Subsequently, in 1981, by decision of the military regime and like many other Turkish and Kurdish intellectuals, he was stripped of his nationality. He resumed his linguistic quest in Stockholm, aided by grants from the Swedish government. To collect vocabulary and folklore, he visited an Iraqi Kurdish leader in a rebel-held mountain valley of Iraq, spending evenings in a tent listening to Kurdish poets and storytellers by the light of an oil lamp. He learned Arabic script to read classical Kurdish poems of the 16th and 17th centuries.