About Hiwa

Hiwa

Hiwa, transliterated as Hîwa and also rendered Hewa in modern scholarship, was a Kurdish cultural magazine published in Baghdad, Iraq, from 1957 to 1963. Its name means hope in Kurdish. Issued by Yaney Serkewtni Kurdan, the Kurdish Victory Club, it appeared first in July 1957 and continued into the first years of the Iraqi republic, publishing historical research, poetry and articles on the social, economic, political and cultural life of Baghdad and Kurdistan. Although it ran for only about six years, it has attracted dedicated scholarly attention: historians at Salahaddin University in Erbil devoted a full study to the role of Hiwa in writing the modern and contemporary history of the Kurds. The magazine is written about in the past tense as a historic title of the late monarchy and early republic period.

Origins and Publisher

Hiwa was published in Baghdad by the association recorded in the scholarly abstract as yaney serkewtny kwrdan, the Victory Club. A history of Kurdish periodicals in monarchical Iraq confirms this origin, noting that while some Kurdish periodicals of the period were issued by the British or American embassies in Baghdad, others were launched by local associations, and that the Hîwa magazine, glossed as Hope, was issued in 1957 by Yaneyi Serkewtin, the Victory Club. That distinction matters for understanding the magazine. Hiwa was not a government organ and not an embassy publication; it was the venture of a Kurdish cultural association operating in the capital, at a moment when Kurdish associational life in Baghdad was briefly expanding. The first copy of the magazine was issued in July 1957, in the final year of the Hashemite monarchy.

Dates, Frequency and Number of Issues

The sources on Hiwa's publication pattern do not agree in every detail, and a faithful profile should record that. The standard chronological list of the Kurdish press catalogues Hîwa as a bimonthly journal published in Baghdad from 1957 to 1963 with 36 issues. The Salahaddin University study, published in the Zanco Journal of Humanity Sciences in 2020, describes Hiwa as a monthly cultural Kurdish magazine issued in Baghdad, records that the first copy appeared in July 1957 and that it continued until 1963, and states that 38 copies were issued within six years. The difference between 36 and 38 issues, and between a monthly intention and a bimonthly reality, is typical of the Kurdish associational press of the period, whose schedules depended on money, permissions and printers. What all sources agree on is the frame: a Baghdad Kurdish magazine launched in 1957, running through the revolutionary change of regime in 1958, and ending in 1963.

The Baghdad Context of 1957

Hiwa's launch belonged to a specific political moment. Literary-historical scholarship on the Kurdish press records that, after years of retreat following the fall of the Mahabad Republic in 1946 and the repression of the late 1940s, the Kurdish movement and its allied opposition parties began to organise again in the 1950s, and that cooperation between opposition parties led to the creation of the National Front in 1957. The opposition's advances, that account continues, compelled the regime to allow the renewed publication of certain newspapers and magazines, and among the periodicals given out during 1957 and 1958, Hîwa and Shafaq, or Dawn, had a positive reception. Hiwa was therefore one of the titles through which Kurdish cultural life in Iraq re-entered legal print before the monarchy fell. When the July 1958 revolution replaced the monarchy with the republic under General Qasim, Kurdish publishing in Baghdad entered the brief opening in which titles such as the newspaper Xebat, published in Baghdad from 1959 to 1961, also flourished.

Contents of the Magazine

The Zanco Journal study summarises Hiwa's contents directly. It was a publication issuing historical research and news about different fields, including the social, economic, political and cultural life of Baghdad and Kurdistan, in addition to poems and various articles. That range made it a general cultural magazine with a pronounced historical mission rather than a purely literary review. Poetry held a recognised place in its pages: the Kurdish Institute of Paris's bulletin on the poet Sherko Bekas records that the young Bekas started writing at seventeen and published poems in the newspaper Jin and short stories in the review Hetaw, and that very quickly his poems started appearing in prestigious Kurdish literary reviews such as Rojî Nwê and Hîwa. For a Sulaymaniyah schoolboy who would become the most celebrated Kurdish poet of his generation, appearing in Hiwa in Baghdad was an early mark of standing, and it shows the magazine functioning as a national platform for Kurdish writing rather than a purely local club bulletin.

