Kurdish Printing in Iran | Kurdish Academy of Language

Though printing was brought to Iran in 1629 by Carmelite missionaries (Floor 1980:369), the industry did not develop until-the early twentieth century. The first book with Kurdish language material is a Kurdish-Persian dictionary printed lithographically in Tehran in 1885 (cf. 8.4.4 and Figure 32).

The first city close to Kurdistan to acquire a press was Urmia, where the leaders of a Kurdish revolt seized a small private press to publish a journal and other material (cf. 6.3.0). Printing presses were carefully watched by the secret police during the entire period of the Pahlavi dynasty (1925-79). Printing in the languages of Iran’s nationalities, Turkish, Kurdish, Baluchi and Turkmeni was illegal. Even in the relatively relaxed conditions following the abdication of Reza Shah in 1941, the newly formed Kurdish political party Kornelley J.K. had to print its journal and a few books (cf. 3.2.l.II.B. and Fig. 1) clandestinely in Tabriz.

When Iranian Kurds revolted against the Shah in 1946 and established an autonomous republic, there were no printing presses in any Kurdish town within its territory. Two years earlier, the Iranian government had officially protested to the Soviet Union for providing the Kurds with "one printing press and lots of newssheet paper" (Ettela’at, No. 5922, December 1, 1945; cf., also, Times, November 28, 1945, p. 3). In fact, an old hand press was given as a gift to the Kurdish Republic in 1946 by the autonomous Azerbaijan Republic which had been established in December 1945 to the east of the Kurdish areas of northwest Iran. A second press, set up in Bokan [Bukan], printed the first book in February, 1946 (Kurdistan, No. 14, February 13, 1946, p. 3). The small presses were put to active use and printed five periodicals in less than a year (cf. Table 30, items 36¬40). The workers at the press published their own journal (cf. Table 30, item 38). A number of Iraqi Kurds helped with the operation of the machinery. The presses were expropriated by the Iranian Army and removed from the region after the fall of the Republic in December, 1946.

Two small presses were set up in Sanandaj (one as early as 1922) and one in Mahabad in the mid-1950s, although neither was permitted to print in Kurdish except for a few religious works. The presses in Sanandaj published two weekly or monthly papers in Persian. Under the political circumstances of the early 1960s (cf. 7.4.3.1), a bookseller in Mahabad was permitted to publish non-political Kurdish works, but had to use printing facilities outside Kurdistan (cf. 7.2.3). To publish the government sponsored weekly Kurdistan, one printing press in Tehran used Kurdish letter types in the early 1960s. Another press in Tabriz was also using special type to print the folklore material published by the Faculty of Letters of Tabriz University.

Printing was an indispensable weapon against the Pahlavi dynasty in the 1978-79 Revolution. In Kurdistan, students, teachers and government employees gained access to the well-guarded duplicating machines in government offices and schools and produced periodicals and leaflets. Soon after the fall of the monarchy in February 1979 considerable sums of money were donated by the people in Saqqez and Mahabad for the purchase of printing presses. In Saqqez, the machinery had just been acquired when the Government offensive against the Kurds began in 1979, and the Army expropriated the press.

In the rural areas which were mostly under Kurdish control during the period 1979 through 1985, publishing activity was going on through mimeographing. In the post-1979 period a number of printing presses possessed Kurdish type, although much of the publishing has been done by using the less costly method of offsetting typed or letter-set texts with manually added diacritics.

Source: Dr. Amir Hassanpour, "Nationalism and Language in Kurdistan 1918-1985", 1992.