The Feylis: Authenticity, Ancient Heritage, Concerns, and Hopes – 5

I had decided to suffice with addressing Kurdish history, which I spoke about in the previous four articles within this series, because my goal was not merely to narrate Kurdish history, but rather to shed light on an aspect of Kurdish history and to highlight the pivotal contribution of the Kurdish people in building the edifice of human civilization. However, I deemed it necessary to write this article about history as well, after noticing the injustice to which Kurdish history is subjected. Regrettably, I say that the vast majority of historians, both Eastern and Western, consider the Sassanids to be Persians, or at best “Ajam” (non-Arabs), whereas reliable historical sources categorically and unequivocally confirm that the Sassanids belong to the Kurdish people. To do justice to the ancient Kurdish people and to present historical facts objectively and professionally, away from personal desires and chauvinistic tendencies, I wanted to dedicate this article to the Sassanids, who we will see were pure Kurds. I would also like to emphasize here that all Kurdish civilizations were established on the shoulders of the Feylis, because since the dawn of history, they migrated from the mountains of Kurdistan to the plains, where there were water and fertile land suitable for agriculture, livestock raising, and building cities, which in turn led to the emergence of great civilizations on the land of Kurdistan.

The Sassanid kings were titled “Khasraw”. The word is composed of two Kurdish words: “Khas”, which means “good” in the Lori Kurdish dialect (refer to the book Loghatnaameh by Ali Akbar Dehkhoda), and the word “Raw”, which means “behavior” or “conduct”. Thus, the word “Khasraw” means “one with good conduct”, meaning a “respected person of high status”. The letter Alif in the word “Khas” is omitted in the compound word to facilitate its pronunciation after combining the two words. The Persians took this title from Kurdish and modified it to “Khusraw”, as the words “Khas” and “Raw” do not exist in the Persian language. The Arabs, in turn, Arabized this word so it became “Kisra” or “Kasra”. Many kings of other peoples had their own titles, as did the Sassanids; for instance, the kings of the Romans were titled “Caesar”, the Coptic kings “Pharaoh”, the Turkish kings “Khagan”, the Yemeni kings “Tubba'”, the Abyssinian kings “Negus”, the Egyptian kings “Aziz”, and so on. Many people mistakenly think that the name of the Sassanid king during whose reign the Battle of al-Qadisiyyah took place was “Kisra”, whereas “Kisra” was the title of all Sassanid kings and not the personal name of one of them, corresponding to the title “King”, “President of the Republic”, or “Prince” used nowadays.

Here, I am not talking about the history of Sassanid civilization, but rather about their origin. “Sassan” is the supreme ancestor of the Sassanid kings. “Sassan” belonged to the Kurdish “Shabankara” tribe (“Shabankara” means “shepherd” in Kurdish), which inhabited the region of Fars (refer to the book of Ibn al-Balkhi). Sassan’s wife was the daughter of a chief of a Kurdish clan called (Bazrangi), which also belonged to the “Shabankara” tribe. This family grew up in the Kurdish area located in the Fars region. To proceed further in proving that the Sassanids were Kurds, we present the letter written and sent by the last king of the Ashkanians (Parthians), King Artabanus V (Ardawan V), to the Sassanid King “Ardashir”, in which he insults King “Ardashir” and looks down on him with contempt. This insulting letter was read by the Sassanid king in the royal court in the presence of the subjects of the Sassanid state. Among what was stated in the aforementioned letter is the following: (You have exceeded your bounds and brought about your own death, O Kurd raised in the tents of the Kurds! Who gave you permission to wear the crown you have donned?). This letter is cited by both al-Tabari (al-Tabari, Volume II, Egypt edition, page 57) and Ibn al-Athir (Ibn al-Athir, The Complete History, Volume I, page 133). Furthermore, Yaqut al-Hamawi mentions in his book Mu’jam al-Buldan (Dictionary of Countries), the writing of which took from 1224 to 1228 AD (Yaqut al-Hamawi, Mu’jam al-Buldan, Volume VII, page 413), that when the Sassanid sultans built “al-Mada’in” (Ctesiphon), they built a neighborhood within al-Mada’in and named it “Kurd Abad” to celebrate their national affiliation with the Kurdish people, which means “the Kurds are the builders of the city”. The name of the city is “Madyan”, which means in Kurdish “Madions or Medes”, to whom the Kurds belong; it was altered by the Arabs into “al-Mada’in”, and the Persians called it “Taysfun” (Ctesiphon). The Sassanid King Ardashir also built a special city for the Kurds near the current city of Mosul and named it “Budh Ardashir” (refer to Le Strange, The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate). From this, we realize that the Battle of al-Qadisiyyah, which took place between the Arab Muslims under the leadership of Sa’d ibn Abi Waqqas and the Sassanids during the reign of their last king, Yazdegerd III, was a battle between the Arabs and the Kurds. However, the occupiers of Kurdistan forged history and stole Kurdish history, falsely and slanderously considering the Sassanids to be Persians. Moreover, as a result of this forgery, racist Arabists attempted—and continue to attempt—to make the relationship between the Persian and Arab peoples an historically hostile relationship, just as the deceased Saddam Hussein tried when he called his destructive and reckless war against Iran “Saddam’s Qadisiyyah” as an extension of Sa’d ibn Abi Waqqas’s Qadisiyyah, whereas, as previously mentioned, that battle took place between the Kurds and the Arabs, not between the Persians and the Arabs. It should also be recalled that Persians and Arabs do not share geographical borders with each other, as Kurdistan separates the Persian and Arab lands.

