A teacher who knew prosody and the poetic metres thoroughly, yet could not recite a poem properly: this is how Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar describes el-Hâc Mustafa Tevfik Efendi, known as Hacı Hâfız Efendi. According to his long entry he knew the Arabic, Persian and Turkish literatures and wrote commentaries on prosody; the same entry states plainly that he had no gift for poetry. The first of these facts brought him into the Literature section, and the second leaves his standing as a poet in dispute. He was born in the town of Köprü, today's Vezirköprü, and spent most of his life teaching in Amasya. He became mufti and deputy of Amasya, and later served in the Dârü'l-hikmeti'l-İslâmiyye in Istanbul and on the boards of the Ministry of Religious Law (Şer'iyye Vekâleti) and the Presidency of Religious Affairs in Ankara. He died in Amasya on 11 May 1931. Hüsameddin's text can be read from beginning to end on the page Hacı Hâfız Efendi-el-Hâc Mustafa Tevfîk Efendi.

Hüsameddin's Entry

The entry is one of the longest Hüsameddin wrote about a contemporary; at its end stands the list of works, in his own hand, that Hacı Hâfız Efendi sent to Hüsameddin two months before his death. The entry opens as follows:

Köprülüdür. Köprü kasabasından Semercioğlu Hüseyin bin Mehmed'in mahdûmudur. 1278'de doğdu. Köprü'de hıfz-ı Kur'ân edib bir müddet Hacı Mehmed Emin Efendi'den okudu. Ba'dehû Amasya'ya gelip Sultân Bâyezîd medresesinde ikâmet ve Harpûtî Alî Efendi'nin halka-i tedrîsine mülâzemet etdi. Bu esnâda fâzıl-ı meşhûr Mîr Hasan Efendi'nin dersinden iktisâb-ı fezâ'il ederek 1302'de mûmâ-ileyh Alî Efendi'den usûl-i ulemâ üzere tedrîse mücâz u me'zûn oldu.

In modern English: He was from Köprü, the son of Semercioğlu Hüseyin bin Mehmed of the town of Köprü. He was born in 1278. In Köprü he memorised the Qur'an and studied for a while with Hacı Mehmed Emin Efendi. Then he came to Amasya, lodged in the Sultan Bayezid Madrasa and attended the teaching circle of Ali Efendi of Harput. Meanwhile he also profited from the lessons of the famous scholar Mîr Hasan Efendi, and in 1302 he received from Ali Efendi a licence to teach according to the custom of the scholars.

The section describing his relation to literature comes where he is compared with his contemporary and rival Hâfız Kâmil Efendi:

Hacı Hâfız Efendi de elsine-i selâse edebiyâtına âlim olmakla beraber tabî'at-ı şi'riyyesi yoktu. Arûz ve evzân-ı şi're bi-hakkın vâkıf olduğu hâlde bir şi'ri dürüst okuyamazdı. Tevârih ve muhâzarâtı bilirdi. Fakat yerinde satamazdı.

In today's English: Hacı Hâfız Efendi too, though learned in the literature of the three languages, had no poetic gift. Although he knew prosody and the poetic metres thoroughly, he could not recite a poem properly. He knew histories and the lore of conversation, but could not use them in the right place.

Life

He was born in 1278 (1861-62). After receiving his licence in 1302 (1884-85) he went back to Köprü for a while, married the daughter of Tiryâkîzâde Hacı Ahmed Efendi, a land-registry clerk from Amasya, and began teaching in the Orta Mosque. According to Hüsameddin, when he did not find the interest he had hoped for in his home town he returned to Amasya and gave morning and afternoon lessons on the right wing of the Sultan Bayezid Mosque. In 1313 (1895-96) he gave licences to his first group of students.

