On dhayls of Bidlīsī’s Sharafnāma produced in the Ardalān emirate
Résumé
As the first general history of the Kurds, the Sharafnāma, authored by Sharaf Khān, emir of Bidlīs (d. ca. 1008-9/1599-1601), was widely circulated in Kurdish emirates on both sides of the Ottoman-Safavid frontier. Chronicling the history of 47 Kurdish dynasties up to the time of composition (1597), the Sharafnāma lent itself particularly well to the addition of dhayls, composed at the request of emirs wishing to see their dynasty’s narrative continued to include their own rule. A number of such continuations were thus produced throughout the text’s circulation history, including in the early 19th century in the emirate of Ardalān.
The emirs of Ardalān were, then, pillars of the nascent Qajar state. Khusraw Khān II (r. 1754-62 and 1766-90) had played a crucial role in Āghā Muḥammad Shāh’s (r. 1789-97) rise to power and his son, Amānullāh Khān I (r. 1799-1825), had subsequently spent ten years as a companion to Fatḥ ‘Alī Shāh Qājār (r. 1797-1831) in the Palace of Golestan. Once appointed governor of Ardalān, Amānullāh Khān transformed his capital at Sinna into the seat of a vibrant court culture, and it is under his auspices that a school of Ardalān historiography emerged which would see nine works produced from 1800 to 1901.
In this communication, I will study the role played by two dhayls of the Sharafnāma in the emergence of this historiographical school, namely, Ibrahīm b. Mullā Ḥusayn Ardalānī’s Dhikr-i ḥikūmat-i Ardalān (‘On the government of the Ardalān’, 1810), and the anonymous Tārīkh-i Sanandaj (‘History of Sanandaj’, 1813). I will try and show how the authors of these texts, all the while placing their works firmly in the Sharafnāma’s tradition, present us with a socio-political and historiographical perspective that differs both from Sharaf Khān’s text and from contemporary Qajar historiography in significant ways.