Shahrzad Mojab & Amir Hassanpour, Women of Kurdistan: A Historical and Bibliographic Study, London: Transnational Press, 2021, 365 pp., ISBN: 978-1-912997-96-1.
Shahrzad Mojab and Amir Hassanpour’s new book, Women of Kurdistan: A Historical and Bibliographic Study, came into being as the result of long decades of study, effort, and courageous tenacity. We are most fortunate to have it; several times, its existence might have been prevented. Amir Hassanpour comes from the city of Mahabad, one of Iran’s historically important Kurdish cities. In the period after the 1979 revolution, as Kurds were being killed and executed, Amir remained secluded in the southwest city of Shiraz where his wife, Shahrzad, is from. Their escape from Iran, brought across the desert to Pakistani Baluchistan by motorcycle, along with their small child, marked another point when this book might have been prevented from emerging.
I met Amir in 1966–1968, while I was working as an American Peace Corps Volunteer teaching English in the girls’ high school of Mahabad. Amir also taught English so the Peace Corps volunteers became friends with him and his family. From way back, Amir’s family suffered from some of the repression Shahrzad and Amir’s book describes. One brother was put in prison because of distributing leaflets about Prime Minister Mossadegh and the nationalization of Iranian oil. Due to the cold and the depth of water covering the floor of the prison, he suffered from health issues throughout his shortened life. When I visited Mahabad once, Amir’s mother, by phone, asked me not to come to see her: the last time after I had stopped by, the SAVAK (the Pahlavi regime’s secret police) had questioned her. One brother was imprisoned and tortured by the regime of Mohammad Reza Shah.
Amir and his family and then Shahrzad too experienced some of the horrors and repressive treatment suffered by Kurds as discussed in their book, Women of Kurdistan. I can think of no better team to work on such a book. The late Amir Hassanpour was a highly respected Kurdish intellectual. He was a scholar devoted to Kurdish people, culture, history, and language. He was an idealistic activist as well, providing Marxist analyses of history and society and applying them to Iran and the history and language of the Kurdish people (see Hassanpour 1992, 1993, 2020). As Shahrzad so rightly comments, their lives have been “fully committed to revolutionary social transformation” (p. 7). As writer, speaker, and professor at the University of Toronto, Amir was loved and respected widely and grieved terribly when he died in 2017 from cancer. Shahrzad Mojab, Amir’s beloved wife and intellectual partner, had taken on his devotion to Kurds and their culture. In addition to so many other commitments and interests, Shahrzad learned Kurdish and became an outstanding scholar and publisher about the Kurds, especially regarding women, gender, and sexuality (see Mojab 2001, 2013, 2015). She starts out Part I of Women of Kurdistan with the words, “Love and learning made the making of this bibliography imaginable” (p. 7). Indeed, Shahrzad’s deep love for Amir and respect for his work prompted her, on top of many other obligations and responsibilities, to spend much of her time since 2017 completing Amir’s projects.
The book is divided into two main parts. The first part provides context, history, and an introduction to the topic of Kurdish women. Shahrzad’s discussion of the process of developing this bibliography will intrigue other writers; she shares the difficulties, lacks, silences and silencing, and decision-making during these twenty years. Rapid changes, “Western imperialist interests”, and “the hegemonic analytical tools of the last 30 years” (p. 10) have separated Kurdish women’s experiences and the study to understand them and their situations from the effects of and interactions with “patriarchy and capitalist imperialism”, Shahrzad comments. She points to the necessity of “adopting a feminist historical materialist perspective” (p. 11), quoting from the Bengali-Canadian sociologist Himani Bannerji.
