Professors Nurullah Koltaş and Vitoria Holbrook join us to discuss the poetry of Niyazi Misri (d. 1694) and Ismā’īl Ḥaqqī Bursawī (d. 1725), two of the greatest Sufi poets of Ottoman Turkish. Highly-esteemed scholars, authors, and Sufi masters of the Halveti order during their lives, their poetry is still sung today in Turkish tekyes, or Sufi lodges, forming the basis of many popular ilâhis. Their poetry is characterized by a marriage of Akbari metaphysics, Persian ghazal symbolism, and the directness and profundity of the earlier Turkish Ashki tradition. One of Niyazi’s poems even alludes to the title of this podcast: “We speak with the obscure lexicon of the speech of birds;
Not everyone understands us since riddles we have become
How could they understand us through words and form and body?
We are neither words nor form; pure meaning we have become.”
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Links and Further Reading/Listening:
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Niyazi Misri, The Architect of Love, trans. Ersin Balci (KOPERNIK, 2019)
Niyazi Misri poems in translation
Walter G. Andrews, Najaat Black and Mehmet Kalpakli, Ottoman Lyric Poetry: An Anthology (University of Washington Press, 2006)
Şeyh Galip, Beauty and Love, trans. Victoria Holbrook (MLA Texts and Translations, 2005)
Stephen Hirtenstein, “Malatyan Soil, Akbarian Fruit – From Ibn ʿArabi to Niyazi Misri”: https://ibnarabisociety.org/from-ibn-arabi-to-niyazi-misri-stephen-hirtenstein/
Jennifer Ferraro and Latif Bolat, Quarreling with God: Mystic Rebel Poems of the Dervishes of Turkey (White Cloud Press, 2007).
Derin Terzioglu, Sufi and Dissident in the Ottoman Empire: Niyazi-i Misri (1618-1694). Harvard University, dissertation, 1999.
Elias, Jamal J. “Commentary as Method vs Genre: An Analysis of Ismaʿil Haqqi Bursawi’s Commentaries on the Qur’an and the Maṡnawī-yi maʿnawī.” In From the Khan’s Oven, pp. 237-257. Brill, 2021.
Ismail Hakki Bursevi, The Kernel of the Kernel (Beshara Publications)
Omneya Ayad, Niyāzī Miṣrī on Poverty, Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society Vol. 69, 2021
Aydoğan Kars, “Niyazi-Yi Mısri on the Divine Names: Ottoman Theology and Sufism in the Light of the Arabic Commentary Tradition.” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 6, no. 1 (2019): 171–210
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Host: Oludamini Ogunnaike
Guests: Nurullah Koltaş and Victoria Holbrook
Edited By: Alana Bittner, WJTU