From Abdāl Khān Bidlīsī to Aḥmad Beg Mokrī: A Study of Two Courtly Libraries and Their (Lack of?) Use for Kurdish Cultural History

Sacha Alsancakli, University of Münster

This talk aims to present the libraries of two Kurdish emirs, Abdāl Khān Bidlīsī (r. 1622–1664) and Aḥmad Beg Mokrī (active in the early 19th century), and to use them as a basis for reflecting on the history of book culture in Ottoman and Iranian Kurdistan. A list of Abdāl Khān’s books appears in the Seyāḥatnāme of the Ottoman traveler Evliyā Çelebi, whereas Aḥmad Beg Mokrī’s library is documented in a recently uncovered waqf deed. The authenticity of the latter is not in doubt. As for the former, however, it has been convincingly argued that at least part of the list of Abdāl Khān’s books is in fact “fictional”—an imagined collection that “reflects Evliya’s own intellectual world, rather than scholarly activities in Bitlis” (Takamatsu 2015: 431).

I will analyze these two book lists separately. First, I will consider whether anything can be “rescued” from Evliyā’s account of Abdāl Khān’s library, particularly in light of what we know about the khan’s literary interests, including his patronage of translation efforts. Second, I will introduce the previously unknown waqf document mentioning Aḥmad Beg’s library and examine several of its aspects, especially the question of its “Persianate” and/or Kurdish character. I will then synthesize these findings and offer a few broader conclusions concerning the cultural history of Kurdistan and a possible way forward.

Sacha Alsancakli is a postdoctoral research associate at the Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Münster, working within the Emmy Noether Junior Research Group “Inner-Islamic Transfer of Knowledge within Arabic-Persian-Ottoman Translation Processes in the Eastern Mediterranean (1400–1750)”, TRANSLAPT. He received a PhD in Oriental Languages and Civilizations from Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Paris, in 2018, with a doctoral dissertation on “Sharaf Khān Bidlīsī’s Sharafnāma (c. 1005/1597): Composition, Transmission, and Reception of a Chronicle of Kurdish Dynasties between Safavids and Ottomans”. As a cultural historian of the early-modern Turco-Iranian world, he researches historiography, popular literature, and the history of the book through the actors and processes involved in the production and circulation of manuscript texts. He has worked as a lecturer at Sorbonne Nouvelle University (2019–21) and at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (Inalco, Paris, since 2021), and has co-edited a collective volume on Authorship and Textual Transmission in the Manuscript Age (2023) and published book chapters and articles in various journals including Eurasian Studies, Kurdish Studies Journal, Diyâr, and Die Welt des Islams.