Ali b. Hüseyin el-Amâsî, also called Alâeddin Çelebi in the sources, was a teacher and writer who lived in the middle of the fifteenth century. His name lives on through a single book: Tarîku'l-Edeb, written in Turkish prose in 1453, the year Istanbul was conquered, which brings together child rearing, the mutual duties of teacher and pupil, rules of conduct and the basic religious knowledge every Muslim should have, and is one of the early and rare sources of Ottoman educational history. The sources attribute a few further works to him, but the authorship of some of these is disputed. His life and the educational views in his book are told in detail in Alâeddin Ali al-Amâsî: The Tarîku'l-Edeb and the Upbringing of Children.

Life

His dates of birth and death are unknown. In the prefaces of his works he records his own name and nisba as Ali b. Hüseyin el-Amâsî; the nisba shows that he was from Amasya. Since he says that he wrote Tarîku'l-Edeb in his old age, he is counted among the authors of the reigns of Murad II and Mehmed the Conqueror. His account that a child was brought to him to be educated, given as the occasion for writing the book, shows that he was a teacher by profession; the sources he relies on and the passages he quotes suggest a good training in Arabic and Persian and a grounding in the Islamic sciences. Bursalı Mehmed Tâhir names him as the tutor of Hızır Bey, son of Yörgüç Pasha, who became sanjak governor of Amasya in 1423. The date of death of 875 (1470-71) given by Nihad Sami Banarlı is treated with caution by scholars.

Works

Tarîku'l-Edeb (Tâcü'l-Edeb)

Tarîku'l-Edeb ("The Path of Good Conduct") is a book of morals, upbringing and manners in Turkish prose. It opens with praise of God and blessings on the Prophet, is divided after a preface into twenty-seven chapters whose Arabic headings are accompanied by Turkish equivalents, and ends with an epilogue. In the epilogue the author records plainly the year in which the book was completed:

Elḥamdülillāhi ‘alā itmāmihī ve’ş-şükrü ‘alā in‘āmihī bu kitāb düzildi ve yazıldı hicretüñ sekiz yüz elli yidinci yılında feth-i Ḳosṭanṭīn tārīḫinde Ḥaḳ Te‘ālā ‘ināyeti ve fażlı keremi birle; ve’s-selām.
Tārīḫ-i fetḥ-i Ḳosṭanṭīn:
Fetḥ-i Ḳosṭanṭīne furṣat bulmadılar evvelūn
Fetḥ idüp Sulṭān Muḥammed yazdı tārīḫ āḫirūn

In English: "Praise be to God for its completion and thanks for His grace; this book was composed and written in the eight hundred and fifty-seventh year of the Hijra, at the date of the conquest of Constantinople, by the help, favour and generosity of God Most High. Farewell. A chronogram on the conquest of Constantinople: Those before found no chance to conquer Constantinople; Sultan Mehmed conquered it and wrote its date for those who come after." The date of composition is thus fixed at 857 (1453). The authorship of the couplet on the conquest is disputed; the author does not present it as his own verse but quotes it as a record of the date.

The book's subjects are wide-ranging: the rights of parents and upbringing within the family, sending a child to school and choosing a teacher, the qualities and method of the teacher, respect for and service to the master, the virtue of learning to write and of knowledge, the etiquette of greeting, speaking, eating, walking and sitting, ablution, the call to prayer, entering the mosque, Friday and funeral prayers, the etiquette of the bathhouse, wise sayings and the temperaments of peoples. As stated in the preface, its main foundation is the Qur'an, from which twelve verses are quoted. These are followed by eighty-one hadiths, twelve sayings of Ali, and one saying each of Husayn and Imam Shafi'i. Alongside them are Persian verses, mostly from Sa'di's Gulistan, occasional Arabic and Turkish poems, and passages taken without acknowledgement from the legal works Muhît and Hulâsa. The author keeps his language simple, with the children who would read the book and the teachers who would instruct them in mind; the prefaces, by contrast, are in an ornate rhymed prose.

