About Hetaw

Hetaw

Hetaw was a Kurdish biweekly magazine published in Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan, from 1954 to 1960. Its name means sun in Kurdish, and it is catalogued among the formative titles of the Kurdish press in Iraq. Over its six years it ran to 188 issues, a substantial total for a Kurdish periodical of the 1950s, when Kurdish printing in Iraq still depended on small, privately run workshops and on the personal labour of printer-editors. Hetaw was the journal of Giw Mukriyani, the Erbil printer whose family press, founded by his brother Hussein Huzni Mukriyani with the magazine Zari Kirmanji in Rawandiz in 1926, stood at the origin of Kurdish publishing in the Erbil region. The magazine is written about in the past tense as a historic title, and its issues were republished in facsimile volumes in Erbil in 2010 as part of the effort to preserve the Kurdish periodical heritage.

Publication Record

The standard chronological list of well-known Kurdish newspapers and magazines records Hetaw concisely: a biweekly magazine, published in Erbil, from 1954 to 1960, with 188 issues. A biweekly schedule sustained over six years explains that total, and it places Hetaw among the more durable Kurdish periodicals of its decade. In the same listing it stands between Nizar, a Baghdad monthly journal of 1948 and 1949, and Riya Taze of Yerevan, and immediately before Hîwa, the Baghdad journal of 1957 to 1963. Hoshyar Karim's history and union catalogue of Kurdish journalism likewise lists Hetaw, glossed as sunshine, in the sequence of 1950s titles, followed a few entries later by Hewa, or hope. Readers should distinguish this Erbil magazine from the earlier Hetawî Kurd of 1913 and 1914, an Istanbul-era title that has been the subject of its own modern study; despite the shared word for sun, they were different publications separated by four decades.

Giw Mukriyani and the Erbil Press

Hetaw cannot be understood apart from the Mukriyani printing tradition. The Kurdish Academy of Language's history of the organisation of printing in Kurdistan, drawn from Amir Hassanpour's Nationalism and Language in Kurdistan, records that the Zari Kirmanji Press was operated for years by Huzni Mukriyani or his brother Giw, and that in Erbil Giw himself worked sixteen to seventeen hours a day. After Huzni died in 1947, the press that had begun in Rawandiz was renamed Chapkhanay Kurdistan, the Kurdistan Press, and was owned and operated by Giw in Erbil. The Academy's account then ties Giw directly to Hetaw: he put a note in his journal Hetaw in 1956, in issue number 71, seeking to recruit two apprentices with an education no lower than the fifth grade of elementary school and residing in Arbil. The apprentices, the note promised, would learn typesetting, printing and photography, and would receive pay as well. The detail is revealing: Hetaw was not merely printed in Erbil, it was the house journal of a working print shop whose proprietor was simultaneously recruiting and training the next generation of Kurdish printers.

Printing Conditions in 1950s Kurdistan

The world in which Hetaw was produced is documented in the same printing history. Until the late 1970s, the printing presses in Kurdistan were housed in small workshops and owned privately, apart from the two municipal presses of Sulaymaniyah and Erbil, and were operated by individuals alone or assisted by one to three apprentices. None of the presses ever made any profit; the purchase of spare parts or the replacement of worn-out type was usually done through donations, and the building occupied by the Kurdistan Press in Erbil was itself donated by a Kurdish nationalist. In 1946, the apprentices of the Zari Kirmanji and Zhin presses had volunteered to travel to Iran to help the inexperienced printers of the Kurdish Republic run their Kurdistan Press. Nationalism, in Hassanpour's summary, was the inspiration that kept the old machines running. Hetaw's 188 issues were therefore the product of that economy of devotion: a magazine kept in print for six years by a printer who worked sixteen-hour days and trained school-leavers at the case.

