To Mesopotamia and Kurdistan in disguise : $b with historical notices of the Kurdish tribes and the Chaldeans of KurdistanSoane, Ely Banister
History
To Mesopotamia and Kurdistan in disguise : $b with historical notices of the Kurdish tribes and the Chaldeans of Kurdistan
Soane, Ely Banister
Iraq -- Description and travel; Kurdistan -- Description and travel; Tigris River Valley -- Description and travel
In 1779, in the time of Sulaiman Pasha of Bagdad, the government
was transferred to the site of the present town, and a government
house and other buildings were constructed, and the new town called
Sulaimani--not Sulaimania.
[Sidenote: HISTORY OF SULAIMANIA]
Now a dynasty of Kurdish pashas ruled, beginning with Ibrahim Pasha,
and followed by his descendants. These governed until the time of
Abdulla Pasha, who was contemporary with Namiq Pasha of Bagdad.[50]
The Sulaimani ruler, having come to Bagdad to visit the Vali, was
seized, together with his brother Ahmad Pasha, and sent under a guard
to Constantinople. This was in 1851, and was the end of Kurdish rule
in Sulaimania. One Isma’il Pasha, a Turk, was appointed Qaim Maqam of
Sulaimania, with a garrison, and Sulaimania has remained a Turkish
government ever since. The two Kurdish pashas died about thirty years
ago, and their sons live as pensioners in Constantinople.
The Kurdish Ibrahim Pasha, having gained the chieftainship of the
district of Sulaimania, and Qaradagh to the south-east, built for
himself a large house upon the hill-side--where the modern governor
or Mutasarrif now resides. Around this and lower down, the town began
to form. The old family of shaikhs, or religious leaders, established
itself there also, and the construction of a bath and mosque gained for
the place a certain importance. Kurds, however, are not good settlers,
and the population of the new town began to form of the various classes
of people who habitually follow trade. These are, in these regions,
Turkoman of Kirkuk, Jews and Christian--Syrian and Chaldean, mainly the
latter. It is said that out of a thousand houses constituting the town
in 1825, eight hundred were occupied by Christians, Jews, and Turkomans.
As the neighbourhood is entirely peopled by Kurds of the Marga, Shuan,
Hamavand, Bana, and Jaf tribes, the language of the place was from
the first Kurdish. The shaikhs at the same time exercising their power
for evil and fanaticism, made life so difficult for Christians and
Jews that a large number each year deserted their own faiths to escape
persecution, adopting after conversion the dress and speech of the
local Kurds. From this very mixed material a people has sprung whose
ancestors were the children of races widely different in sentiment and
nature, mixtures of Aryan, Semitic, and Turkish stock, that possesses
almost every one of the unpleasant qualities of each race, and a very
lively fanaticism that has--under the inflammatory action of the
shaikhs--never weakened, gaining for Sulaimania a name for the ignorant
and savage isolation that has now brought about its own ruin.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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