The authors explain the reasons why such a dearth of materials challenges those who wish to study Kurdish women, gender, and sexuality. States, the authors comment, are patriarchal institutions. Those states that are home to the Kurds are also generally anti-Kurd. These states restrict academic freedom and university autonomy. Turkey, Iran, and Syria generally do not allow institutions of higher learning to engage in critical research or teaching about Kurdish women – or Kurds in general. Wars and upheavals in these areas also impact research and learning. The authors explain the reasons why in the West as well, Kurdish women’s studies are neglected. The authors provide theoretical perspectives on how states and also the market work to obstruct sound knowledge and understanding about Kurdish women. In spite of all of this, Kurdish women have resisted and have sought to develop knowledge, particularly in Turkey, about violence against women especially. Further, Kurds in diaspora have authored studies and have become involved with media, art, publishing, and human rights.
Part I contains thorough, detailed information about Kurdish language, religious life, diversity in Kurdish areas, and Kurdish populations in Middle Eastern countries and diasporic countries. The “Historical Sketch” stretches back to the seventh century. The authors gathered earlier materials about Kurdish women from Sharaf-Name, a history of Kurds from four centuries ago, from travelers, and from Mela Mehmûdê Bayezîdî’s Adat û Rusûmatnameê Ekradiye, a nineteenth-century book on Kurdish customs.
They warn about myths regarding the freedom of Kurdish women and offer excellent other cautions as well. The authors provide brief histories of Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Syria and the situation of Kurds in these countries over time. Part I provides excellent contextualization for the annotated bibliographical entries that follow – the larger section of the book. I was amazed that so much information and so much channeling of theoretical perspectives could be fit into this section; this accomplishment conveys the in-depth reading, thinking, and knowledge of the authors developed over their long years of academic and intellectual partnership.
Part II, the 300 pages devoted to the bibliographic entries is meant to cover 20th century literature pertaining to Kurdish women, and as the note cautions, it “does not include the extensive literature (…) published from 2006 onward” (p. 67, my own emphasis), accentuating how “extensive” the relevant literature has become since then, an encouraging observation. It should also be noted that the bibliography is limited to works in English, German, and French, and does not include works in the languages spoken in Kurdistan and the wider region. Part II, amounting to an extremely thorough annotated bibliography, is divided into sections and subsections. The excellent organization of materials makes this opus user-friendly.
Each entry provides the citation followed by keywords with full information about the contents of the entry, almost amounting, in many cases, to an abstract of the publication. Some keywords are very long, such as the entry about Minoo Alinia’s dissertation that covers most of a page (see p. 189), and the entry on a roundtable about “violence against women in Iraqi Kurdistan”, that covers almost two pages (see pp. 164–165). The book includes segments on Table of Contents, About Authors, Acknowledgments, and Acronyms as well as Author Index and Institutions and the Press Index in the Appendix. The wide coverage of materials about women of Kurdistan in English, German, and French, evokes marvel. However, as I have been familiar with the in-depth, scholarly analyses of both Amir and Shahrzad and with the patience and meticulous attention to detail of Shahrzad, I am not surprised. We can be grateful indeed to have this exceptional volume as a result of decades of dedication by a couple of beloved, dedicated, brilliant intellectuals and scholars. No one interested in the Kurds – nor, indeed, interested in the Middle East, women and gender, politics, international relations, patriarchy, or imperialism – can afford to miss studying this “historical and bibliographic study” of Women of Kurdistan.
References
Hassanpour, A. (1992). Nationalism and Language in Kurdistan, 1918–1985, Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellon Press.
Hassanpour, A. (1993). The Pen and the Sword: Literacy, Education and the Revolution in Kurdistan. In P. Freebody and A. R. Welch (eds.), Knowledge, Culture and Power: International Perspectives on Literacy as Policy and Practice, 35–54. London: The Falmer Press.
Hassanpour, A. (2020). Essays on Kurds: Historiography, Orality, and Nationalism. Bern: Peter Lang.
Mojab, S. (2001). Women of a Non-State Nation: The Kurds. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishing.
Mojab, S. (ed.) (2013). Women, War, Violence and Learning. New York: Routledge.
Mojab, S. (2015). Marxism and Feminism. London: Zed Books.