Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: mefâîlün mefâîlün mefâîlün mefâîlün (not stated in the source; we identified the metre)

Bugün da'va-yı fazl eyler iken bir zâde-i hindî
Görünce kâmili erneb gibi bir kûşeye sindi

In English

1. Today a Hindîzâde, a "son of an Indian", while laying claim to learning and virtue, saw a man of perfect learning, saw Kâmil, and shrank into a corner like a hare.

Literary and Historical Commentary

A Scene in the Courtyard

A moment's scene in the courtyard of the Sultan Bayezid Mosque is both the subject of the couplet and the occasion for it: the witticism was improvised on the spot, and there is no trace showing that it was part of a ghazal. Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar records the event in the twelfth volume of Amasya Tarihi while describing Hindîzâde Abdülmecîd Zühdî Efendi: one day Zühdî is sitting in front of the timekeeper's room (muvakkithane) in the mosque courtyard, boasting to those beside him of his learning and virtue. At that moment Mecdîzâde Hâfız Kâmil Efendi, "one of the celebrated scholars and poets", comes and sits beside him, and Zühdî falls silent. In Hüsameddin's words "Hazret şu beyti irticâlen söyler", that is, the couplet was spoken on the spot, unprepared. Since Zühdî died in 1314 (1896-97), the event took place before that date; in those years Kâmil Efendi was a professor at the Bekir Paşa Madrasa and pulpit sheikh (kürsü şeyhi) of the Sultan Bayezid Mosque.

A Play on Two Names

The couplet uses two proper names as if they were common nouns and draws all its flavour from this. The phrase "zâde-i hindî" literally means "a son of an Indian", but it plainly points to Zühdî's family name, Hindîzâde. "Kâmil", in turn, means a mature person whose learning is complete; it is also the speaker's name. The "da'va-yı fazl", the claim to virtue, of the first line sets up a contrast with the word "kâmil" in the second: one who parades his virtue falls silent before a true kâmil. Because the word's general meaning and its meaning as a person's name work together, this way of speaking is double entendre (tevriye). "Erneb" is Arabic for hare; the hare is the emblem of timidity, and together with the idiom "to shrink into a corner" it turns Zühdî's silence into a comic flight.

Hüsameddin's view of Zühdî fits this jest. At the end of the entry he writes that after many requests he saw Zühdî's sizeable divan in the hands of his son, went through it from beginning to end and found not a single couplet worth putting in his book. Thus the only couplet Hüsameddin includes in the entry on Zühdî did not come from Zühdî himself but from the mouth of the man who mocked him.

Attribution

That the speaker of the couplet was Kâmil Efendi follows from the place of the word "Hazret" in the sentence: Zühdî has fallen silent, and the word passes to the newcomer, who is spoken of with respect. The couplet's play on the word "kâmil" also suits it to the mouth of someone named Kâmil. Even so, Hüsameddin does not give Kâmil Efendi's first name. It is very likely that he is the mufti of Amasya known as a hâfız and poet of the Mecdîzâde family, whom Hüsameddin elsewhere calls "Mecdîzâde Hâfız Abdurrahman Kâmil Efendi"; still, the identification is not made explicitly in the source. The couplet is not found in the Divançe published by Avni Erdemir; it may be one of Kâmil Efendi's lost poems, or simply a saying that passed from mouth to mouth. Zühdî's side of the story is in the page on Zühdî Abdülmecîd Efendi; Kâmil Efendi's poetry and his other poems are in the article Abdurrahman Kâmil Efendi: Poet and Works.

Bibliography

Online sources