water: where do you come from, whom have you seen, why do you never stop? He has a poem to a mill as well. In Feqî's world water, stone, and bird all speak, and the human being listens.

What was his language like? The exact opposite of Mela's. By Ebdulreqîb Yûsuf's measure: flowing, sweet, and easy, at the level of the language people spoke. For that reason even the unlettered recited his poems by heart. The dengbêjs, the master singers who carry a people's memory in their voice, bore his poems in melody for centuries. Written poetry and oral tradition shook hands in him; the other foot of that bridge we described in our article on the dengbêj tradition.

His pen swept a wide field. He wrote the tale of Şêxê Sen'an into Kurdish: the parable of the old shaikh who tested his faith for love. Qewlê Hespê Reş, the Song of the Black Horse, is attached to him. And there is a document of war: Dimdim. In 1608, at Dimdim Castle near Urmia in what is now northwestern Iran, Kurds mounted a defense to the death against the Safavid army. According to Ebdulreqîb Yûsuf, the first pen to write that resistance as an epic was Feqî. Dimdim is the subject of a separate article here; we will say only this: the man who spoke with birds also set down the sound of the cannon.

"Mela û Feqî": History Hidden in a Verse

The two poets' paths crossed in Cizre. Feqî studied there, and Ebdulreqîb Yûsuf writes that Mela may have been his teacher. What is certain is the friendship, and the shared text in our hands: the "Mela û Feqî" exchange.

The exchange works like this. Mela recites a stanza; Feqî answers in the same meter. On the surface, the beloved's face; in truth, the secret of letters. The stanzas are woven with the letters of the Qur'an, hidden numbers, the candle and the moth. A contest, a lesson, a greeting? All three at once. Two masters displaying their skill show, at the same time, how much Kurdish can carry.

And into it a date is dropped. Feqî's line gives "one thousand and thirty-one": in the Islamic calendar 1031, in the common calendar 1621. A rare piece of luck in Kurdish literature. The document that two classical poets sang together, in one place and year, is the text itself.

The difference in style shows here too. Mela's stanzas are loaded, Feqî's plainer. The centuries proved both right: the medrese taught Mela, the people sang Feqî.

Two Graves, One Legend

There is no exact record of their deaths; for both we speak in approximations. For Mela the grave is known: he lies under the dome of the Medresa Sor in Cizre. Visitors are not lacking even today.

Feqî's grave is the sweet quarrel of two districts. The Miks side points to the tomb in the village of Werezoz, where Ebdulreqîb Yûsuf records it. The Hîzan side points to the poet's own village of Teyran. Folk memory solves the double claim with a legend. When Feqî died, the two districts could not share the body. In the night two coffins were prepared; in the morning each side took one. Both were heavy. Each buried its coffin in its own soil, and each believed it had reached the poet. The document is silent, and both tombs are visited.

What does it signify that two districts each want to bury one poet? Love. Here the legend is not history, but it is a witness.

The Road That Opened to Xanî

Without these two pens, would there have been an Ehmedê Xanî? Xanî answered himself. In Mem û Zîn, completed in 1694, he names his forerunners. The couplets are recorded in Ebdulreqîb Yûsuf's collection of the classical poets:

Bi navê ruhê Melê Cizîrî Pê hey bikira Elî Herîrî Keyfek we bida Feqiyê Teyran Heta bi ebed bimaya heyran

The translation is approximate: "In the name of the soul of Mela Cizîrî, with it I would revive Elî Herîrî; I would give such delight to Feqiyê Teyran that he would marvel for all eternity." (translation approximate) Xanî says that, had he found support, he would raise these masters' voices again. The third name, Elî Herîrî, is an older poet on whom even his own century's sources cannot agree; some count him the first Kurmanji poet.

That is how the ground was laid. Mela showed Kurdish could carry high thought. Feqî showed the same language could reach the people's heart through melody. Xanî took the third step: he built a masterpiece in it and announced it as a conscious cause. That story is in our article on Ehmedê Xanî and Mem û Zîn.

This too is the medrese's gift. Those stone rooms, teaching in Arabic, quietly leavened a Kurdish literary language. Ebdulreqîb Yûsuf noted in 1970 that Xanî's Nûbihar, written for children, was still read in the Botan medreses then. The chain had not broken. Nor is it broken today: Mela's divan travels in new editions, Feqî's poems in new melodies.

Frequently Asked Questions

When did Melayê Cizîrî live? The exact year is unknown. Most sources place him from the later sixteenth century into the earlier seventeenth; Dr. Izady gives the span 1570 to 1640. The 1621 exchange "Mela û Feqî" documents that he was alive that year.

What is in Melayê Cizîrî's divan? Ghazals and odes written in Kurmanji Kurdish, where love, Sufism, philosophy, and letter-symbolism are woven together. Its language is heavy, and for that reason it has been read with commentaries for centuries and used as a textbook in the medreses.

What does the name Feqiyê Teyran mean? "The feqî of the birds," that is the student of the birds, commonly rendered "teacher of the birds." Folk memory says he knew the language of birds; researchers also point to the village of Teyran in the Miks region.

Which works of Feqiyê Teyran are known? Poems of water and nature, above all "Ey av û av," the tale of Şêxê Sen'an, Qewlê Hespê Reş, and the epic of the defense of Dimdim Castle. His poems live on in the dengbêj repertoire.

Where are the two poets' graves? Melayê Cizîrî lies in the Medresa Sor in Cizre. For Feqiyê Teyran, the village of Werezoz in Miks and the village of Teyran in Hîzan point to two separate tombs; folk memory tells it with the legend of the two coffins.

Sources and Further Reading

Primary sources (from the Bedel Boseli Collection):

Ebdulreqîb Yûsuf, Şaîrên Klasîk ên Kurd. The records of the two poets' lives, the "Mela û Feqî" text, the datings of 1621 and 1631, and the grave traditions come from this book.
Dr. Mehrdad R. Izady, The Kurds: A Concise Handbook (4th ed.). The datings of Melayê Cizîrî (1570-1640) and Feqiyê Teyran (1590-1660) and the sixteenth-century literary context.
Michael L. Chyet, Kurdish-English Dictionary. Dimdim and the names of the classical epics recorded as entries.

Social Media Summaries

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

A mela in Cizre, a dervish from the mountains of Van. In 1621 they sat down to trade verses, and hid the date inside a line. The founding record of classical Kurdish poetry is still read: bedelboseli.com/en/melaye-ciziri-and-feqiye-teyran
Feqiyê Teyran: teacher of the birds. Folk memory says he knew the language of birds. The document says his village was already named Birds. Two answers, one lovely name, no need to erase either: bedelboseli.com/en/melaye-ciziri-and-feqiye-teyran
Melayê Cizîrî's divan is heavy; the people could not keep pace with every couplet, yet they kept the book for four hundred years. Because that heavy cloth was woven in Kurdish. A divan's power of proof: bedelboseli.com/en/melaye-ciziri-and-feqiye-teyran
One was read in the medrese, the other sung on the dengbêj's tongue. Mela wove heavy, Feqî flowed like water. Both raised the same language and opened the road to Xanî: bedelboseli.com/en/melaye-ciziri-and-feqiye-teyran
When Feqiyê Teyran died, two districts could not share the body; by the legend, both coffins came out heavy. That two soils should each want one poet is a document of love: bedelboseli.com/en/melaye-ciziri-and-feqiye-teyran