Faroqhi S.N. The Cambridge History of Turkey: Volume 3, The Later Ottoman Empire, 1603-1839

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hatice aynur

several d

ıv

ans, but because they had never been put together they were being

dispersed and forgotten.

According to the same source, Seyyid Vehb

ı, who

at the time of writing did not as yet possess a d

ıv

an either, was negligent

about bringing together his works; but if the poems in the hands of his friends

were to be united in a single volume, the result would be perfect.

We are

left to wonder how the friends of a poet preserved his works, whether they

retained single slips of paper or whether they entered the poems into their

own collections of diverse texts (mecm

u‘a).

How N

ı’s poems were collected is worth a separate discussion. When

the author was living in Aleppo, Sil

ahd

Ibr

ım Pas¸a, who was governor of

the province for three years (1705–8), wanted to see such a volume appear. The

pasha himself took the initiative in bringing together the drafts and arranging

the poems in sequence; he felt that the collection would gain much if it were

introduced by a kas

ıde in praise of the unity of God (tevh

ıd). N

ı complied

with the governor’s wishes, specifying that the poem had been written at

Ibr

ım Pas¸a’s request. At the beginning of the section comprising his gazels,

ı did something unusual: he inserted a poem of twenty-three couplets

explaining how the collection had come into being. By the time of writing, the

poet had been active for about sixty years, and looking back at the work of his

youth, excused himself for the defects that he now saw in it.

However, even

though this d

ıv

an was already N

ı’s second one, an earlier one having been

put together in Istanbul many years previously, it did not contain the very last

works of this great writer: a full collection of his poems was only published in

1997.

While normally a d

ıv

an was to contain the entire life’s work of a given

poet, some authors preferred to include only a selection. Thus when in the

early nineteenth century, the poet Sur

ı wrote verses that concealed the date

at which his second d

ıv

an had been composed (1805), he explained that for

this, his second effort, he had only chosen his best pieces. A few poets also

divided their output among several collections; thus Ahmed N

ı(1600–73)

published that part of his poetry which dealt with the beauties of this world

under the title H

usn-i Mec

ı; after he had lost his position as a kadi and had

withdrawn to a Naks¸bend

ı lodge, he brought together his mystical poems

under the title H

usn-i Hak

ık

ı.InhisH

usn-i Mec

ı, the poet included his gazels

and short informal poems (kıt’as) about worldly pleasures, including coffee and

tobacco; there were also ﬁfty poems concealing a date, a feature all but absent

74 Altuner, ‘Saf

ı’, p. 707.

75 Ibid., p. 1031. 76 Diri

oz, Eserlerine,pp.183–8. 77 Bilkan (ed.), N

ıD

ıv

anı.

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Ottoman literature

from H

usn-i Hak

ık

ı. The latter volume also did not contain any references to

people of the author’s circle, nor did the poet include responses to the writing

of other authors; in brief, the focus was other-worldly.

Sometimes friends and relatives of a deceased poet might bring out the

latter’s collected works after his death: thus the poetry of R

agıb Pas¸a was

collected by his fellow author M

ustakimz

ade. But the latter did not succeed in

bringing together his dead colleague’sentire output. Thus a manuscript known

as the Mecm

u‘a-i R

agıb Pas¸a, containing poetry and prose in three languages

as well as the pasha’s ofﬁcial and unofﬁcial correspondence, held sixty-ﬁve

kas

ıdes, most of which did not appear in the posthumous d

ıv

an. Saf

ı also

told us that the works of the poet Remz

ı were collected and organized by his

former disciple R

us¸d

ı.

What were the dominant considerations when poems were arranged in a

ıv

an? Normally only verses composed in the ar

uz – in other words, in metres

consisting of sequences of long and short syllables – were considered worthy

of entering a volume that was to ensure the writer’s lasting prestige. Down to

the sixteenth century poets sometimes complained that Turkish did not lend

itself well to ar

uz compositions. In the seventeenth century such complaints

ceased, because the numerous Arabic and Persian loanwords now allowed the

poet a variety of alternatives. Down to the eighteenth century, poems in the

hece metre used by the ‘popular’ poets, which is based on a predetermined

number of syllables and pauses to each line, were not entered into d

ıv

ans. The

poet Ned

ım was the ﬁrst to break with this tradition.

