Roj Bash Kurdistan

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region -- “If the girl is good, we keep her for ourselves. And if she is not good, we still keep her to avoid being embarrassed in front of others,” says Abdulwahid Dizayee, a university professor, about the customs of the Kurdish Dizayee tribe.

The Dizayees are a large tribe that has been settled for centuries in the Erbil plains. They have historically been rich and powerful, and known for not allowing their women to marry men from outside the tribe. Dizayee men, however, can marry women from outside the tribe.

Professor Dizayee says that one of the major reasons behind the custom is the tribe’s wealth, which has apparently always motivated non-Dizayee men to seek the hands of Dizayee women.

“Many people have eyed the Dizayee’s wealth and wanted to marry Dizayee women,” said Professor Dizayee.

Members of the tribe have been accused of ultra-social conservatism because of this custom.

There are 200 Dizayee villages around Erbil, the capital city of Iraqi Kurdistan, but most of its members currently dwell in the city itself. Some Dizayees have become notable social, political and artistic figures in Kurdish culture.

Homar Dizayee, a famous Kurdish singer, told Rudaw, “In the past, tribes used to only marry among themselves, and so it was for the Dizayees. Economy played a major role because when they let a woman from their tribe marry an outsider, he would have a right to inherit property and fortune. So, Dizayees did not allow their women to marry outsiders so that there would not be inheritors from other tribes.”

He also noted the fact that Dizayees were landlords, which played a role in this custom because they shunned the idea of letting their women marry peasants of people or a lower social rank.

The singer lived abroad for years and is married to a Dizayee woman, although he says he had opportunities to marry women from outside the tribe.

But just as Kurdish society has been affected by the winds of modernization, traditional attitudes toward marriage are also changing among the Dizayee.

Safin Dizayee, a former minister of education with the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), says the Dizayee custom is due to protectionist tendencies that were prevalent among Kurdish tribes in the past. Dizayees, along with the Barzani tribe, are among the few remaining tribes that follow such tendencies, though these too are fading.

“Now the times have changed and parents need to take the feelings of their children into consideration,” he said.

Since when Dzayee was a tribe? I thought people living in the plains of Kendenawa was known as Dzayee, because of the area, not because they were a tribe.

Dzayee means stealing as a profession. I heard a lot of stories about this name as how it came about. One of them was about villagers stealing from other villages on behalf of their vllage chief, Agha.

By thwe way I am Dzayee too.