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KURDISH SOCIETY IS KNOWN as a male-dominated society, and it has been for all of its known history. Throughout Kurdish history we find, however, instances of women reaching high position and becoming the political, in some cases even military, leaders of their communities. It is hard to find comparable cases among the Kurds' most important neighbors, the Turks, Arabs, and Persians. Such cases, if there were, may of course be under-reported in the literature because of an anti-female bias in historiography; but then one would expect the same bias to militate against the reporting of Kurdish women chieftains too. Most of the contemporaneous authors who wrote about diese remarkable women leaders appear, in fact, to have considered them as a typically Kurdish phenomenon.
These recurrent instances of rule by women are interesting enough in their own right, but they also raise a number of questions about the nature of Kurdish society and the position of women in it. Several male Kurdish authors have wished to see in these cases proof of die respected position enjoyed by women in their society, or even the remnants of an old tradition of gender equality. The best known of these women appear to be developing into national symbols, exemplifying the moral superiority of the Kurds over their neighbors. Feminists may be equally fascinated by these Kurdish women rulers and chieftains but be less inclined to conclude that all is well with women's rights in Kurdistan because some women reached the top. Various conflicting interpretations of tiie phenomenon of rule by women will be discussed briefly in the following pages. The primary aim of this article, however, is the modest one of simply describing the best documented cases of women who became rulers or played other "manly" roles in Kurdistan.
Adela Khanum of Halabja
At the beginning of this century the Jaf were probably the most important tribe of southern Kurdistan. Like other large tribes, the Jaf constituted a rigidly stratified society, consisting of a number of sub-tribes that were considered as Jaf proper besides others, of lower status, that were client tribes. Together, these tribesmen dominated a non-tribal peasant stratum. They were in turn subservient to a ruling lineage called Begzade.1 The person occupying the pinnacle of this...