Literary Citations In The Sharaf-nāma

Year 2014, Volume: 1 Issue: 2, 11 - 32, 01.11.2014

Mustafa Dehqan

Abstract

The Sharaf-nāma, that huge compendium of Kurdish history, constitutes a large collection of gnomic sayings which has survived in the text. It is possible, in general, to distinguish between two types of gnomic literature in the Sharaf-nāma. A distinction can be made between verse compositions containing mainly pragmatic advice and those prose aphorisms which have primarily religious character. Although one cannot expect absolute separation of themes as there is very little that is completely secular in the text.Loosely speaking, every citation has itself a source. What distinguishes the citations of the Sharaf-nāma from others is the unsystematic way in which they are expressed, showing almost always no mention of the sources used. In this context, the job of the editor or translator is not merely to make interesting remarks about, for example, the Kurdish nationalism in the Sharafnāma but to identify literary references. They are very useful not only for the supposition and the semantics of terms but also for clarifying the exact meaning of a number of points of this text, as well as for correcting or reconstructing some passages of the text especially when the questions of meaning, language, and particularly variant readings are concerned.The present article provides a complete checklist of literary citations given in the text. Literary here can apply to anything eloquence, including elegant and subtle poetry, to proverbs, ḥadīths, to āyas, invocations to God for assistance, satires, and on occasion even to the divinatory art of astrology etc. There are certain fragments where a poetical citation has not been identified, where a hemistich of long qaṣīdas remains undiscovered. Lacunae always do exist but I hope that the present checklist, as a slight recompense for its priority, may constitute a modest contribution to further research on this textual aspect of the Sharaf-nāma; especially as a stepping-stone to other scholars in happier times. My work makes no pretension to completeness

Keywords

Sharaf-nāme, literary citations, literary citations in Sharaf-nāme, gnomic sayings, Kurdish history