Statue of Dr Muhammad Kamal erected in Kurdistan

Left: Dr Muhammad Kamal. Right: Sculptor Chenar Nizar and Dr Muhammad Kamal with his statue in front of the School Arts Centre, Sulaymaniyya, Iraqi Kurdistan.
Left: Dr Muhammad Kamal. Right: Sculptor Chenar Nizar and Dr Muhammad Kamal with his statue in front of the School Arts Centre, Sulaymaniyya, Iraqi Kurdistan.

A statue of Senior Lecturer at the Asia Institute Dr Muhammad Kamal has been erected in Sulaymaniyya in Iraqi Kurdistan, to honour him for furthering scholarship and promoting the study of philosophy in his native land.

Dr Kamal has made philosophy accessible to Kurds in their own language, writing 18 books on philosophy in the Kurdish language and translating several key philosophical works from English to Kurdish including Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Metaphysics, Poetics and the Categories, Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.

In doing so, he has become the founder of Kurdish philosophical language, and is acknowledged as such.

Dr Kamal's work is pioneering – if he had not written these works in the Kurdish language nobody would have, and this part of this international cultural heritage would still be a 'closed book' for many Kurds.

Congratulations Dr Kamal on this well-deserved recognition.