Abdulraqib Yousef is a great cultural figure in Kurdistan. He has devoted most of his life to writing history, preserving Kurdish culture in monuments, documents, architectural arts and house paintings. Because of his scientific and valuable works, he has been called the great dictionary of civilizational culture by experts.
He was born in 1943.
He has served as a teacher in different parts of Kurdistan. He later became an advisor on archaeological affairs in the Council of Ministers, where he served for nine years and retired in 2010.
From the beginning of his youth, he was fond of reading historical articles and paid attention to archaeology.
Saeed Dewachi, director and founder of the Mosul Museum and a famous Iraqi historian, encouraged Abdulraqib to write, and he started writing in February 1960 and continues to do so to this day.
Abdulraqib has been writing for sixty years and has more than 50 printed and manuscript books.
In 1985, he published a book called A Call to Kurdish Intellectuals, in which he called for the collection, revival and preservation of Kurdish culture. Although Abdulraqib has many other excellent books, he considers this book to be the best because it discusses in detail the need to preserve all branches of Kurdistan's civilized culture.
These are the names of some of the published books of Abdul Raqib Yousef (Diwani Kurmanji, Doula al-Dustkiya fi Kurdistan, Tablokani Sharafnama, Memoirs of Ahmadi Hama Agha of Pishdari, Southern Kurdish Borders, Documents of Sheikh Mahmoud's government) and many other books.
He has published hundreds of articles and researches in Kurdish and Arabic languages in newspapers and magazines in Iraq, Kurdistan and abroad.
Abdulraqib Yousef's main passion was archaeological research. He discovered many ancient monuments and cities that had not been discovered before.
During his 60 years of work, Abdul Raqib has collected valuable documents, cassette recordings, photographs and videos, which is the work of a large national institution, he has done alone and on his own duty.
He has 18 million pages of documents, 1,300 hours of video recordings, audio tapes of the elderly and 70,000 photographs, all of which are a great cultural asset of civilization. He has donated most of his documents to the Kurdistan National Archives. Abdulraqib Yousif, who has digitized most of the valuable archive, has worked on it for nearly 12 years to make it available to readers through his own website.
He has completed this work and his website presents much of the information of his archive under 32 main titles, which is considered the richest website in the field of civil culture in the region.[1]