As previously noted, d

ıv

ans of the seventeenth and following centuries

tended to contain more references to daily life than had been true in earlier

periods. From the collected poems of N

ı it is possible to compile his biogra-

phy, while Cevr

ı was the ﬁrst to mention palace women by name, particularly

the ruler’s powerful mother, K

osem Sult

an. He also stated openly that some

of his poems had been ‘made to order’; thus he wrote verses concealing the

foundation dates of various charities instituted by palace ladies and, upon the

sultan’s request, a kas

ıde evaluating the artistic qualities of singers performing

in the sultan’s presence.

Kas

ıde, gazel and naz

ıre

The kas

ıde ﬁrstappeared in Arabic literature,and fromthere passedinto Persian

and then into Turkish. It was often used for expressing praise or vituperation

78 Ahmet Yenikale, ‘Divan tertibine farklı bir yaklas¸ım: H

usn-i Hak

ık

ı-H

usn-i Mec

ı’,

Ilm

Aras¸tırmalar 14 (2002), 209–19.

79 Altuner, ‘Saf

ı’, pp. 286–7. 80 Ayan, Cevr

ı,pp.110–12.

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of a given person.

This type of poem gained in popularity in the course of the

seventeenth century, and the large number of kas

ıdes composed in praise of

important people may indicate that relations between authors and members

of the ruling group became closer in this period. Among seventeenth-century

kas

ıde poets, the most prominent was Nef‘

ı, who authored sixty-two such

pieces.

A novelty was his Fahriyye kas

ıde, in which he praised the merits not

of some patron but of his own poetry, and this work became a model for many

of his successors.

In this period the range of topics that might be treated in a kas

ıde widened,

as some poets including Veys

ı(1561–1628) addressed the social problems, eco-

nomic difﬁculties, dubious policies and corrupt power-holders of their times.

However, the latter poet preferred not to include his most critical kas

ıde in

his d

ıv

an, and from a marginal note in one of the manuscripts, we learn that

Ve y s

ı, when asked about his authorship, preferred to deny it altogether.

the same time the kas

ıde was considered suitable if an author wanted to ask

a patron for a favour; thus S

abit of Bosnia, not very successful in his ofﬁcial

career and always impecunious, not only asked for gifts in this manner but also

wrote a kas

ıde in recognition of the help given.

In the eighteenth century,

Ned

ım and S¸eyh G

alib were considered the foremost representatives of the

genre; the output of F

azıl Bey Ender

ı admittedly was larger, but its quality

not beyond dispute.

The gazel was central to Ottoman poetry, and the success of a poet was

largely determined by his success in this genre. In social life, the gazel might

serve purposes akin to those for which kas

ıdes were used: thus authors might

employ this form to pay their respects to potential patrons. Has¸met addressed

both a kas

ıde and a gazel to S¸eyh

ulisl

am Kara Hal

ılz

ade Mehmed Sa‘

ıd Efendi,

the head of the Ottoman hierarchy of religious scholars, and was rewarded

with a professorship.

Or else the poet might make a present of a gazel to

friends and aﬁcionados of his art; this was also the most commonly recited

kind of poem in convivial gatherings. However, in the eighteenth century, the

prestige of the gazel may have declined:

Ism

a‘il Bel

ginhisS¸ehreng

ız-i Burusa

81 Stefan Sperl and Christopher Schakle (eds.), Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa:

Classical Traditions and Modern Meanings (Leiden, New York and Cologne, 1996); Walter

Andrews, ‘Speaking of Power: The “Ottoman Kaside”’, in Sperl and Schakle (eds.),

Qasida Poetry,pp.281–300;Yas¸ar Aydemir, ‘T

urk edebiyatında kaside’, Bilig 22 (Summer

2002), 133–68.

82 Aydemir, ‘Kaside’, pp. 140–1.

83 G

unayAlpayKut,‘Veys

ı’nin Divanında bulunmayan bir kaside

uzerine’, T

urk Dili

Aras¸tırmaları Yıllı

gı: Belleten (1970), 169–78.

