Making Some Religious Truths Extraordinary with Legendary Motifs: The Example of Hespê Reş

Authors : Ayhan Yıldız

Pages : 1260-1291

Doi:10.18506/anemon.1611880

View : 94 | Download : 128

Publication Date : 2025-12-30

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :Although some anonymous folk tales are religious, they overshadow their real heroes and events because they contain legendary motifs in their narratives. Therefore, they are moving away from the original truths of these texts. One of these texts is the story of Hespê Reş. When we chose this topic and turned to the literature on the field and read it, we saw that there was a master\\\'s thesis and some compilation studies on Hespê Reş. However, we observed that no special evaluation was made regarding this interesting aspect of this text. Therefore, we found a research gap and felt it was a necessity to conduct this study. Because this story has been told among the people in religious environments in many regions of Kurmanci speakers from ancient times to the present day, and many different variants have survived to the present day. Since its religious and legendary aspects are intertwined, some of its truly religious aspects are overshadowed by its legendary motifs. This caused the structure of the story to be damaged. That\\\'s why we chose this situation as a research problem and started researching it. After literature review, we limited the regions of Kurmanci speakers as the research population of this study. We collected sample data from eminent people through interview and observation techniques of qualitative research management. We compared the events in this story with the events in Islamic history and analyzed them. As a result of the study, in this story, the prophet of Islam is Hz. Muhammad, his caliph. Omar b. Hattab, Hz. A series of events occurred between Ali, a non-Muslim tribe, and a legendary horse called Black Horse. Hz. Although some of the wars of the Prophet\\\'s companions were against non-Muslims and these wars were included in various books, it was seen that the mentioned event was not mentioned in any sirah book or companions\\\' gazavatname. Naturally, the legendary motifs in this story make its listeners suspicious in terms of religious history. It seems that the narrators of this story, in order to endear the mentioned Islamic heroes to the public, chose to tell their narratives by embellishing them with legendary motifs in addition to their real attributes. That\\\'s why they alienated these true religious heroes from their reality.
Keywords : Islamic History, Kurdish Folk Literature, Legend, Folk Tales, Hespê Reş

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