Salim, the nineteenth-century poet Abdulrahman Beg Sahibqiran, wrote about love, displacement and the changing life of Sulaymaniyah. His surviving poems and manuscript records offer a more precise introduction than a general reputation for philosophical wisdom.
A nineteenth-century poet of Sulaymaniyah
Salim is the pen name of Abdulrahman Beg Sahibqiran. The 2021 Manchester–Slemani anthology identifies Kurdî as his cousin and describes mosque education followed by a commitment to poetry, as well as journeys to Sanandaj and Tehran during political instability. [1] His dates vary between sources: VejinBooks uses 1800–1866, while Chnor Jaafar Ahmad’s Glasgow thesis gives 1805–1869. [2] [4] These disagreements make an approximate nineteenth-century chronology preferable to a falsely exact life story. His Kurdish poetry belongs to the literary world shared with Nalî and Kurdî; Vejin also preserves a separate collection of Persian poems. [3]
The morning wind carries a political letter
Salim’s reply to Nalî, translated in My Body Is Not Yours, begins by addressing the morning wind as a messenger. It moves from gardens and beauty to the condition of the city after the governor’s removal. Named places, including Saywan and Sarchinar, anchor grief in a recognisable landscape. The closing warning asks Nalî to stay away. [1] Read as a verse letter, the poem joins personal separation to a hostile account of Ottoman power. Its mourning voice conveys a political judgement, rather than offering a neutral administrative history.
Love, fortune and borrowed stories
The ghazal beginning “Kewkebî se’dim…” opens with failed good fortune and repeatedly measures the speaker’s suffering against inherited stories. Farhad and Shirin, Wamiq and Azra, the Companions of the Cave and Sheikh San’an appear within one poem. A promised kiss is even described through the language of a deferred transaction. [2] The effect is both learned and intimate: familiar narrative and religious references become ways of describing disappointment. Vejin identifies this particular poem’s metre as ramal; it cannot support a claim that all Salim’s verse follows hazaj.
A heart captured by a single hair
A shorter ghazal, “Diłî şêr’efgenî min…”, reverses the image of a powerful heart: the lion-like speaker is captured by the beloved’s hair. Its imagery moves through Moses and the burning mountain before ending with prayer distracted by an eyebrow. [5] These changes of scale—from lion to hair, from sacred encounter to an intimate feature—give the poem its tension. Love and religious language interact within the verse itself, without requiring every beloved to stand for a homeland or every line to become a political slogan.
How the poetry survives
Zheen Centre’s catalogue of digitally photographed manuscripts lists several copies of Salim’s diwan. Entry 16 records a 143-page copy dated 1903; entry 17 records a 214-page copy dated 1862, described as prepared for the poet, with its scribe unidentified. It also lists incomplete and undated copies. [6] Vejin’s Persian collection identifies modern edited editions, including the two-volume Zheen edition of 2015 and a Tehran edition prepared by Sediq Saleh. [3] Manuscript copying, editing and translation are therefore concrete parts of Salim’s continuing readership.
Sources and further reading
- Manchester and Slemani Cities of Literature, My Body Is Not Yours (2021), pp. 46–50 and 354; Salim translated by Savan Abdulrahman, Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse and Shene Mohammed.
- VejinBooks, Salim, “Kewkebî se’dim le burca def’eyê bała nebû”; original ghazal and metre.
- VejinBooks, Ashʿar-e Farsi-ye Salim; Persian collection and bibliographic details of edited editions.
- Chnor Jaafar Ahmad, The dilemma of Kurdish nationalism…1850 to 1930, University of Glasgow MPhil thesis (2019), p. 104; biographical dates.
- VejinBooks, Salim, “Diłî şêr’efgenî min seydî çi cadûyê bû”; original ghazal.
- Zheen Centre, catalogue of digitally photographed manuscripts, PDF p. 29, entries 16–20; copies of Salim’s diwan.