Life of Kurdish scholar celebrated in Erbil 160 years later

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - A documentary film premiered in Erbil on Tuesday, retracing the life of a 19th-century Kurdish scholar who traveled to Cape Town, South Africa, where he spent his life and left behind a legacy of knowledge and education. 

The documentary celebrates Abubakir Afandi Khoshnaw, a well-known Kurdish religious scholar (mullah) in the plains of Harir in Erbil. His great-grandson Mohammed Zzobri, who contributed to the filming of the documentary, traveled to the Kurdistan Region for the first time to attend the premiere.

Sirwan Rahim, the director of the documentary and author of a book titled “A Kurdistan Star in the Sky of Cape Town,” about the life of Abubakir Afandi, said that during his visit to Cape Town to gather information about the forgotten scholar, he was fascinated by the amount of intellectual and social projects he had spearheaded, including the opening of a girls’ school.

“The making of the documentary film has been a source of good for many among the descendants of Afandi, and it has evoked in many of them, a renewed awakening of where they had originally come from,” said the scholar’s great-grandson.

Aside from being a socially-engaged figure, Afandi also authored a book in the local language of Afrikaans about the science of Fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence. 

The hour-long documentary produced by Rudaw retells the whole life story of the Kurdish scholar, from his youth to the Ottoman Sultan’s decree to send him to Cape Town, zooming in on both of his works and the attempts made to misrepresent his history and ethnicity and more.

Zzobri said he was initially reluctant to participate in the filming of the documentary, because he never wanted to leave Cape Town, “But now having spent nearly two weeks in Kurdistan, I do not feel like leaving again the land of Kurdistan,” he said.


Who was Abubakir Afandi Khoshnaw?

Abubakir son of Mir Sulaiman, son of Mir Mohammed of Khoshnaw, was born in 1814 in Sisaway village in the Khoshnaw area near Erbil.

In his book The Statement of Religion (Bayan al-din), he mentions his family was among those who lived near Soran (Sohran in the book) in Sharazur (Shahrezoor) and Baghdad.  During Ottoman times, Sharazur was a separate province that covered most of the areas of what is now the Kurdistan Region and its capital was Kirkuk. Sharazur was under the direct control of the Baghdad province.

Afandi’s family moved to Erzurum in his early adolescence, and when he grew older he embarked on a journey to study science in Istanbul. He successfully finished his education and became a mufti, one of the highest degrees of intellectual scholarship in Islamic sciences. Afandi also studied in the renowned cities of Mecca and Baghdad.

When he reached his late 40s, Afandi grew to become one of the most influential muftis of his time. Abdulaziz, the Ottoman Sultan at the time,  signed in 1862 a decree to send him to Cape Town in South Africa, upon a request of Britain’s Queen Victoria, with the purpose of guiding the Muslim population of the city.

In the documentary however, Zzobri recounts that Afandi never actually worked as a cleric (a mullah), but rather as a teacher for the people of Cape Town. He established a school where he taught the Holy Quran and religious sciences. Children attended the school in the mornings, and men in the evenings.

A supporter of women’s right to education, the Kurdish scholar also established the first school where women could learn to read and write, and could study to become Islamic teachers. He appointed one of his wives as the principal of the school.

“Abubakir Afandi, assigned my great-grandmother Um Tahura Cook as the principal of the girls’ school,” Zzobri told Rudaw English. 

However, teaching was not the Kurdish scholar’s only aim, as he also wanted to pass on his knowledge to future generations, which led him to write Bayan al-Din about religious teachings and rules. The book was written in Afrikaans language using the Arabic alphabet and was published in 1877 in Istanbul. 

Afandi wrote in the language of the common people, so anyone who read his works could understand them even if they lacked knowledge of Arabic, which at the time, was the language the majority of religious books were written in..

Nearly two centuries later, many still want to claim Abubakir Afandi’s name. In a visit to South Africa in July 2018, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan described Afandi as an Ottoman cleric. In the same year, Turkish historian Halim Gencoglu claimed in a book titled  “Efendi of Erzurum at the Cape”  that Afandi was Turkish, a statement strongly countered by Zzobri who accused the book of distorting facts and reiterated that Afandi was in fact a Kurd.

Afandi died in 1880, and was buried in Tana Baru cemetery in Cape Town. From now on, in addition to being honored by the Afrikaans Language Monument in South Africa’s city of Paarl, his legacy will also be celebrated in his homeland thanks to Rahim’s documentary.

“Today is a wonderful and important day, that after 160 years a Kurdish scholar returns to Kurdistan,” said Rahim.