Shikaki

The Shikak (Shekak, Shakak; Persian شکاک) are a Kurmanji-speaking Kurdish tribe living mainly in West Azerbaijan, Iran, west of Lake Urmia between Urmia, Salmas and Oshnavieh, with smaller sections in southeastern Türkiye and, in the past, around Afrin in Syria. They are first recorded in a Yazidi manuscript of 1207-08 as tribes attached to the Yazidi saint Pir Sini Darani, and appear twice in the 16th-century Sharafnama and in Ottoman registers near Birecik, Kahta, Suruç and Rawanduz. The tribe has two branches: the Kardar, with twelve clans (among them Pazaki, Mamadi, Buti, Khudri, Dilan and Muqri) in Salmas and Urmia, and the Awdoi (Abdui), with nine clans (among them Atmani, Diri, Hanara, Shukri and Mirkan); the Awdoi claim to have come from Diyarbakır in the 17th century and displaced the Donboli. Kurmanj commoners and sayyid families live among them. Ismail Agha Shikak supported Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar and died around 1816-20; Jafar Agha was executed in Tabriz in 1905; his brother Ismail Agha, called Simko (1887-1930), led the revolts of 1918-22 and 1926 and was killed at Oshnavieh in 1930. The Shikak are now mostly settled.

The Shikak were transhumant herders of sheep and goats who moved between the mountain border pastures and the villages of Sumay, Beradust and Chahriq, under aghas of the leading lineages; Simko's family ruled from the castle of Chehriq near Salmas. Tribal organisation runs from household to camp group, lineage (tireh), clan (tayefeh) and tribe (il), and tribal endogamy with the chief's consent to marriages persisted into the late 20th century. Shikak share Kurmanji language, dance (govend), Newroz and dress with their neighbours, though the Herki costume worn elsewhere around Urmia is not popular in Sumay. Hospitality, honour and lineage pride, especially pride in Simko, remain strong. In the city younger Shikak are giving up chief-approved marriages and identify as 'Kurds of Urmia'.

The Shikak are Sunni Muslims of the Shafi'i school, like other Kurmanji Kurds of West Azerbaijan, and sayyid sheikh families living among them have held religious authority. Their earliest record links them to Yazidi saints, showing the fluid religious history of Kurdish tribes in the medieval period, but they have long been Sunni. In Urmia city Sunni Kurds worship at mosques such as the Imam Shafe'i mosque, which holds sermons in Kurdish and Azeri, and they carry their dead back to ancestral villages because the city has no Sunni cemetery. No study of folk practice specific to the Shikak was found.

The complete Bible, the Jesus Film and Global Recordings Network audio exist in Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji), mostly in Latin script for Türkiye and Europe. No Shikak-focused outreach or believers are known. In Iran evangelism of Muslims is illegal, and the 1918 killing of the Assyrian patriarch by Simko remains a painful memory between the Shikak and the Assyrian Christians of Urmia and Salmas.

Ismail Agha Shikak, known as Simko, was born in 1887 into the chiefly family of the Awdoi Shikak at the castle of Chehriq near Salmas; his brother Jafar Agha had been executed by Qajar officials in Tabriz in 1905. In the chaos of the First World War, as Ottoman, Russian and British forces fought over the Urmia region, Simko made himself master of the land west of Lake Urmia by the summer of 1918. In March 1918 he killed the Assyrian patriarch Mar Shimun XIX Benyamin at a meeting in Kohneh Shahr, and the Assyrian retaliation under Agha Petros killed thousands of Kurds and Turks in Urmia. Simko's army grew to about 20,000 in 1919 and perhaps 33,000 by 1921-22, with Herki and Mamash tribesmen his most loyal allies; he governed Urmia through Teymur Agha Shikak and extended his rule to Mahabad, Khoy, Maku, Piranshahr, Baneh and Sardasht, and briefly Maragheh. After Reza Khan's coup the Iranian army took Chehriq in 1922 and Simko fled to Turkey. He returned and rebelled again in 1926 at Salmas, and on 30 June 1930 he was lured to Oshnavieh by General Hassan Moqaddam and killed in an ambush. Kurdish nationalists remember him as an early leader of Kurdish self-rule; Assyrians and many Azerbaijanis remember the massacres and plunder of his years, and the memory still divides the communities of Urmia and Salmas.