Contents and Literary Role

Hetaw's pages carried Kurdish literary writing, language debates, cultural materials and historical press content, to use the terms in which the University of Exeter's Digital Archive of the Middle East describes the significance of its republished volumes. The archive notes that the Hetaw volumes preserve Kurdish journalism, literary writing, language debates, cultural materials and historical press production. The magazine's best-documented literary association is with Sherko Bekas, later the most famous Kurdish poet of his generation. The Kurdish Institute of Paris's bulletin on Bekas records that he started writing at the age of seventeen, published poems in the newspaper Jin, and published short stories in a review called Hetaw, rendered there as The Sun, before his poems began appearing in prestigious Kurdish literary reviews such as Rojî Nwê and Hîwa. Bekas, born in Sulaymaniyah in 1940 as the son of the poet Faiq Bekas, published his first poem at seventeen in 1957, squarely within Hetaw's run, and his early short stories in the Erbil review formed part of the beginnings of a career that would reshape modern Kurdish poetry. That an Erbil biweekly served as an early venue for a young Sulaymaniyah writer shows Hetaw functioning, like the other serious Kurdish periodicals of the day, as a national literary platform rather than a local sheet.

Hetaw in the Erbil Press Landscape

Erbil's Kurdish press between 1935 and 1975 has been studied as a subject in its own right, most directly in Abdullah Anwar Abdullah Simko's historical study The Kurdish Press in Erbil, 1935 to 1975, published by the Kurdish Writers' Union in 2012. Hetaw was the city's principal Kurdish magazine of the 1950s within that landscape. Its chronology overlaps the last years of the monarchy and the first two years of the Iraqi republic: it began in 1954, when Kurdish publishing in Iraq was still recovering from the repression of the late 1940s in which Gelawej had ceased publication, and it continued through the 1958 revolution into 1960. The titles that surround it in the chronology map the same world: Hiwa in Baghdad from 1957, Ray Gel in Kirkuk from 1959, Azadî in Kirkuk from 1959, and Bilêse in Sulaymaniyah from 1959. When Hetaw ended in 1960, Erbil's next magazine in the standard list, Hewlêr, did not appear until 1962, running as a weekly to 76 issues before it too closed in 1963.

End of Publication

Hetaw ceased publication in 1960 after 188 issues. The sources available for this profile record the dates and the issue total without documenting a specific cause for the closure, and no cause is invented here. Its end came as the post-1958 opening for Kurdish publishing in Iraq was narrowing; several of its contemporary titles in Baghdad and Kirkuk also ended in the early 1960s. What survived was the print shop tradition behind it and, eventually, the magazine itself in archival form. Giw Mukriyani's working life, from the Rawandiz press of his brother through the Kurdistan Press in Erbil to Hetaw, forms a single thread in the history of Kurdish printing, and Hetaw was its most substantial periodical product in the 1950s.

Preservation and Facsimile Republication

Like Gelawej and Zari Kirmanji, Hetaw owes its modern accessibility to the Kurdish archival republication programme centred on Binkey Jin in Erbil. The Digital Archive of the Middle East at the University of Exeter holds the compiled and republished volumes of Hataw, as the archive spells the name, covering the magazine of 1954 to 1960. Volume 1, Part 1 gathers issues 1 to 11, and Volume 1, Part 2 gathers issues 12 to 30; both were prepared by Siddiq Salih, Rafiq Salih and Abdullah Zangana, with a study and preface by Dr Kurdistan Mukriyani, and published by Binkey Jin in Erbil in 2010. The archive describes the project as part of a wider effort to preserve, reorganise and make accessible older Kurdish newspapers and magazines as sources for Kurdish journalism, literature, culture and historical research. The involvement of Dr Kurdistan Mukriyani, the scholar of the Mukriyani family's history, gave the republication a direct link to the family that had produced the magazine.

Legacy

Hetaw's legacy is threefold. In the chronology of the Kurdish press it is one of the substantial Iraqi Kurdish magazines of the 1950s, a biweekly that sustained 188 issues from Erbil across the monarchy-republic divide. In the history of Kurdish printing it is the documented journal of Giw Mukriyani, complete with the remarkable 1956 advertisement in issue 71 through which the history of Kurdish apprenticeship in the print trade can be traced. And in Kurdish literary history it holds a place as an early publisher of Sherko Bekas's short stories. Preserved in facsimile by Binkey Jin and catalogued by the University of Exeter's Digital Archive of the Middle East, Hetaw remains available to researchers as a primary source for Kurdish journalism, language debates and cultural life in 1950s Iraq.