Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Kendü ḥüsnüñ ḫûblar şeklinde peydâ eyledüñ
Çeşm-i ʿâşıḳdan dönüp anı temâşâ eyledüñ

In English

1. (O God,) You made Your own beauty appear in the form of the beautiful; then You turned and gazed upon it through the lover's eye. (In the text of Mecdî and Hüsameddin the verbs are in the third person: "He made it appear … He gazed".)

Literary and Historical Commentary

This matla is among the most often repeated couplets of sixteenth-century Sufi poetry and expresses the idea of the unity of being (vahdet-i vücûd), the idea that being is in essence one, in the language of a love scene. According to the first line the beauty of the beautiful is the outward reflection of God's own beauty. The second line closes the circle: the lover's eye that looks at the beautiful one is also God's gaze, that is, He is both the one who shows beauty and the one who beholds it. Lover, beloved and love thus become two faces of a single being.

Latîfî explains the matla in exactly this way. He says that in the terminology of the masters the lover stands for the "mümkin", the being whose existence is not necessary, and the beloved for the "vâcib", the necessary being; he points to the idea that God is "the seer and the seen" and that man is held to be a perfect mirror of the divine self-disclosure; he also touches on the hadith that God created Adam in His own image. Then he adds Câmî's Persian couplet with the same meaning as "fitting to this place": the couplet which says that the essence, the manifest and the place of manifestation are one, while in the judgement of reason one seems apart from the other. The article in the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi writes that Bâyezîd Halîfe translated the matla from Câmî; Latîfî only sets the two couplets side by side and does not say it is a translation.

Two Texts

The matla has been transmitted in two forms. In Latîfî the verbs are in the second person ("eyledüñ") and the couplet becomes a prayer addressed directly to God. In Hüsameddin, who quotes it from Mecdî's translation of the Şakâyık, and in the TDV, the verbs are in the third person ("eyledi") and the couplet is a statement setting out a truth. In Hüsameddin the word order of the second line also differs: "anı dönüp". Latîfî's text, the oldest among the sources, is followed here. The sheikh's life and works are the subject of the article Bâyezîd Halîfe.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

Online sources