Mulla Effendi
During his life he granted more than hundred scientific licenses for scholars from different parts of Iraq, Iran, and the Middle East in general, and sponsored the daily living and study costs of his students.
Throughout the British Mandate and after the creation of Iraq, he played a prominent role in inspiring and directing public opinion, as well as being deeply involved in the political process of the region.
In the events of 1941, the Iraqi royal family chose his house as the most suitable and safe for their stay, and when King Faisal II returned, he awarded him "Wisam al-Rafidain" of the first order as a reward for his services for his country.
Only he could issue Fatwas in Arbil and for nearby tribes and villages where he granted more than hundred scientific licenses for scholars from different parts of Iraq, Iran, and the Middle East in general.
[6] During the Ottoman Empire, Mulla Effendi's family had a significant role in disengaging public conflicts and settling disputes between Kurdish tribes.
It is a lovely place shut in by orchards and vineyards with, on the east side, a small water-tank surrounded by flower-beds thick with whatever blooms happen to be in season.
He is respected throughout Kurdistan for his piety and learning; his ancestors for several generations before him have earned a similar reputation, and it is said that none of the family, which owns large properties, have ever yet laid a complaint against any man.
He remained true to this policy throughout, and though, as became one of his cloth, he refused any official position, he always supported the Government with his influence to this utmost of his power, and it was he more than anybody else who led public opinion in Arbil.
Yet I have rarely met a more modest man; he would not listen to my expressions of gratitude, and merely stated that he strove and always had striven for the good of his country and his people.Gertrude Bell had often visited Mulla Effendi at his house in Badawa, and mentioned him in her letters to her father published in 1927, a year after her death by her stepmother in two volumes.
He followed both world and local politics with great interest, and his wide knowledge of most subjects from astronomy to botany was extraordinary in view of the fact that he had never travelled outside the province.
He set up his own chapel, his library of Persian, Turkish and Arabic books, his garden and guest house, and seldom left it except for the Friday Prayer in the big mosque in the Qala.
Whenever I returned from leave, a long absence in the mountains from a frontier affray, or escaped an ambush, he would call on me in the office and invite me to a banquet at his villa.
Would I receive the deputation politely and agree to consider the case, but on no account was I to allow this to influence my ultimate decision, because in fact the criminal in question was a notorious blackguard who well merited whatever was coming to him.
He could reassure them about drinking water from a clean source pumped by infidel engines to the top of the Qala, and when the first troop of Boy Scouts was looked up with suspicious as the beginning of conscription, it was Mulla Effendi who told his sons to Join.
[8] In December 1924 and June 1931, King Faisal I visited Mulla Effendi in his house in Badawa in Arbil and thanked him for his efforts and his calls for reconciliation and peace to the different groups in the region.
The Archbishop and town chiefs went to meet Mulla Effendi at the Great Mosque to explain the situation to him and make him aware of rising tensions in Ankawa.
King Faisal II, Queen Alia, members of the royal family, and court escorts and servants left Baghdad on May 28, 1941, to stay at Mulla Effendi's house at Badawa.
[17] On his return to Baghdad, King Faisal II decorated Mulla Effendi with Wisam al-Rafidain "the Medal of the Two Rivers" in recognition of his work for the country.
Highest-ranking members of the government and others such as Deputy Chief of Royal Protocol on behalf of Regent Abd al-Ilah, the Iraqi Premier then Nuri as-Said, the British Ambassador to Iraq in Baghdad Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, the President of the Senate Sayyid Muhammad al-Sadr, Mutasarrif of Mosul Abdul-Majeed al-Yaqubi, Jamil al-Midfai (served five times as Prime Minister of Iraq), Dawud al-Haidary (well-known Iraqi statesman), paid tribute to his family.
The libraries contained books on language, science, grammar, morphology, rhetoric, Tafsir (Commentary on the Quran), Hadith (Traditions of the Prophet), linguistics, doctrine, logic, literature.
