Arif Mardin (March 15, 1932 – June 25, 2006) was a Turkish-American music producer, who worked with hundreds of artists across many different styles of music, including jazz, rock, soul, disco and country. He worked at Atlantic Records for over 30 years, as both an assistant, producer, arranger, studio manager, and vice president, before moving to EMI and serving as vice president and general manager of Manhattan Records. His collaborations include working with Queen, The Bee Gees, Anita Baker, Aretha Franklin, Roberta Flack, Bette Midler, Laura Branigan, Chaka Khan, Scritti Politti, Phil Collins, Daniel Rodriguez, Norah Jones, Richard Marx, Culture Club and Howard Jones. Mardin was awarded 11 Grammy Awards.

Biography

Early life

Arif Mardin was born in Istanbul into a renowned family that included statesmen, diplomats and leaders in the civic, military and business sectors of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic. His father was co-owner in a petroleum gas station chain.

Mardin grew up listening to the likes of Bing Crosby and Glenn Miller. Through his sister he met jazz critic Cuneyt Sermet, who turned him onto this music and eventually became his mentor. After graduating from Istanbul University in Economics and Commerce, Mardin studied at the London School of Economics. Influenced by his sister's music records and jazz, he was also an accomplished orchestrator and arranger, but he never intended to pursue a career in music.

Mardin (Kurdish: Mêrdîn‎, Syriac: ܡܶܪܕܺܝܢ‎, Arabic/Ottoman Turkish: ماردين Mārdīn, Armenian: Մարդին) is a city in southeastern Turkey. The capital of Mardin Province, it is known for the Artuqid (Artıklı or Artuklu in Turkish) architecture of its old city, and for its strategic location on a rocky hill near the Tigris River that rises steeply over the flat plains.

History

Antiquity

The territory of Mardin and Karaca Dağ was known as Izalla in the Late Bronze Age (variously: ^KURAzalzi, ^KURAzalli, ^KURIzalla), an originally Hurrian kingdom.

The city and its surrounds were absorbed into Assyria proper during the Middle Assyrian Empire (1365-1020 BC), and then again during the Neo Assyrian Empire (911-605 BC).

The ancient name was rendered as Izalā in Old Persian, and during the Achaemenid Empire (546-332 BCE) according to the Behistun Inscription it was still regarded as a part of the geo-political entity of Assyria (Achaemenid Assyria, Athura).

It survived into the Assyrian Christian period as the name of Mt. Izala (Izla), on which in the early 4th century AD stood the monastery of Nisibis, housing seventy monks.

Mardin was a diocese of the Chaldean Church from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. The diocese lapsed in 1941. Prior to this is was a diocese of the Assyrian Church of the East, from which the Chaldean Catholic Church originated.

Background

Fiey’s list of the Assyrian bishops of Mardin is derived principally from the list compiled by Tfinkdji in 1913. Tfinkdji's treatment of the diocese of Mardin, where he was himself an Assyrian Chaldean Catholic priest, is more than usually detailed, but although containing much valuable information is not free from error. From the middle of the eighteenth century onwards most of the Chaldean bishops of Mardin were buried in the city's church of Rabban Hormizd, and the dates of their deaths were recorded in their epitaphs. These dates were used by Tfinkdji, and most of them also appear in an undated note made around the end of the nineteenth century in a manuscript in the Mardin collection, which lists the bishops of Mardin from Basil Hesro (ob. 1738) to Peter Timothy ʿAttar (ob. 1891), giving wherever known the dates of their consecration and death. The author of the note is not known, but may have been Tfinkdji himself, despite occasional discrepancies in some of the dates given. Details of this kind, based on first-hand knowledge and personal recollection, can probably be trusted. Elsewhere, particularly for the early history of the diocese, his evidence is contradicted by other sources, and cannot be relied upon.

Mardin is an electoral district of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. It elects six members of parliament (deputies) to represent the province of the same name for a four-year term by the D'Hondt method, a party-list proportional representation system.

Members

Population reviews of each electoral district are conducted before each general election, which can lead to certain districts being granted a smaller or greater number of parliamentary seats. Mardin's seat allocation has varied little over the last sixty years, keeping around the six seats it has today.

There are currently six sitting members of parliament representing Mardin, three of which are from the governing party. Van was a district where the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) ran independent candidates in an attempt to overcome the 10 percent national electoral threshold. Three independent candidates were elected here in 2011; two have since joined the BDP.

General elections

2011

Unelected candidates in small text.