84 Bosnalı, Divan,pp.240–3. 85 Erdem, R

amiz,p.78.

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complained that it was now no longer appreciated, and that the younger

generation preferred to listen to the ‘popular’ poetry of ‘As¸ık ‘

Omer, or else to

an amusing anecdote.

From the seventeenthcentury onwards, gazels made up of ﬁve couplets were

the most widespread type, possibly because certain authors felt that brevity

was of the essence; others, however, stuck to the older, longer forms. The

Mevlev

ı dervish S

akıb Mustaf

a Dede (1652–1735) deﬁnitely preferred lengthy

gazels, perhaps because he lived during a period when his order was in crisis,

and seized this opportunity to defend it.

Variations of the gazel might also

come into being by a poet’s adding lines to a text already in existence. This

fashion (m

ustez

ad) became more widespread in the eighteenth century: as a

result the supremacy of the couplet broke down, and individual lines came

to carry more weight; this development should be viewed as a major literary

change.

Gazels were very suitable when authors wished to write a poetic response

to a composition they admired or that had at least attracted their attention: in

this case the metre, rhyme and echo-rhyme all had to conform to that of the

original (tanz

ır, naz

ıre). In this period it was considered ﬂattering if a gazel or

other poem received many such responses, and the practice of tanz

ır was part

and parcel of a poem’s afterlife. When Seyyid Us¸s¸

ız

ade wrote a gazel in a

novel style, it was said that contemporaries ornamented it by producing their

own poetic responses.

But from certain remarks about authors excelling in

this genre, we understand that writing such verses was considered not as a

creative act, but rather as a show of mere literary skill, and in certain cases

even as an indication that the writer’s creative spirit was failing him. However,

all literatures develop by reworking their own traditions, and the popularity of

naz

ıre writing may simply mean that certain authors honed their own abilities

by starting out from the poems of admired predecessors.

In our period, gazel-writing was dominated by the major ﬁgures of N

and Ned

ım, both of whom have given their names to speciﬁc poetic styles.

ı was famous for his ‘dominant’ type of writing, which he shared with

his Iranian colleagues S¸evket-i Buh

ı (d. 1699) and S

a’ib-i Tebr

ız

ı (d. 1669–70).

ı considered that meaning should be given pride of place, and accused his

predecessors of being unable to go beyond a standardised description of the

ﬁgure and face of the beloved, which they compared to equally stereotypical

images such as roses, cypresses and nightingales. By contrast, N

ı himself

86 Abdulkerim Abdulkadiro

glu, Bursalı

Ismail Beli

g (Ankara, 1985), p. 151.

87 Ahmet Arı, Mevlevilikte bir hanedanlık kurucusu: S

akıb Dede ve d

ıv

anı (Ankara, 2003), p. 52.

88 Erdem, R

amiz,p.168.

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hatice aynur

was quite willing to use terms from the marketplace and foreground his urban

concerns; in so doing, he expanded the range of topics that could be treated

in a gazel.

Ned

ım’s innovations were of a different sort. While he avoided all didacti-

cisms and allusions to religion, focusing instead on love, pleasure and amuse-

ment, the ‘beautiful people’ he described were not merely the creatures of

artiﬁce, but real living beings. His language was closely modelled on the

Istanbul speech of his day; he even included certain Arabic and Persian terms,

not as they would have sounded in the original languages, but as they were

pronounced by the people of the eighteenth-century Ottoman capital. This

gave his language a ﬂexibility that must have reminded the reader/listener of

real speech. That N

ı and Ned

ım’s modes of writing were highly successful

becomes apparent from the large number of eager imitators that they managed

to attract.

Mesnev

When it came to judging a poet, many Ottomans thought that while the

gazel was a witness, it was the mesnev

ı that really constituted the judge. In

mesnev

ıs the metre does not change and every couplet has its own rhyme,

with the pattern aa/bb/cc.

The number of couplets is potentially unlimited

and the poet thus highly ﬂexible in his choice of topic and narration; short

poems of twenty to thirty couplets are possible, but also long love stories,

or else mystical and moral tales consisting of thousands of couplets.