The work circulates under two titles and with two different prefaces. The author first wrote it as Tarîku'l-Edeb, in answer to an unjust reproach from the parent of a child brought to him. In manuscript no. 2476 of the Yazma Bağışlar collection of the Süleymaniye Library, however, the text bears the title Tâcü'l-Edeb and the occasion is told differently: this time a distinguished father who loved scholars entrusted his son to the author, and the author dedicated his book to this child. Kâtip Çelebi records the work under this second title. Mehmet Şeker and Ahmet Naim Çiçekler, who published the work in 2023, think that the author found no patron to whom he could present the first text and therefore altered it slightly and dedicated it under a new title to a family; they also suggest that the father who brought the child may have been Tâceddin İbrâhim Pasha, known in Amasya as Tâcî Bey. Both views are the scholars' conjectures.

The manuscripts of the work are spread over a wide area. The oldest known copy is no. 2575 in the Malek Library in Tehran, completed on the last Sunday of Ramadan 870 (May 1466); because it was written thirteen years after the date of composition it was taken as the base text of the 2023 edition. In Turkey, the Süleymaniye Library copies Laleli 1876 (dated 904/1499), Kasîdecizâde 325 and Reşid Efendi 984/9, and Nuruosmaniye 3908, descend from the same branch; Istanbul University Turkish Manuscripts no. 5720 contains additional poems not found in the others. Three copies registered as Tac-ı Edeb have also been identified in the manuscript institute in Baku. The first study of the work was Mehmet Sarı's text and index of 1978. The text was published in 2002 by Mehmet Şeker by the Presidency of Religious Affairs, in 2010 by Halil Çeçen as a text and glossary based on the Laleli copy, and in 2023 by Şeker and Çiçekler, on the basis of the Tehran copy, in the Turkish-Islamic Scientific and Cultural Heritage series of the Turkish Academy of Sciences.

Risâletün mine'l-Arûz ve Istılâhât-ı Şi'r

This is a Turkish treatise explaining poetic terms, verse forms, the riddle (muamma), literary figures and the metres of aruz in a preface and four sections. Its language bears the features of late Old Anatolian Turkish. In the Süleymaniye Library Nafiz Paşa copy published by Menderes Coşkun the author's name appears as Ali bin Hüseyin Hüsâmeddin el-Amâsî, while Istanbul University Turkish Manuscripts no. 3223 gives only Ali bin Hüseyin el-Amâsî. Şeker and Çiçekler count the treatise among the works of the author of Tarîku'l-Edeb. Since Bursalı Mehmed Tâhir, however, the view has also been expressed that the treatise belongs to another man of Amasya of the same name who lived in the seventeenth century. As this distinction has not been settled, the treatise is listed here as a work of disputed authorship.

Nasâyihu'l-Müslimîn

This work is attributed to Ali b. Hüseyin el-Amâsî in the sources as "a poem named Nasâyihu'l-Müslimîn". Its title indicates a book of counsel in verse addressed to Muslims. No information could be found on whether a copy of it survives.

Commentary on Sura Yâsîn

This is a Turkish commentary on the sura Yâsîn attributed to the author in the sources. For this work too, no information on manuscripts was found in the sources consulted. The author's approach to Qur'anic commentary was the subject of a paper by Naim Döner at the International Symposium on the Scholars of Amasya held in Amasya in 2017.

Amasya in His Works

Tarîku'l-Edeb carries its author's link with Amasya only in his name. In the index of the 2023 edition the name Amasya appears only on pages of the introduction; the text itself does not mention the city. The author introduces himself in both prefaces with the same formula:

Emmā ba‘d; Bu dürer-i ‘acībüñ nāḳili ve ġurer-i ġarībüñ ḳāyili ‘Aliyyi’bni Ḥüseyni’l-Amāsī –ṣānehullāhu ani’l-ḳalbi’l-ḳāsiyyi- şöyle beyān ve ‘ayān ider ki bu risāle-i edeb ve vesīle-i men ṭaleb te’līf olınup terkībi ṣūret-i tertīb bulup ḳaleme geldigine sebep oldur ki...