Mehmed Kemal Bey, who came to Amasya as district governor in Recep 1314 (December 1896-January 1897), drew him and Hâfız Kâmil Efendi to his side. Cünûnzâde Hacı Mustafa Ağa built a madrasa for his students on a plot west of the Abdullah Pasha Mosque in the Sofular quarter; Hacı Hâfız Efendi moved to Sofular too, repaired a ruined schoolhouse and used it as lecture room and home. In these years he was given the preachership of the İbâdullah Mosque in Yukarı Pazar, the post of preacher at the Cami-i Atik in Merzifon and the professorship of the Abdullah Pasha Madrasa. In 1316 (1898-99) he became a member of the court of first instance. When Mehmed Kemal Bey left Amasya in Recep 1321 (September-October 1903) he withdrew from the court, licensed students for the second time and began teaching his third group.

When the Constitution was proclaimed in 1908, he joined the Committee of Union and Progress after Köprülü Fâzıl Mehmed Ârif Efendi, who was living in exile in Amasya, was elected deputy. In the election Hüsameddin dates to 1329 he became deputy for Amasya; when the chamber was dissolved a year later he returned to his lessons. In 1331 he became mufti of Amasya on the dismissal of Hâfız Kâmil Efendi. According to the site's article on Abdurrahman Kâmil Efendi, Kâmil Efendi was retired on grounds of age in September 1915; Hüsameddin seems to give the years in this part according to the Rumi calendar, but he does not state the calendar. Afterwards he went to Istanbul as a member of the Dârü'l-hikme opened in the office of the Şeyhülislam, with a salary of five thousand kuruş, and in 1338 he became director of İlâmât-ı Şer'iyye (court decrees).

After the War of Independence ended in victory he went to Ankara as a member of the Fatwa Board of the newly founded Ministry of Religious Law. When the ministry was abolished and the Presidency of Religious Affairs set up in its place, he became a member of its Consultative Board and his salary was raised to seven thousand five hundred kuruş. Although he should have been retired for passing the age of sixty-five, his post was extended by five years at the request of Mehmed Rifat Efendi, head of Religious Affairs. At the beginning of 1349 he was retired without a pension; his bladder illness had worsened. He died in Amasya on the evening of Monday, 23 Zilhicce 1349, that is, 11 May 1931.

Hâfız Kâmil Efendi and the "Sa'deyn"

What sets Hüsameddin's entry apart from an ordinary biography is the long comparison in which he places the two scholars side by side. Mecdîzâde Hâfız Abdurrahman Kâmil Efendi and Hacı Hâfız Efendi were the two teachers who gathered most of Amasya's students in their lessons, and in learned circles they were called the "Sa'deyn", the two Sa'ds: one was taken for Sa'deddin Teftâzânî, the other for Seyyid Şerif Cürcânî. Because District Governor Mehmed Kemal Bey, who walked with a slight limp and had been nicknamed "Timurleng", took the two of them everywhere, the three were called the "Triangle", and the saying went round that "Timur the Lame has joined Sa'd and Seyyid".

In the comparison Hüsameddin openly favours Kâmil Efendi. Kâmil Efendi is a clever, well-spoken teacher who could make the people weep and laugh in his sermons, and a poet; Hacı Hâfız Efendi is drawn as a man "halting in speech and expression", who struggled to convey what he understood and was somewhat slow-tempered. He says very few people listened to his sermons in the İbâdullah Mosque. On the other hand he never belittles his learning: he is so deep in jurisprudence, its principles and theology as to be counted "unique in his age", a pious man who did not miss the night prayer for fifty years, tall, thin and sharp-eyed. Nor does he hide the coolness between the two teachers, which he puts down to "envy". According to Hüsameddin, Kâmil Efendi's dismissal from the office of mufti, Hacı Hâfız Efendi's appointment in his place, and later the appointment as mufti of Kâmil Efendi's pupil Hâfız Mehmed Tevfik Efendi were the work of Hacı Hâfız Efendi's influence. It should also be kept in mind that Hüsameddin was not a neutral witness when he wrote these lines: he regards Kâmil Efendi with open admiration.

