Description

Classical Turkish Literature is full of road and journey stories. In classical texts of Turkish literature, the journey is circular. This cyclicality is largely related to the perception of the universe by Sufism and this perception was inspired by Ptolemy’s theory. Turkish literature constructs the perception of the mystical universe through the wahdat al-wujud theory. According to Sufism, the soul is in state of homesickness. Sufi stories also tell the story of the return of the soul to the homeland (God). This is also the return of the individual to find himself. There is a saying attributed to the prophet of Islam: “To know yourself is to know Allah” (man ‘arafa nafsahu faqad ‘arafa rabbahu). This journey is also the journey of self-maturation. We can trace these themes in pre-Islamic Turkish literature going back to Uighur Buddhist texts and in the Islamic period examples inspired by Persian and Arabic literature: Turkish epics and Uighur Buddhist and Manichean texts (9th and 10th centuries), Iranian masnavis (especially ‘Attar in the 12th century and Jami‘ in the15th century), Arabic symbolic stories (Ibn Tufeyl’s Arabic philosophical novel and an allegorical Hayy bın Yaqzan, early 12th century) were sources of road stories in Turkish literature. This seminar will focus on the mystical lines of this journey with examples from Turkish literature from the 13th through the19th centuries.