Spread of Islam among Kurds started in the 7th century with the Early Muslim conquests.[1] Before Islam, the majority of Kurds followed a western Iranic pre-Zoroastrian faith which derived directly from Indo-Iranian tradition,[2][3][4] some elements of this faith survived in Yezidism, Yarsanism and Kurdish Alevism.[3][5][4][6] When Islam first appeared, the Kurds were divided between the Byzantine and Sassanian Empires. The term "Kurd" back then referred to any Iranian nomad from any Iranian ethnic group whether in central Asia or western Iran regardless of geographic location or Iranian ethnicity.[9]Jaban al-Kurdi and his son Meymun al-Kurdi were the first Kurds who converted to Islam and Khalil al-Kurdi as-Semmani was one of the first Kurdish tabi'uns.[10][11][12][13][14][15] Mass conversion of Kurds to Islam didn't happen until the reign of Umar ibn Al-Khattab, second caliph of the Rashidun Caliphate between 634-644.[16][17] The Kurds first came into contact with the Arab armies during the Arab conquest of Mesopotamia in 637. The Kurdish tribes had been an important element in the Sasanian Empire, and initially gave it strong support as it tried to withstand the Muslim armies, between 639 - 644. Once it was clear that the Sassanians would eventually fall, the Kurdish tribal leaders one by one submitted to Islam and their tribe members followed in accepting Islam.[18] Today the majority of Kurds are Sunni Muslims, and there are Alevi and Shia minorities. Sunni Muslim Kurds are mostly Shafiʽis and Hanafis.[19]
With the spread of Islam in Kurdistan, a new style of civilization was formed in the region. One of the grounds of this new civilization was madrasas. The first Kurdish madrasa was formed around 950s in Hamadan, Iranian Kurdistan. However, Saladin changed the educational status of madrasas where only Islamic sciences were taught, and started to teach many branches of science there, giving more importance to Kurdish lessons.[11][24]
Lessons taught in the Kurdish madrasas included Tafsir of the Quran, Hadith, Fiqh, Logic, Statute, Mathematics, Astronomy, Medicine and Philosophy. Most of the books that were used as textbooks in Kurdish madrasas were in Arabic, and they were translated to Kurdish by educationalists and experts. There was an obligation of at least one child in each household having the necessity of being educated in a madrasa among the Kurds. Around 80% of students in Kurdish madrasas were male.[25][26]
^Safrastian, Kurds and Kurdistan, The Harvill Press, 1948, p. 16 and p. 31.
^Asatrian, Prolegomena to the Study of the Kurds, Iran and the Caucasus, Vol.13, pp. 1–58, 2009.
^Books from the early Islamic era, including those containing legends like the Shahnameh and the Middle PersianKar-Namag i Ardashir i Pabagan and other early Islamic sources provide early attestation of the term kurd in the sense of "Iranian nomads".
A. The term Kurd in the Middle Persian documents simply means nomad and tent-dweller and could be attributed to any Iranian ethnic group having similar characteristics.[7]
G. "It is clear that kurt in all the contexts has a distinct social sense, "nomad, tent-dweller"."The Pahlavi materials clearly show that kurd in pre-Islamic Iran was a social label, still a long way off from becoming an ethnonym or a term denoting a distinct group of people"[8]