Hiwa as a Writer of Kurdish History

The most distinctive scholarly claim made for Hiwa concerns history. The 2020 study by Hoshang Salh Najir and Fatah Bahram Khdir, both of the Department of History at the College of Arts of Salahaddin University in Erbil, is titled The Role of Hewa Magazine in Writing the Modern and Contemporary History of the Kurds, 1957 to 1963, and it organises its analysis of the magazine into four chapters. The first chapter deals with the life of Kurdish celebrities and personalities and their role in the political and cultural life in Kurdistan, reflecting a strand of Hiwa that profiled notable Kurdish figures. The second chapter concerns Kurdish cities and villages and their role in modern and contemporary Kurdish history, reflecting the magazine's attention to the geography and local history of Kurdistan. The third chapter discusses the Kurdish struggle movement and its aim of achieving national goals, while the fourth covers the most important political and cultural activities in the city of Baghdad and in Kurdistan between 1957 and 1963. Taken together, the four chapters portray a magazine that treated the Kurdish past and present as a single connected subject, and that documented its own times as history in the making.

Position Among Its Contemporaries

In the standard list of the Kurdish press, Hîwa stands between Hetaw of Erbil, which ran from 1954 to 1960, and a cluster of Kirkuk and Sulaymaniyah titles of the late 1950s: Ray Gel, a monthly journal in Kirkuk from 1959 to 1962; Azadî, a biweekly magazine in Kirkuk from 1959 to 1961; and Bilêse, a monthly journal in Sulaymaniyah from 1959 to 1960. Survey accounts of the Kurdish cultural movement group Hiwa with Rzgari and Ronahi as the monthly and biweekly Kurdish publications that followed the earlier Baghdad titles. Hoshyar Karim's union catalogue of Kurdish journalism lists Hetaw and Hewa consecutively, as sunshine and hope, among the periodicals of the 1950s. Hiwa's distinction within this company was its Baghdad base, its associational publisher, and its concentration on historical writing at a time when Kurdish history had few institutional homes.

The Wider World of Baghdad Kurdish Publishing

To understand Hiwa's setting, it helps to recall the Baghdad Kurdish press ecology described by historians of the monarchy period. Kurdish newspapers and magazines of those years were published both publicly and clandestinely in the cities of Kurdistan and in Baghdad. Embassy ventures included Dengî Gêtî Taze from the British Embassy and Aga û Rûdawî Hefteyî and Peyam from the American Embassy. Associational and individual ventures, among them Hiwa, stood alongside government-issued periodicals such as Êre Beğdaye, This is Baghdad, issued in the capital in 1950. Hiwa's Victory Club sponsorship placed it in the associational category, dependent on Kurdish organisational life rather than on a foreign mission or a ministry. That helps explain both its cultural seriousness and its vulnerability: when the political weather changed, an association magazine in the capital had few defences.

End of Publication in 1963

Hiwa continued until 1963. The sources consulted for this profile record the fact and date of its end without assigning a single documented cause, and this profile does not invent one. The year itself was a turning point for Iraq: the scholarly literature on the period treats 1963 as the close of the post-1958 opening for Kurdish publishing, and Hiwa's contemporaries in the Kurdish press list, including Hewlêr of Erbil, likewise end in 1963. With Hiwa's closure, Baghdad lost the Kurdish cultural magazine that had documented Kurdish personalities, towns, struggles and cultural activities through the last years of the monarchy and the first years of the republic. The next Baghdad Kurdish journal in the standard chronology, Birayetî, did not appear until 1970.

Scholarly Afterlife

Hiwa's afterlife is unusually well documented for a magazine of its size. It is catalogued in Hoshyar Karim's history and union catalogue of Kurdish periodical publications, which grew out of a University College London thesis on Kurdish periodicals from 1898 to 1958. It appears in the major English-language listing of the Kurdish press alongside its contemporaries. Most significantly, it became the subject of a dedicated peer-reviewed study in the Zanco Journal of Humanity Sciences, the journal of Salahaddin University in Erbil, in December 2020, with a digital object identifier registered for the article. That study's very existence confirms the magazine's reputation among Kurdish historians: a short-lived Baghdad monthly is not made the subject of a four-chapter analysis unless its pages preserve material found nowhere else.

Legacy

Hiwa, the magazine named hope, left a legacy larger than its thirty-some issues might suggest. It carried Kurdish historical research, poetry and cultural reporting in the Iraqi capital across one of the most turbulent six-year spans in the country's modern history, from the last year of the monarchy through the 1958 revolution to the upheavals of 1963. It gave early print exposure to the young Sherko Bekas. It embodied the associational model of Kurdish publishing, in which a cultural club rather than a state or an embassy sustained a national magazine. And through the attention of Salahaddin University's historians, its contents have been mapped in detail for modern readers, securing its place in the documented history of the Kurdish press in Iraq.