Baban dynasty

The Baban were a family and dynasty of Iraqi Kurdistan. They rose early in the eleventh/seventeenth century from an obscure origin in the Pishdar country, through Ahmad al-Faqih, whose son became a power, and then his grandson Sulayman Beg, a major power in the Shahrizur area. Their headquarters at Kara Chulan remained so until the foundation of Sulaymaniyya in 1198/1783. Sulayman Beg gained a measure of recognition from the sultan and passed a princely position, or at least princely pretensions, to his sons, despite an unsuccessful invasion of Persia. ¹

Under his grandson Bakr Beg, early in the twelfth/eighteenth century, the principality stretched from the Lesser Zab to the Sirwan (Diyala), but it was always insecure and had no regular administration. After Bakr Beg's violent fall and the reassertion of Turkish authority, the Baban prince Khana Pasha gave important military help to the wali of Baghdad against the Persians (1136-1160/1723-1747). Under his nephew Sulayman Pasha (1167/1754) the family obtained the sanjaq of Koy, Khanikin and wide areas of western Persia. The principality remained precarious, resented by the Turkish authorities, threatened by rivals within the family, and weakened by intrigues with Persian supporters of rival candidates. ¹

Even valuable service to the pashas of Baghdad did not secure consistent Turkish policy towards the principality. 'Abd al-Rahman Pasha, the greatest of the Baban rulers, was in power with interruptions from 1204/1789 to 1227/1812, and fell, like others, to frontier warfare, intrigue and the rivalries among his brothers and cousins. Their territory was occupied more than once by Persian or Turkish forces. The final eviction of the Baban rulers, inevitable under the modernising policy of the Turkish government after 1246/1830, was made easier by Turko-Persian frontier agreements of 1239/1823 and 1264/1847. A brief revival came when modern weapons and military methods were introduced, but the centralising efforts of the mid-century walis of Iraq prevailed in 1267/1850, when the last Baban prince left Sulaymaniyya. Numerous descendants of the family survive. The entry's bibliography cites Longrigg's Four Centuries of Modern 'Iraq (1925) and Muhammad Amin Zaki's history of Sulaymaniyya (1951). ¹