Was Evliyā a Fakester?: On Abdāl Khān’s “Fictional” Library and Its (Lack of?) Use for Kurdish Cultural History

Sacha Alsancakli, University of Münster

Described by a contemporary French merchant as “the most powerful and formidable Bey or Prince” of Kurdistan, who “does not recognise the authority of the Great Lord [the Ottoman sultan] nor of the King of Persia” (Tavernier 1676: 273-275), Abdāl Khān (r. 1622–1664), emir of Bidlīs, was also, if we are to believe Evliyā Çelebi, a towering intellectual figure and a man of many talents. The Ottoman traveller devotes a significant portion of his Seyāḥatnāme to his encounters with the Khan in the years 1655–1656, a narrative that has drawn considerable scholarly attention.

This is equally true of Evliyā’s inventory of the Khan’s library, which offers a potentially valuable glimpse into the otherwise poorly documented Kurdish cultural life of the period. However, it has been convincingly argued that at least part of this library is, in fact, a “fictional” one—an imagined collection that “reflects Evliya’s own intellectual world, rather than scholarly activities in Bitlis” (Takamatsu 2015: 431).

This raises important questions: Is there anything to salvage from Evliyā’s inventory list of the Khan’s books? Can it still serve as a window into Kurdish cultural life? If not, what to make of Evliyā’s account? Was Evliyā a total fakester? In what follows, I attempt to answer these questions by taking the inventory as a starting point, drawing on supplementary evidence concerning Abdāl Khān’s patronage activities, and comparing the supposed library with another recently uncovered collection belonging to a Kurdish emir, that of Aḥmad Beg Mokrī, active in the mid-nineteenth century.

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.