KHURMAL, Kurdistan Region – The small Kurdish town of Khurmal this week honored Dr. Mustafa Zalmi, a 92-year-old scholar of Islamic law, by naming a major road to one of Kurdistan’s famous summer resorts after him. Government officials, politicians, academics and many ordinary citizens joined a ceremony where Zalmi was hailed as one of the scholarly giants of the Islamic world and honored for a lifetime of studies and contribution to Islamic universities with 60 books. “Dr. Zalmi is a university himself, he is a library, he is knowledge,” said Kaka Hama, the head of the Socialist Party who shares the same countryside with Zalmi. “The nation and people need him, he doesn’t need anyone.” Zalmi has received more than 65 local and international awards in Muslim countries and his work on the interpretation of the Islamic and Sharia law are studied in Kurdistan, Iraq, Jordan, Turkey and Malaysia. Redar Ahmad, Zalmi’s secretary and manager, told Rudaw that the scholar has three masters degrees and three PhDs in Islamic and Sharia law. According to Ahmad, some of Zalmi’s fans are famous deans and heads of universities in places such as Egypt and Tunisia. “When the Azhar University, which is the main Sunni school of thought in the world, invited Dr. Zalmi to honor him, there Dr. Taha Jabir Alwan, an Islamic scholarly giant said: ‘The Azhar should feel proud to have honored Dr. Zalmi, not the other way around,” Ahmad told Rudaw. Zalmi’s family say that due to failing health he cannot put pen on paper anymore “though he has a lot more on his mind to say.” “In Tunisia I visited Ez- Zitouna University -- the oldest of Islamic studies in the world -- the dean wept and said, ‘Are there still such scholars left in the Muslim world?’ and when the Salahaddin University in Erbil invited him to Kurdistan, he said, ‘Take me to Dr. Zalmi, I want to kiss his hands,” Ahmad recalled. The town of Khurmal is planning to mark the road that it named after him with a statue of Zalmi, who was born in the town. Zalmi traveled the Muslim world and learned and taught in many of its universities. Now, as he is spending his last days at home, he has donated his life savings and books to a cultural center to be built and named after his birthplace of Hawraman.