In English: "And now: Ali, son of Hüseyin, of Amasya, the transmitter of these wondrous pearls and the speaker of these rare bright sayings, may God protect him from hardness of heart, explains and makes clear that the reason why this treatise on good conduct, a means for whoever seeks it, came to be composed, arranged and set down in writing is this..." Beyond this nisba, the book's relation to Amasya can be traced only indirectly. If Bursalı's record is correct, the author was tutor to Yörgüç Pasha's son in the years when the pasha was sanjak governor of Amasya. If the conjecture that the father to whom Tâcü'l-Edeb was dedicated was Tâcî Bey is correct, the book took its new title in the circle of this famous Amasya family of Şirvânî descent, the household that raised the poet Câfer Çelebi and Sâdî Çelebi. Neither connection is confirmed by documents, but both suggest that the book came out of the learned circles of fifteenth-century Amasya.

Influence and Assessment in the Sources

That the work was read over the centuries is shown by its dated copies, ranging from 1466 to 1768, and by the fact that one copy names it in its title panel with a third title, Vesîletü'l-Edeb. It entered Ottoman bibliography under the title Tâcü'l-Edeb through Kâtip Çelebi's Keşfü'z-Zunûn, and Bursalı Mehmed Tâhir recorded the author and his works in Osmanlı Müellifleri.

From the second half of the twentieth century the work has been studied from three different angles. Educationists have read it as one of the early sources of Turkish educational history, and Yahya Akyüz compared its views with modern educational thought at the First Symposium of Amasya Studies held in Amasya in 2007. Linguists have treated the text as a specimen of fifteenth-century Turkish; Halil Çeçen catalogued its idioms one by one, and İnci Kasımlı drew attention to the archaic words in the Baku copies. Theologians have studied the hadiths in the work and traced their sources. The common conclusion of these studies is that the book is valuable at once as a treatise on education, as a book of manners and as a monument of the language. In his epilogue the author asks those who read and benefit from his book to remember "the owner of this keepsake" with a prayer; and the name of the teacher from Amasya does indeed live on today through this book alone.

Bibliography

Academic studies

  • Menderes Coşkun, "Edebî Terimler ve Aruzla İlgili bir Eser: Ali b. Hüseyin Hüsâmeddin Amasî'nin Risâletün Mine'l-'Arûz ve Istılâhı'ş-şi'r'i", Türk Kültürü İncelemeleri Dergisi, 8, İstanbul.
  • Yahya Akyüz, "Amasyalı Hüseyinoğlu Ali'nin 'Tarîku'l-Edep' Başlıklı Eseri (1453) ve Çağdaş Eğitim Açısından Değerlendirilmesi", I. Amasya Araştırmaları Sempozyumu Bildirileri, Amasya 2007, vol. II, pp. 1099-1125.
  • Naim Döner, "Ali b. Hüseyin el-Amâsî ve Tefsir Anlayışı", Uluslararası Amasya Âlimleri Sempozyumu Bildiriler Kitabı, Amasya 2017, vol. I, pp. 249-264.
  • Halil Çeçen, "Ali bin Hüseyin el-Amâsî'nin Tarikü'l-Edeb'inde Deyimler", Journal of Turkish Language and Literature, 2(1), 2016, pp. 93-102.
  • İnci Kasımlı, "Tac-ı Edeb Adlı Eserin Bakü Nüshaları", Atatürk Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi, 2016.

Official sources

  • Mehmet Şeker, Ahmet Naim Çiçekler (eds.), Osmanlı Eğitim-Öğretim Tarihinin Kaynaklarından Tarîku'l-Edeb, Ali b. Hüseyin el-Amâsî, Ankara: Türkiye Bilimler Akademisi, 2023, introduction pp. 37-66; text fols. 2a-2b, 95b-96a. https://www.tuba.gov.tr/files/yayinlar/tibkm-serisi/TUBA-978-625-8352-80-1.pdf
  • Mehmet Şeker (ed.), Alî bin Hüseyin el-Amasî ve Tarîku'l-Edeb'i, Ankara: Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı Yayınları, 2002.

Books

  • Halil Çeçen (ed.), Alî bin Hüseyin el-Amasî, Tarîku'l-Edeb, Metin-Sözlük, Ankara: Bizim Büro Yayınları, 2010.
  • Bursalı Mehmed Tâhir, Osmanlı Müellifleri, ed. M. A. Yekta Saraç, Ankara: Türkiye Bilimler Akademisi, 2016, vol. I, pp. 373-374.

Online sources