Reading Mustawfī in Turkish: On a translation of the Nuzhat al qulūb produced in 17th century Bidlīs

Résumé En

Until the Ottoman victory at Chāldirān in 920/1514, lands east of the Euphrates were considered part and parcel of the Persianate world. This included Kurdish principalities like Bidlīs, where Persian was the language of administration, literature, and correspondence, a status maintained throughout the 10th/16th century. There is evidence, however, that a linguistic shift occurred in 11th/17th-century Ottoman Kurdistan, evidence found notably in the form of multiple translations from Persian to Turkish produced in the region.In this communication, I will present one such translation, a Turkish version of the historical and geographical work Nuzhat al-Qulūb by Ilkhanid historian Ḥamdallāh Mustawfī Qazwīnī (d. 740/1340), composed in Bidlīs at the request of the emirate’s ruler, Abdāl Khān (r. 1031–74/1622–64). There are two extant manuscripts of this anonymous work, both kept in Ankara’s Milli Kütüphane as mss. A 957 and A 979, with the latter being the autograph, as well as a partial edition by Güneş Ekmekçi Aşan (Diyarbekir, 2020).I will first introduce the text of the translation with a view to answering the following questions: Why was this book chosen? How was the translation carried out? Were any passages left out or added? More generally, how can we relate this work to the broader context of Persian-Turkish translations in the Ottoman Empire?I will then focus more specifically on manuscript A 979, which includes a plethora of reading notes in the margins, written in what appears to be the hand of Abdāl Khān himself. I will thus be able to delve deeper into the peculiar interests that attracted the ruler of Bidlīs to this text, and, through this focus, I will endeavour to draw conclusions on the Kurdish political elite’s self-image and intellectual world in a time of cultural change.