About Gelawej

Gelawej

Gelawej, known in scholarly transliteration as Gelawêj, was a monthly Kurdish literary and cultural magazine published in Baghdad, Iraq, in the late 1930s and 1940s. Its own masthead described it as a monthly Kurdish literary and cultural magazine, and histories of the Kurdish press in monarchical Iraq regard it as the most important and sophisticated Kurdish journal of its period. At a time when Kurdish publishing inside Iraq depended on a small number of presses, associations and individual patrons, Gelawej sustained a regular monthly presence in the Iraqi capital for nearly a decade, carrying poetry, prose, historical writing, educational material and discussion of the Kurdish language. It ceased publication in 1949, and its run is preserved today through facsimile republication volumes held by the Digital Archive of the Middle East at the University of Exeter.

Origins and First Publication

Gelawej was first published in Baghdad in 1939. Accounts of the Kurdish press during the monarchy period date its first appearance to January 1939, while the compiled facsimile volumes held at Exeter begin with Year 1, Issue 1, dated December 1939, and cover the magazine's first year through October and November 1940. The standard chronological listing of the Kurdish press records Gelawêj simply as a monthly journal published in Baghdad from 1939 to 1949. The magazine therefore belonged to the generation of Kurdish periodicals that appeared in Iraq after the end of the British Mandate in 1932, when, as press histories note, many Kurdish newspapers and magazines were issued in the cities of Kurdistan and in Baghdad. Within that crowded but fragile field, Gelawej distinguished itself by its longevity and by the standing of the writers it attracted.

Founder and Editor: Ibrahim Ahmad

The founder and editor of Gelawej was Ibrahim Ahmad, also spelled Ibrahim Ahmed or Ibrahîm Ehmed, one of the central figures of modern Kurdish literature and politics. Ahmad was born in Sulaymaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1914, studied law at the University of Baghdad, and worked as a lawyer and a judge. Biographical accounts record that he founded and edited the Kurdish literary periodical Gelawêj during his Baghdad years, and that in the same period he became involved in politics, joining the movement that produced the Kurdistan Democratic Party. Ahmad is best known as the author of the novel Jani Gal, rendered in English as Suffering of the People or The Pain of the Nation, which scholars of Kurdish literature treat as a prominent example of realist writing about the social circumstances of the people of Iraqi Kurdistan. His work on Gelawej came before that novel reached print, and the magazine formed part of the literary apprenticeship of a writer whom later scholarship would describe as a representative of socialist realism in Kurdish literature. Ahmad eventually retired from politics in 1975, went into exile in London, and died in 2000.

Contributors and Intellectual Circle

Press histories emphasise that a considerable number of Kurdish writers and intellectuals from various fields contributed to writing and producing Gelawej. Among those named in accounts of the magazine are Pîremêrd, the veteran Sulaymaniyah poet and journalist; Salih Qeftan; Hamd Ferec; Abdulla Goran, the leading modernist Kurdish poet; Tawfiq Wahbi, the Kurdish linguist and scholar; Faiq Bekas; and Mohammed Amin Zaki, the historian of the Kurds. That a single Baghdad monthly could draw contributions from figures of this stature explains why historians describe it as the most sophisticated Kurdish journal of the period. The range of its circle, spanning poets, historians, linguists and educators, also shaped its contents, which moved between literature, history, education and public affairs rather than confining itself to verse alone. The separate biographical volume later compiled for the magazine, containing entries on its writers and contributors, testifies to how large and significant that circle was felt to be.

Contents: Literature, Language and Education

The surviving facsimile issues show what a typical number of Gelawej contained. The Exeter archive descriptions of its volumes list literary prose and poetry, cultural writing, discussion of the Kurdish language and literature, historical and social commentary, translated or adapted texts, educational material and notices to readers, together with the illustrated cover and masthead. The third and fourth year volumes, covering January 1942 to July 1943, are described in the batch records as filled with poetry, prose, language and cultural writing. Issues from the fifth year, including Issue 6 of June 1944 and Issue 11 of February 1944, likewise combine literary prose, poetry, cultural commentary, translated or adapted writing, historical discussion and essays on Kurdish society, language and intellectual life. Translation mattered to the magazine's generation: scholarship on Kurdish translation between 1898 and 1991 notes that Kurdish newspapers and magazines played a vital role in supporting translation and promoting the publication of Kurdish writing, and Gelawej's mix of original and translated material placed it squarely in that effort.