From

the eighteenth century onwards it became current practice to write kas

ıdes

and missives in mesnev

ı form. Thus in the collected verses by Mirz

ade S

alim

(d. 1743), we ﬁnd laudatory poems, including one in which the poet praised

himself, and poetic letters to relatives and friends, all in the shape of mesnev

ıs;

in older periods it had not been customary to include such works in a d

ıv

an.

While it is often believed that Ottoman poetry was governed by inﬂexible rules,

we ﬁnd poets who wrote kas

ıdes and kıt‘as where it would have been usual to

prefer the mesnev

ı: thus F

azıl Bey Ender

ı (d. 1810) composed a c¸engin

ame as

a sequence of kıt‘as. Perhaps these changes indicated a new-found ﬂexibility

in eighteenth-century literature.

Lengthy books in mesnev

ı form generally followed a pre-established plan,

consisting of an introduction, the narration proper and the conclusion. While

Ismail

Unver, ‘Mesnev

ı’, T

urk Dili: T

urk S¸iiri

Ozel Sayısı II: Divan S¸iiri 415–17 (June–

September 1986), 430–63. Also see Ahmet Kartal, ‘T

urkc¸e mesnev

ılerin tertip

ozellikleri’,

Bilig 19 (2001), 69–117.

Unver, ‘Mesnev

ı’, p. 432.

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the mesnev

ı had reached the summit of its popularity in the sixteenth century,

it was, by the period under discussion here, becoming much less frequent.

Did other genres ﬁll the gap opened by the relative decline of the mesnev

ı?

Were the examples we possess from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

really of the same kind as their predecessors, or was there a hybridisation with

other forms? We need more research and debate on the implications of this

development.

It is generally accepted that the H

usn

u‘As¸k of S¸eyh G

alib is the last major

work composed as a mesnev

ı, and it has aroused much interest down to the

present day.

The difference in approach between S¸eyh G

alib and his prede-

cessors has been summarised in the following fashion: almost all old stories

have been recounted by several different narrators, reﬂecting the claim that

the author of the ‘traditional’ mesnev

ı will have learned his tale from previous

tellers. But in H

usn

u‘As¸k the author does not posit a gap in time, impossible to

measure, between the readers and his tale.

The mythical dimension of the

story is thus reduced, and its immediacy enhanced.

On the other hand, H

usn

u‘As¸k can be read at ﬁve different levels: on the

ﬁrst and simplest, it is a story of human love. But it should also be interpreted

as a love rising to the celestial level and attempting the ascent to God. Seen dif-

ferently, it is the account of the mystical way as followed by a Mevlev

ı dervish,

and also a transmutation into narrative shape of the feelings aroused during

a Mevlev

ı ceremony. Finally, in Mevlev

ı thought, it is the symbolic represen-

tation of the stages through which a human being will pass on his/her way

to God.

Verses concealing dates

Verses concealing dates, making use of the numerical values of the letters of the

Arabic alphabet, had occasionally been written since the fourteenth century,

butthe genre gained in importance during the period under discussion. Nevres-

iKad

ım invented a couplet in which twenty-four dates were hidden, and

challenged others to do the same.

For such verses poets reserved special

sections (called tev

ıh) in their d

ıv

ans, in which the poems were arranged

91 The ﬁrst of these is Abd

ulbaki G

olpınarlı (ed.), S¸eyh Galib, H

usn

uAs¸k:

Ons

oz, metin,

bug

unk

u dile c¸evirisi, l

ugatler, ac¸ıkama, G

alib’in el yazısı ile H

usn

uAs¸k’ın tıbkı basımı (Istan-

bul, 1968), the most recent Muhammed Nur Do

gan (ed.), S¸eyh Galib, H

usn

uAs¸k, metin,

nesre c¸eviri, notlar ve ac¸ıklamalar (Istanbul, 2002). Victoria Holbrook, The Unreadable Shores

of Love (Austin, 1994) is noteworthy for its distinctive approach.