Works

The list given to Hüsameddin by Hacı Hâfız Efendi's son, the pharmacist Abdullah Ekrem Efendi, and written in his father's hand, contains seventeen finished works. Among them, those directly related to literature are the commentaries on prosody:

  • Hakâyıku'l-Beyân Şerhi
  • A commentary on Ali Kuşçu's commentary on the Vaz'iyye
  • On prosody, Endülüsiyye Şerhi
  • A gloss on the commentary on Birgivî's treatise on the principles of hadith
  • On disputation, Takrîr-i Kavânîn Şerhi
  • A commentary on Hayâlî's gloss on the Şerh-i Akâid
  • An abridgement of Gelenbevî's gloss on Celâl
  • On the principles of jurisprudence, Mecâmi' Şerhi
  • Şerhu't-Târîhi'l-Mektûb fî Evâhiri'l-Kütüb
  • Tevşîhu's-Sîmâ fî Tavzîh-i Lâ-siyyemâ
  • Risâletü'l-Besmele fi'l-Mantık
  • Şerhü'l-Lugaz alâ İsmi Tîmârhâne
  • Şerhü'l-Lugaz fî Kelimeti't-Tevhîd
  • er-Resâil fî Ba'zi'l-Mesâil
  • Commentaries on the suras al-Duha, al-Inshirah and al-Asr

The second part of the list contains twenty-two marginal notes written in the margins of books and not yet collected. The last of these are notes on the commentary Kayserî wrote on the poem of the Andalusian prosodist. Hüsameddin considers the Mecâmi' Şerhi, over thirty printer's sheets long, the most valuable of these works, and notes that Şeyhülislam Mustafa Sabri Efendi of Tokat, while belittling this commentary at the Dârü'l-hikme, had to consult Hacı Hâfız Efendi on certain questions. The two lugaz commentaries also deserve attention: a lugaz is a verse riddle that makes the reader find a word by playing with its letters, and these are explanations written on a genre of divan literature.

Poetry

If Hüsameddin is to be believed, Hacı Hâfız Efendi never wrote poetry, and no poem of his is in our hands. As a scholar who knew prosody and the metres and wrote two commentaries on prosody and two on riddles, he had mastered the technique of verse, but he lacked "tabî'at-ı şi'riyye", the gift of composing poetry; it is even said that he could not recite a poem correctly. The judgement comes from a writer who describes him in contrast to Kâmil Efendi and keeps his distance from him; yet no verse by Hacı Hâfız Efendi could be found in any other source either. Whether he himself wrote the verses explained in his riddle commentaries is also unknown.

State of the Sources

Hacı Hâfız Efendi entered the master list of poets through an automatic scan of Hüsameddin's volumes; the word "poet" occurs in his entry, but it is used of Hâfız Kâmil Efendi. The expression used of him says the opposite. It is therefore more accurate to know him as a scholar with a deep knowledge of prosody and literature who did not compose poetry.

A second confusion concerns the name. The mufti who welcomed Mustafa Kemal Pasha in Amasya in 1919, was the first member of the Amasya Society for the Defence of Rights and died in November 1921 is also referred to as "Hacı Hâfız Tevfik Efendi". According to the site's article on Abdurrahman Kâmil Efendi, this was Hacı Mehmed Tevfik Efendi, born in Amasya in 1868, who became mufti in 1918 after Hacı Hâfız Mustafa Tevfik Efendi was appointed to the Dârü'l-hikme. He is also the one Hüsameddin calls "Hâfız Mehmed Tevfik Efendi, pupil of Hâfız Kâmil Efendi". Because the two muftis' names, titles and years of office are so close, they are easily confused. The mufti of the 1919 events was not Mustafa Tevfik Efendi of Köprü.

Chronology

1278 (1861-62): Born in Köprü.

1302 (1884-85): Receives his licence from Ali Efendi of Harput.

1313 (1895-96): Licenses his first group of students.

1316 (1898-99): Member of the Amasya court of first instance.

1321 (1903): Withdraws from the court when District Governor Mehmed Kemal Bey leaves.

1331: Becomes mufti of Amasya.

1338: Director of İlâmât-ı Şer'iyye in Istanbul.

11 May 1931: Dies in Amasya.

Bibliography

Online sources