Here we mention the names of the twenty-four Sassanid kings, whose rule lasted for four hundred and twenty-six years (224 or 226 – 651 AD), listed in chronological sequence of their reign:

Hamdallah Mustawfi mentions in his book Nuzhat al-Qulub, written in the fourteenth century AD, that King Khosrow I organized the tax system, the army, and state records. During the reign of this king, the book Kalilah wa Dimnah was brought from India to the Sassanid land, and during his era, philosophical and literary schools reached their peak.

The Kurdish poet, Haji Qadir Koyi (1817 – 1897 AD), wrote a poem more than a hundred years ago stating that the Sassanids were Kurds, explicitly mentioning by name the two Sassanid kings, Ardashir and Kavad, and complaining about the neglect of recording the history of the Kurdish people in the Kurdish language. From it, I excerpt these verses, which I translated into Arabic [and now into English]:

* “Azizan” are the ancestors of the “Bedirkhans”, who ruled parts of Kurdistan (“the regions of Jazira, Mush, and Van”) during the time of Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab.

“Muhalhal” is Muhalhal Shazanjani who defeated the Seljuks in Kermanshah and came to rule the regions of Kermanshah, Khanaqin, Kifri, Kirkuk, Sharazor, and Sirwan.

*** “Daysam” is the Kurdish ruler who ruled Azerbaijan during the Abbasid era.

As a result of the Kurdish people’s lack of a political entity that expresses their identity and records their history, preserving and developing their culture, language, and heritage, their history has been subjected to theft, obliteration, cancellation, and unjust distortion. The occupiers of Kurdistan attempt to eradicate the Kurdish language and culture, suppress the identity of the Kurdish people, and forge their ancient history in order to consolidate their occupation of Kurdistan, erase Kurdistan from the map of the Middle East, and assimilate the Kurdish people through Turkification, Persianization, and Arabization. The Kurdish people have a glorious history; they are among the oldest peoples in the region, and the Sumerian, Elamite, Median, and Sassanid civilizations bear witness to the antiquity of this people and their great contribution to the construction, development, and progress of human civilization. Highlighting the true role of the Kurds in establishing human civilization and becoming acquainted with their culture and history requires the establishment of Kurdish scientific centers to revive Kurdish culture and re-read history.

My friend, Professor Muhammad Mandalawi, constantly repeats to me and emphasizes the Kurds’ need to re-read their history, and I fully agree with him that the Kurds must search for their history in the folds of books and documents, in museum halls and archaeological sites, and through archaeological excavations in ancient Kurdish kingdoms, as well as examining the correspondence and reports of governments and officials. Here, I mean conducting objective scientific studies of Kurdish history to find the truth, despite the sabotage, theft, and obliteration to which Kurdish history has been subjected—especially given that the Kurds lack a political entity under whose umbrella this history could be written, which allowed its occupiers to write Kurdish history, working to distort, steal, and efface it. Amidst this distortion and theft, the Kurds must search, find, discover their history, and put it within reach of Kurdish children, letting the world know the true history of the Kurds. I am not calling here for the forgery of history as the deceased Saddam Hussein did in his campaign to “rewrite history”, but rather I suggest establishing scientific centers to gather historical information about the Kurds, classify, record, preserve, compare, filter, analyze it, and then write the correct information in an objective and scientific manner.

Before I finish writing this article, I would like to thank my friend, Professor Muhammad Mandalawi, for his valuable assistance to me in translating the information I relied upon in this writing, which was in the Persian language, as well as for lending me the sources I needed from his rich library. Without him, I would not have been able to present this article and place it in the hands of the dear readers.