Gelawej and the Politics of Its Decade

Gelawej was not an apolitical literary review. Histories of the monarchy-era press record that, in addition to historical, educational, political and literary topics, the magazine published articles on anti-Nazism and anti-fascism that were controversial at the time, and that these articles provided a real service in the fight against Nazi propaganda in Kurdistan and its influence on the Kurdish people. Publishing such material from Baghdad during the Second World War placed the magazine in the middle of the era's ideological contest for the region. Gelawej also appeared alongside other Baghdad Kurdish ventures of the 1940s, including Dengî Gêtî Taze, the Kurdish socio-cultural literary magazine issued by the public relations department of the British Embassy from October 1943 to September 1948, and Nizar, a monthly journal published in Baghdad in 1948 and 1949. Against those embassy-backed and shorter-lived titles, Gelawej stood out as a Kurdish-edited journal sustained by Kurdish intellectuals themselves.

Place in the Kurdish Press Chronology

In the standard chronological listing of well-known Kurdish newspapers and magazines, Gelawêj occupies a pivotal position. It followed Hawar, the Damascus journal of 1932 to 1935 and 1941 to 1943, and Ziban of Sulaymaniyah, and it appeared in the same year, 1939, as Jîn, the Sulaymaniyah weekly that ran to more than a thousand issues. Survey accounts of the twentieth-century Kurdish cultural movement likewise pair the Baghdad intellectuals' Diyari Kurdistan with Galawezh, dated 1939 to 1949, as landmarks of the capital's Kurdish publishing. Where the first Kurdish newspaper, Kurdistan, had been published in exile in Cairo in 1898, Gelawej represented the maturity of Kurdish periodical publishing inside Iraq itself, produced in the capital by a settled circle of writers. Its near-decade run made it one of the longest-lived Kurdish literary magazines of the monarchy period.

Closure in 1949

Gelawej ceased publication in 1949, at the end of its tenth year. Scholarship on Kurdish literature notes the wider context: the fall of the Republic of Kurdistan in Iran in 1946 coincided with another round of repression against Kurdish people in Iraq, and the Kurdish press could not escape that pressure. One literary history records plainly that the magazine Galawezh, which for ten years had quickened Kurdish culture, ceased publication in 1949, after which, until the mid-1950s, only one weekly publication, Jîn, remained, occasionally publishing a literary piece. The magazine's end therefore marked the close of an era in Kurdish literary journalism in Baghdad, and no comparable Kurdish literary monthly took its place in the capital during the years that followed.

Survival and Facsimile Republication

Gelawej survives because of a systematic preservation effort carried out in the Kurdistan Region in the twenty-first century. Its issues were compiled and republished in facsimile volumes prepared by Siddiq Salih, Rafiq Salih and Abdullah Zangana and published by Binkey Jin in Erbil in 2015. The Digital Archive of the Middle East at the University of Exeter holds these volumes, including the first-year issues of December 1939 to October and November 1940, the second-year volume of 1940 to 1941, the third and fourth year volumes covering January 1942 to July 1943, individual fifth-year issues from 1944, and the tenth-year volume associated with 1949. In 2016 the same editors produced an eleventh volume, part one, containing biographical entries on the writers and contributors associated with the magazine and chronological and author-based indexes to its issues from 1939 to 1949. The archive describes these volumes as significant for documenting Kurdish literary journalism, cultural production, translation, language use and intellectual life in mid-twentieth-century Kurdistan and Iraq.

Legacy and Significance

Gelawej's legacy rests on three foundations. First, it demonstrated that a Kurdish literary magazine edited in Baghdad could sustain monthly publication for nearly ten years and attract the leading Kurdish writers of its generation. Second, it served as an early platform for Ibrahim Ahmad, whose later novel became a landmark of Kurdish prose, and as a meeting place for poets such as Abdulla Goran and Faiq Bekas, the historian Mohammed Amin Zaki and the linguist Tawfiq Wahbi. Third, its wartime anti-Nazi and anti-fascist writing gave it a documented role in the political education of its readership. Because its complete run has been indexed, republished in facsimile and deposited in a university digital archive, Gelawej remains one of the most accessible primary sources for the study of Kurdish literary journalism in Iraq in the 1940s, and it is remembered as the outstanding Kurdish journal of the monarchy period.