Life

Fuzûlî is generally believed to have been born around 1483 in the city of Karbala, in what is now Iraq. His family was a part of the Bayat tribe, one of the Turkic Oghuz tribes who were related to the Ottoman Kayı clan and were scattered throughout the Middle East, Anatolia, and the Caucasus at the time. Though Fuzûlî's ancestors had been of nomadic origin, the family had long since settled in towns.

Fuzûlî appears to have received a good education, first under his father—who was a mufti in the city of Al Hillah—and then under a teacher named RahmetullahŞentürk 281. It was during this time that he learned the Persian and Arabic languages in addition to his native Azerbaijani. Fuzûlî showed poetic promise early in life, composing sometime around his twentieth year the important mesnevî entitled Beng ü Bâde (بنگ و باده; "Opium and Wine"), in which he compared the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II to opium and the Safavid shah Ismail I to wine, much to the advantage of the latter.

One of the few things that is known of Fuzûlî's life during this time is how he arrived at his pen name. In the introduction to his collected Persian poems, he says: "In the early days when I was just beginning to write poetry, every few days I would set my heart on a particular pen name and then after a time change it for another because someone showed up who shared the same name"Quoted in Andrews, 236.. Eventually, he decided upon the Arabic word fuzûlî—which literally means "impertinent, improper, unnecessary"—because he "knew that this title would not be acceptable to anyone else"Ibid.. Despite the name's pejorative meaning, however, it contains a double meaning—what is called tevriyye (توريه) in Ottoman Divan poetry—as Fuzûlî himself explains: "I was possessed of all the arts and sciences and found a pen name that also implies this sense since in the dictionary fuzûl (ﻓﻀﻮل) is given as a plural of fazl (ﻓﻀﻞ; 'learning') and has the same rhythm as ‘ulûm (ﻋﻠﻮم; 'sciences') and fünûn (ﻓﻨﻮن; 'arts')"Ibid..

In 1534, the Ottoman sultan Süleymân I conquered the region of Baghdad, where Fuzûlî lived, from the Safavid Empire. Fuzûlî now had the chance to become a court poet under the Ottoman patronage system, and he composed a number of kasîdes, or panegyric poems, in praise of the sultan and members of his retinue, and as a result, he was granted a stipend. However, owing to the complexities of the Ottoman bureaucracy, this stipend never materialized. In one of his best-known works, the letter Şikâyetnâme (شکايت نامه; "Complaint"), Fuzûlî spoke out against such bureaucracy and its attendant corruption:

سلام وردم رشوت دگلدر ديو آلمادىلر

Selâm verdim rüşvet değildir deyü almadılar.Kudret 189

I greeted them by Salam, but they didn't accept it since it wasn't a bribe.

Though his poetry flourished during his time among the Ottomans, the loss of his stipend meant that, materially speaking, Fuzûlî never became secure. In fact, most of his life was spent attending upon the Shi`ite Tomb of `Alî in the city of Najaf, south of BaghdadAndrews 237. He died during a plague outbreak in 1556, in his hometown of Karbala, either of the plague itself or of cholera.

Works

Fuzûlî has always been known, first and foremost, as a poet of love. It was, in fact, a characterization that he seems to have agreed with:

مندن فضولی ايستمه اشعار مدح و ذم

من عاشقام هميشه سوزم عاشقانه در

Menden Fuzûlî isteme eş'âr-ı medh ü zem

Men âşıkam hemîşe sözüm âşıkânedürTarlan 47

Don't ask Fuzûlî for poems of praise or rebuke

I am a lover and speak only of love

Fuzûlî's notion of love, however, has more in common with the Sufi idea of love as a projection of the essence of God—though Fuzûlî himself seems to have belonged to no particular Sufi order—than it does with the Western idea of romantic love. This can be seen in the following lines from another poem:

عاشق ايمش هر ن وار ﻋﺎﻝﻢ

ﻋلم بر قيل و قال ايمش آنجق

‘Aşk imiş her ne var ‘âlem

‘İlm bir kîl ü kâl imiş ancakKudret 20

All that is in the world is love

And knowledge is nothing but gossip

The first of these lines, especially, relates to the idea of wahdat al-wujūd (وحدة الوجود), or "unity of being", which was first formulated by Ibn al-‘Arabī and which states that nothing apart from various manifestations of God exists. Here, Fuzûlî uses the word "love" (عاشق ‘aşk) rather than God in the formula, but the effect is the same.

In Fuzûlî's œuvre, his most extended treatment of this idea of love is in the long poem Dâstân-ı Leylî vü Mecnun (داستان ليلى و مجنون), a mesnevî which takes as its subject the classical Middle Eastern love story of Layla and Majnun. In his version of the story, Fuzûlî concentrates upon the pain of the mad lover Majnun's separation from his beloved Layla, and comes to see this pain as being of the essence of love:

یا رب بلا عاشق ايله قيل آشنا منى

بر دم بلا عاشقدن ايتمه جدا منى

آز ايلمه عنایتونى اهل دردن

يعنى كه چوح بلالره قيل مبتلا منى

Yâ Rab belâ-yı ‘aşk ile kıl âşinâ meni

Bir dem belâ-yı ‘aşkdan etme cüdâ meni

Az eyleme ‘inâyetüni ehl-i derdden

Ya‘ni ki çoh belâlara kıl mübtelâ meniLeylâ ve Mecnun 216

Oh God, let me know the pain of love

Do not for even a moment separate me from it

Do not lessen your aid to the afflicted

But rather, make lovesick me one among them

The ultimate value of the suffering of love, in Fuzûlî's work, lies in that it helps one to approach closer to "the Real" (al-Haqq الحق), which is one of the 99 names of God in Islamic tradition.

Selected bibliography

Works in Azerbaijani

• Dîvân ("Collected Poems")
• Beng ü Bâde (بنگ و باده; "Opium and Wine")
• Hadîkat üs-Süedâ (حديقهت السعداء; "Garden of Pleasures")
• Dâstân-ı Leylî vü Mecnûn (داستان ليلى و مجنون; "The Epic of Layla and Majnun")
• Risâle-i Muammeyât (رسال ﻤﻌﻤيات; "Treatise on Riddles")
• Şikâyetnâme (شکايت نامه; "Complaint")

Works in Persian

• Dîvân ("Collected Poems")
• Enîs ül-Kalb (اﻥﻴﺲ الﻗﻠﺐ; "Friend of the Heart")
• Heft Jâm (هﻔﺖ جام; "Seven Goblets")
• Rind ü Zâhid (رند و زاهد; "Hedonist and Ascetic")
• Risâle-i Muammeyât (رسال ﻤﻌﻤيات; "Treatise on Riddles")
• Sıhhat ü Maraz (ﺹحت و ﻡﻌﺮوض; "Health and Sickness")

Works in Arabic

• Dîvân ("Collected Poems")
• Matla ül-İ'tikâd (ﻡﻄﻠﻊ الاﻋﺘﻘﺎد; "The Birth of Faith")

References

Notes

External links

• Muhammed Fuzuli—a website with a brief biography and translated selections from Leylî vü Mecnûn

Turkish poets | Azerbaijani poets | Turkish literature

Fûzulî | Fuzuli | Fuzuli