Muhammad Amin Zaki: The Kurdish Scholar Who Rebuilt His People’s History from Ashes (1880–1948)
- Daniel R
- Mar 14
- 6 min read
Updated: Mar 16
There is a certain irony in the fact that the first serious scholarly history of the Kurdish people was written by a man who spent his career serving the states that denied Kurdish existence. Muhammad Amin Zaki was an Ottoman military officer, an Iraqi government minister, a President of the Chamber of Deputies, a trusted servant of institutions whose fundamental premise was that the Kurds were either Turks or Arabs or, at most, a picturesque tribal people without a meaningful history of their own. And yet, in the decades between his military service and his ministerial career, often working in conditions of considerable difficulty and with resources that would seem laughably inadequate to a modern academic, he produced a two-volume history of the Kurdish people that would stand as the definitive scholarly reference on the subject for generations.
Table of Contents
Part 1: Sulaymaniyah — The City That Made the Scholar
Muhammad Amin Zaki was born in 1880 in Sulaymaniyah, the great city of southern Kurdistan that had been, since its founding in the eighteenth century, the cultural and intellectual capital of the Kurdish world. He received both classical Islamic education and new-style secular Ottoman schooling, and was sent to Istanbul to continue his education — the pathway into the Ottoman military and administrative elite available to talented young men from the Kurdish provinces.
Part 2: The Ottoman Officer — From Cadet to Staff College
Zaki pursued a military career, rising through the Ottoman officer corps to reach the rank of lieutenant colonel by the time of the First World War. He attended the Ottoman Staff College in Istanbul. For Zaki, military education provided access to the archives, libraries, and intellectual networks of the Ottoman capital. He was a voracious reader, a polyglot who would eventually master nine languages, and a man whose curiosity extended to the history of his own people, the Kurds, which had never been written in any systematic scholarly form.
Part 3: The Research Years — Twenty Years Across the Archives of Europe
From approximately 1900 to 1919, Zaki conducted a remarkable independent research project. While serving as an Ottoman officer, he was simultaneously pursuing the sources for a scholarly history of the Kurdish people — working in Ottoman archives, corresponding with European scholars, reading medieval Islamic chronicles in Arabic and Persian, compiling a bibliography that would eventually reach approximately 250 sources in nine languages. This research was conducted without institutional support, without a university position, without the infrastructure of modern academic scholarship.
Part 4: The Fire of 1919 — A History Rebuilt from Memory
In 1919, Zaki's house in Baghdad burned to the ground, destroying his entire research archive — the notes, transcriptions, working manuscripts, decades of accumulated scholarship. For most people, this would have ended the project. For Zaki, he rebuilt the work from memory through the 1920s while simultaneously pursuing a government career in the new Iraqi state. The honesty with which he acknowledged this process in the published work — noting where his reconstruction was uncertain — is itself a mark of scholarly integrity.
Part 5: The Book That Changed Kurdish History — Tarîxî Kurd û Kurdistan (1931)
Tarîxî Kurd û Kurdistan was published in Baghdad in 1931. The work — two volumes totalling over 600 pages — traced Kurdish history from antiquity to the modern era. It was the first time a scholarly, source-based history of the Kurdish people had been written in the Kurdish language. Before Zaki, the only major prior reference was the Sharafnama — the sixteenth-century Persian-language chronicle compiled by Sharaf Khan Bidlisi. Zaki's work was something different: an attempt to apply the methods of modern historical scholarship to the full scope of Kurdish history.
Part 6: The Politician — Defence Minister, Parliamentarian, Advocate
After leaving the Ottoman military service in 1923, Zaki lectured at the Iraqi Military Academy and subsequently entered the civilian administration of the British mandate. In 1928, he was appointed Defence Minister of Iraq — the highest ministerial position achieved by any Kurdish figure in the new Iraqi state. He served multiple terms as a Member of Parliament for Sulaymaniyah and was elected President of the Chamber of Deputies (Speaker of Parliament) from December 1944 to June 1946.
Part 7: The Polyglot, the Poet, the Painter
Muhammad Amin Zaki was not merely a historian and politician. He was also a poet who wrote in Kurdish and Arabic, a painter whose works depicted scenes from Kurdish life and history, and a linguist whose mastery of nine languages — Kurdish, Arabic, Turkish, Persian, French, English, Russian, German, and Italian — gave him access to an unusually wide range of primary and secondary sources for his historical research.
Part 8: The Banned Memorandum — Speaking Truth to Broken Promises
In 1932, as Iraq was preparing for its admission to the League of Nations, Zaki submitted a memorandum on Kurdish rights to the Iraqi government, documenting the promises made during the British mandate period and the systematic failure to fulfil them. The memorandum was suppressed. But it circulated anyway — in the way that suppressed documents always circulate — and stands as a document of remarkable honesty and courage.
Part 9: Legacy — The Father of Kurdish Historiography
Muhammad Amin Zaki died in 1948 in Sulaymaniyah. His legacy rests primarily on Tarîxî Kurd û Kurdistan. Translated into Arabic, English, and other languages, it remains the foundational text of Kurdish historiography — the work that subsequent scholars have built on, argued with, and extended, but have never been able to ignore. Kurdish historians writing today, whether in Sulaymaniyah or Erbil or London or Washington, are still working in the space that Muhammad Amin Zaki opened.
Chronology of Muhammad Amin Zaki
1880 — Born in Sulaymaniyah, Ottoman Empire.
1902 — Graduates from Ottoman Military Academy; joins Ottoman Army.
1914–1918 — Serves as Ottoman officer during World War I; reaches rank of lieutenant colonel.
1919 — Fire destroys his Baghdad house and entire research archive; begins reconstruction from memory.
1923 — Leaves Ottoman military service; joins Iraqi Military Academy as lecturer.
1928 — Appointed Minister of Defence, Kingdom of Iraq.
1931 — Publishes Tarîxî Kurd û Kurdistan in Baghdad.
1932 — Submits suppressed memorandum on Kurdish rights to Iraqi government.
December 1944 — Elected President of the Chamber of Deputies (Speaker of Parliament).
July 1948 — Dies in Sulaymaniyah at age 68.
References
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Muhammad Amin Zaki?
Muhammad Amin Zaki (1880–1948) was a Kurdish scholar, historian, and statesman from Sulaymaniyah. An Ottoman military officer who reached lieutenant colonel, he later became Iraq's Defence Minister (1928) and President of the Chamber of Deputies (1944–1946). He is universally regarded as the father of Kurdish historiography for writing the first systematic scholarly history of the Kurdish people in the Kurdish language.
What is Tarîxî Kurd û Kurdistan?
Published in Baghdad in 1931, it is Zaki's landmark two-volume history of the Kurdish people from antiquity to the modern era. Backed by approximately 250 sources in nine languages and written in Kurdish, it was the first academically grounded Kurdish history in the Kurdish language. It is considered the second most important reference on Kurdish history after the 16th-century Sharafnama.
Why did Muhammad Amin Zaki have to rebuild his research from memory?
In 1919 a fire destroyed his Baghdad house, consuming his entire research archive — nearly two decades of notes, transcriptions, and manuscripts. Rather than abandon the project, he reconstructed the work from memory through the 1920s while simultaneously serving in the Iraqi government. The published 1931 work honestly acknowledged the limitations this imposed.
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