Shamdinani Stories I: Kurdish Writings on the History and Culture of Central Kurdistan by Mullah Sa'id Shamdinani

During the First World War, the Russian consul Basile Nikitine recruited the Kurdish Mullah Sa’id of Shamdinan to assist him in the study of the Kurdish language and history in the city of Urmia in northwest Iran. Their collaboration resulted in a rich corpus of cultural and historical texts, which Nikitine subsequently intended to publish in cooperation with the British scholar David N. MacKenzie. The plan, however, was never brought to fruition, and MacKenzie’s copious unpublished materia...