92 Necmettin T

urinay, ‘Klasik hikayenin zirvesi: H

usn

uas¸k’, in S¸eyh Galib Kitabı, ed. Bes¸ir

Ayvazo

glu (Istanbul, 1995), pp. 87–122,atpp.98–9.

93 Ibid. 94 Akkaya, Nevres,p.109.

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hatice aynur

according to the importance of the personage they celebrated. Anthologies

(mecm

u‘as), recording the most ingenious inventions of different poets, also

began to appear at this time, a famous one being due to the poet Sur

(d. 1814). Almost all buildings of the time showed inscriptions with a date

hidden in them. A broad selection of such verses has been recorded by the

seventeenth-century travel writer Evliy

aC¸ elebi: about 500 items in the ﬁrstfour

volumes alone. They commemorate eventsin the livesof sultans and important

people, and especially the dates on which mosques and other buildings serving

pious foundations, but also secular structures such as covered markets, had

been completed. About half of these inscriptions were found in the vicinity of

Istanbul.

Specialists in the t

ıh genre included

Ulfet

ı from Baghdad, whose ofﬁcial

career was unsuccessful and who used to bore his contemporaries with his

obsession with such verses. But since some of them had made his reputation,

he was nevertheless accepted in polite society.

In the eighteenth century,

Sur

ı was doubtless the author who best represented the taste of his age.

He concentrated all his energies in this genre, producing t

ıh verses not only

for important people or events, but also to a suicide who threw himself from

the top of a minaret, a theft of shoes from the entrance of a mosque, and

even the death of a cat.

It is worth noting that in the nineteenth century,

when European artistic forms became more and more widespread, poets and

their public did not lose interest in verses carrying dates; the genre deﬁnitely

deserves a closer study.

More than an appendix: women poets

To date we have only minimal information on palace women who wrote

poetry, and only one princess is known to have sponsored a major poet. This

was Beyh

an Sult

an, the sister of Selim III (r. 1789–1807), who was a patroness

of S¸eyh G

alib and paid for the ‘luxury edition’ of the latter’s d

ıv

an. In return

the poet wrote kas

ıdes and t

ıh verses for buildings belonging to the princess

and also for those put up by the ruler’s mother, Mihris¸

ah V

alide Sult

an.

In Ottoman d

ıv

an literature as a whole, thirty-two female poets are on

record, but only four of them lived during the period discussed here: Sıdk

Hanım (d. 1703), Fatma F

a’ize Hanım,

ı Fatma Hatun (d. 1710) and Fıtnat

95 Osman Horata, ‘Evliya C¸ elebi seyahatnamesi’ndeki manzum kısımlar’, in Evliya C¸ elebi

ve seyahatname, ed. Nuran Tezcan and Kadir Atlansoy (Gazima

gusa, 2002), pp. 155–67,at

p. 159.

96 S

alim Efendi, Tezkire,pp.122–7. 97 Sur

ı, D

ıv

an-i Sur

ı (Bulaq, 1255/1839).

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Ottoman literature

Hanım (d. 1780). All four of them were from the capital and had religious

scholars for fathers. Sıdk

ı Hanım recurred in different guises: as Emetull

Kadın, Sıdk

ı Emetull

ah Hanım

Istanbul

ı, Emnull

ah or Sıdk

ı; in her poetry

she used the pen-name Sıdk

ı. Fatma F

a’ize Hanım and Sıdk

ı Hanım were

sisters, their father being K

amet

ız

ade Mehmed Efendi, who was twice judge

of Istanbul. The name of

ı Fatma Hatun’s father is not known, but she

was a member of the illustrious ulema family descended from Hoca Sa‘dedd

ın

Efendi. Fıtnat Hanım’sgiven name wasZ

ubeyde; her father was Eb

Ish

akz

ade

Mehmed Es‘

ad Efendi(d. 1752), as s¸eyh

ulisl

am head of the religiouscum juridical

hierarchy under Mahm

ud I. Her grandfather

Ish

ak Efendi (1679–1734) and

her brother Mehmed S¸er

ıf Efendi obtained the same dignity and were also

known for their poetic skills. On the other hand, Fıtnat’s husband Mehmed

Es‘

ad Efendi, a grandson of Mustaf

a II’s s¸eyh

ulisl

am Feyzull

ah Efendi, was less

knowledgeable than his spouse, and the marriage was not a happy one.

