Taṣawwuf-nāmes: Poetic Descriptions of Sufism in Turkish Literature

Abstract

In Turkish literature, one of the genres that can be added to the rich variety of religious poetic tradition is Taṣawwuf-nāmes. In this article, thirteen different poetic descriptions of Sufism and taṣawwuf-nāmes will be reviewed in order to present this genre, the first examples belonging to the 15th century and the last to the 20th. Among them, the taṣawwuf-nāmes of Dede ‘Omar Rūshenī and the Shaykh Ibrāhīm are counted as the famous texts without mentioning the name of the genre. The poems of Ṣun‘ullāh-ı Gaybī and Sheikh ‘Omar Ẓarīfī were also published by emphasizing their descriptive contents of Sufism. The taṣawwuf-nāmes of Ṣādıḳ Kamālī, Seyyid Mehmed Amīn, İsmā‘īl Ḥikmetī, Shevḳī and Mehmed Ḳāsım were subjects of graduate theses and a journal, without emphasizing the aspects mentioned above. Related parts of the masnawis of Cemāl-i Ḥalvetī’s Risāle-i Teşrīḥiyye, Ḳāḍī-zāda Mehmed Efendi’s Manẓūme-i Aḳā’id and an anonymous work named Manẓūme fī Beyān-ı Tezkiye-i İnsān, which cannot be included in the genre of taṣawwuf-nāme but due to their contents regarding poetic descriptions of Sufism, they are also going to be presented in the article because they shed light on the genre. In these texts, issues like the nature of Sufism and how the Sufis should be are explained in detail, as well as the traits that they should pay attention to have.

Keywords

• sufism
• turkish literature
• taṣawwuf-nāme
• religious poetic tradition