Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Muṣḥaf-ı ḥüsnüñde oḳır dil görüp zülf ü ruḫuñ
Gâh Rabbü’l-maġribîn ü gâh Rabbü’l-maşrıḳîn

In English

1. The heart, seeing your locks and your cheek in the Qur'an of your beauty, recites now "Lord of the wests" and now "Lord of the easts".

Literary and Historical Commentary

The comparison on which the couplet rests is the "Mushaf-ı hüsn", the Qur'an of beauty, frequent in divan poetry. The beloved's face is read like a copy of the Qur'an; the brows, the beauty spot and the hair are its letters and lines. Cevherî ties this comparison to a verse of scripture. The seventeenth verse of the sura Rahmân names God "Lord of the two easts and Lord of the two wests". Reading the beloved's face, the heart, on seeing the black locks, recalls the place where the sun sets, the darkness, and says "Rabbü'l-mağribîn"; on seeing the bright cheek it recalls the place where the sun rises and says "Rabbü'l-maşrıkîn".

Night and day, dark and light, are the best-known pairing of locks and cheek. The poet turns this pairing into an act of reading: the face is a book, the heart one who reads it. The form of the phrase taken from scripture in the couplet is not identical with the plural and dual usage in the Qur'an; the poet alludes to the verse rather than quoting it. That a poet who was a madrasa professor carried the language of scripture into love poetry in this way must have been found both bold and skilful.

Among the manuscript variants Kılıç lists is the absence of the couplet from manuscript P. No other witness has it.

Bibliography

Online sources