For Sıdk

ı Hanım, the biographer S

alim has used the expression ‘a manly

woman’. Her biography not being very full, we have to guess what made S

alim

describe her in this fashion: presumably the fact that she applied to Himmet

Efendi (d. 1684), founder of the Himmet

ı branch of the Bayr

amiyye order

of dervishes, and succeeded in becoming a full member, must have played a

role. Apart from composing successful gazels, she also wrote verses with dates

hidden in them for a sizeable number of persons. Of these, S

alim provided

a few examples; one of them referred to the death of her order’s sheikh.

Saf

ı reported having seen her d

ıv

an, and also included samples of her work

in his tezkire.

Apart from her volume of collected verses, the sources mention

mystical poems (Genc-i Env

ar also called Kenz

u’l-env

ar and Mecma‘

u’l-ahb

ar)in

addition to a few ornate prose texts, as yet unstudied.

About her sister Fatma F

a’ize Hanim the biographer R

amiz has provided

some interesting information. He stresses that like her sister, she was a suc-

cessful poet and prose writer, who admired the early Ottoman poetesses Mihr

Hatun and Zeynep Hatun. Fatma F

a’ize’s knowledge of Arabic was particu-

larly esteemed. While the author claimed that only Sıdk

ı was considered a

really successful poet, F

a’ize was so clever in a variety of subjects that she

gave rise to considerable envy. Interesting is R

amiz’s remark that he was not

qualiﬁed to evaluate the works of women, and therefore did not wish to say

any more. The two sisters were buried in Istanbul’s Edirnekapı cemetery close

to their father’s last resting place.

100

98 S

alim Efendi, Tezkire,pp.426–7. 99 Altuner, ‘Saf

ı’, pp. 461–4.

100 M

ubeccel Kızıltan, ‘D

ıv

an edebiyatı

ozelliklerine uyarak s¸iir yazan kadın s¸airler’,

Sombahar 21–22 (January 1994), 104–69.

515

hatice aynur

ı Fatma Hatun was so famous for her knowledge that her biographer

called her h

ace-i zen

an (teacher of women); she was also a ﬁne calligrapher.

101

alim said that in writing the nesih and ta‘l

ık scripts, and also in her gazels, she

surpassed quite a few males. The same writer also felt that

ı Fatma was a

better poet than Zeynep Hatun, the well-known sixteenth-century writer. It

is worth noting that S

alim, who seems to have thought highly of

ı Fatma’s

gazels, did not, when it came to making a comparison with another person-

age of repute, set her against Ned

ım or N

ı, but against another woman.

According to the biographer S

alim,

ı Fatma Hatun was the butt of at least

one rather drastic joke involving a play on words, of the type common among

men at the time. Whether

ı Fatma Hatun found this ‘joke’ as funny as did

her biographer must remain an open question, for it involved the irreversible

defacing of her d

ıv

an manuscript, doubtless written in good calligraphy.

102

Per-

haps due to this damage,

ı Fatma Hatun’s collected poems apparently do

not survive. The poetess married and had a son known as Em

ırz

ade who died

in 1710 as a kadi of Yenis¸ehir; supposedly he also was made fun of due to his

mother’s literary activities.

103

But most attention seems to have been paid to Fıtnat Hanım. Her ready

wit was apparent from the elegant jokes she exchanged with Koca R

agıb

Pas¸a and Has¸met. Like other poets belonging to the Ottoman ruling group,

she wrote t

ıh verses referring to events concerning the dynasty and the

completion of public buildings; we also ﬁnd poetic responses to the work of

her predecessors.

104

Her poetry, in which the inﬂuence of Koca R

agıb Pas¸a,

and thus indirectly of N

ı, is apparent, corresponded to the expectations of

the time not only in content but also in form; in other words, there was no

trace of a female voice.

105

Obviously women had fewer chances than men

when it came to achieving public recognition, and conformity to accepted

standards may have been viewed as a conditio sine qua non for success. At

101 A study of the M

ırz

ade family, inﬂuential in the eighteenth century, contains some

indication of the education that certain girls growing up in these high ‘ulem

a circles

might receive. Neyl

ız

ade Mehmed Efendi’s(d. 1767) daughter Rukiyye Molla Hanım was

active as a teacher. From a t

ıh verse upon the death of her aunt Saﬁyye, we learn that

the dead woman had constantly read the Qur’an and studied the religious disciplines:

Atabey Kılıc¸, ‘Mirza-zadeler ailesinden Neyl

ı-zade Mehmed Ham

ıd’, in Bir: T

urk D

unyası

Incelemeleri Dergisi: Prof. Dr Kemal Eraslan Arma

gan Sayısı 9–10 (1998), pp. 409–15,at

pp. 413–14.

102 S

alim Efendi, Tezkire,pp.155–6.

103 Altuner, ‘Saf

ı’, p. 59;S

alim Efendi, Tezkire,pp.15–56.

104 Fıtnat Hanım, D

ıv

an (Istanbul, 1286/1869–70).

105 Kemal Silay, ‘Singing his Words: Ottoman Women Poets and the Power of Patriarchy’,

in Women in the Ottoman Empire: Middle Eastern Women in the Early Modern Era, ed.

Madeline C. Zilﬁ (Leiden, New York and Cologne, 1997), pp. 196–213.

516

Ottoman literature

least we may hope that a more thorough study of the manuscripts in Turkish

libraries will bring to light some female writers hitherto unknown: the woman

dervish Asiye Hatun, whose letters have recently been found and edited,

may be just one of those forgotten authors that present-day scholars try to

recover.

106

Prose

Until writers made contact with European literary forms in the nineteenth

century, prose deﬁnitely took second place to poetry, and emphasis moreover

was on style rather than on content. Prose writers tended to imitate forms pre-

viously pioneered by poets: we ﬁnd religious texts, the early history of Islam

recounted in a legendary mode, texts which told stories both religious and

heroic, tales written for highly educated or else for ‘popular’ publics, accounts

of heroic deeds, which might or might not have a recognisable basis in fact,

histories of the Ottoman dynasty, biographical encyclopaedias of ofﬁcials and

poets, commentaries on older texts, travel and embassy accounts, and collec-

tions of samples of ofﬁcial documents (m

uns¸e

at), intended for the education of

aspiring bureaucrats. Hundreds of texts from the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries ﬁt into one of these categories, and historical writing is especially

abundant.

107

Fahir

Iz has divided Ottoman prose into three categories. The ﬁrst encom-

passes texts in a language approximating everyday speech (s

ade). By contrast,

the second contains texts with very few Turkish words, while Arabic and

Persian terms, taken more or less arbitrarily from dictionaries, are employed

according to the grammar of the languages of origin; rhymed prose is used

widely and many of the verbal artiﬁces of d

ıv

an poetry occur (s

usl

u, ins¸

a). As

to the third category, it is also quite distant from everyday speech, but the

author is concerned with content rather than with a demonstration of his

literary skills (orta).

108

Texts of the ﬁrst kind, such as fairy tales and simple

didactic prose, are accessible to people without much formal education. In the

second category, however, the style is not the means to an end, but the end

itself, and the Arabic and Persian words used will be so rare that only very

106 Asiye Hatun, R

uya mektupları, ed. Cemal Kafadar (Istanbul, 1994).

107 For information on Ottoman prose texts, genres and authors see Faik Res¸at Unat,

Osmanlı seﬁrleri ve sefaretnameleri, ed. Bekir Sıtkı Baykal (Ankara, 1987); Virginia H.

Aksan, An Ottoman Statesman in War and Peace: Ahmed Resmi Efendi 1700–1783 (Leiden,

1995); Franz Babinger, Die Geschichtsschreiber der Osmanen und ihre Werke (Leipzig, 1927);

Hasan Kavruk, Eski T

urk edebiyatında mensur hik

ayeler (Ankara, 1998).

108 Fahir

Iz, Eski T

urk edebiyatında nesir, 2nd edn (Ankara, 1996), pp. v–xxii.

517