Quatrains presented to readers as the rediscovered verses of a woman poet of old circulated from hand to hand for a while, were learned by heart and argued over; in the end their author turned out to be a male historian born in Merzifon, İsmail Hâmi Danişmend. The affair set off by the name Râbia Hatun is one of the most talked-about literary episodes of the Republican period. Today Danişmend is known mainly as the author of İzahlı Osmanlı Tarihi Kronolojisi (Annotated Chronology of Ottoman History). He wrote his poems sometimes under his own name and sometimes under the pen names (mahlas) Muhtî and Râbia Hatun. Because he died in 1967, the texts are still protected and have been left off this page.

His Life

Danişmend was born in Merzifon. His year of birth is given as 1889 in the TDV Encyclopedia of Islam, in the Dictionary of Names in Turkish Literature (TEİS) and in a master's thesis on his life; a newspaper article introducing Beşir Ayvazoğlu's biography of him gives 1892. His father was Emîr Mehmed Kâmil Bey, governor (mutasarrıf) of Cebeligarbî, and his mother Melek Hanım came from a Circassian family. The family traced its descent to Danişmend Gazi, founder of the Danishmendid principality, and the surname he later took comes from this. Because of his father's postings and exiles, he spent his childhood in Lebanon, Tripoli in Libya and Damascus. He was taught by private tutors, finished the Damascus İdâdî (secondary school) and went to Istanbul, where he entered the Mekteb-i Mülkiyye, the school of civil administration. He graduated in July 1912.

He entered literature during his Mülkiye years with poems published in the journals Kanat and Düşünüyorum, and he also took part in running Kanat, which lasted only three weeks. In France he enrolled at the Collège de France but left his studies unfinished and returned. In September 1912 he became a clerk at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; his temperament did not suit official life and he soon left. In December 1912 he was appointed to teach modern history at the Maliye Mekteb-i Âlîsi (School of Finance), and in December 1913 he became assistant professor of the history of religions in the Faculty of Letters of the Dârülfünun. On 30 November 1914 he was sent to Baghdad as director of the law school there, and he stayed until the city fell.

During the Armistice years he turned back to journalism. He wrote for Minber, the paper Mustafa Kemal had launched, and when it closed he founded the newspaper Memleket, serving as its chief editorialist between 10 February and 14 August 1919. Because of its articles defending full independence and opposing the Armistice, the paper was shut down under pressure from the Allied Powers; when the government moved to arrest him, he crossed into Anatolia. He attended the Sivas Congress, which opened on 4 September 1919, as a delegate from Istanbul, was elected secretary of its presiding council and became the first chief editorialist of the newspaper İrâde-i Milliye. His being among those who submitted the motion in favour of an American mandate at the congress, however, provoked a strong reaction. The abstract of a master's thesis states that he was tried before the Ankara Independence Tribunal on a charge of "treason" and acquitted; since the date the abstract gives for this trial, 1955, does not fit the years in which the Independence Tribunals sat, no date is given here.

After the Turkish War of Independence he took no official post and withdrew into historical research. He took on the post of chief writer for Türklük, a journal that began publication in 1939. The early death of his first wife Nâzan Hanım, herself a poet and a woman of culture, shook him deeply; his last wife, İclâl Hanım, was also a historian. In 1950 he became president of the Istanbul Conquest Society (Fetih Cemiyeti) and worked with figures such as Ali Fuat Başgil and Süheyl Ünver on preparations for the five-hundredth anniversary of the conquest. On Saturdays poets and writers gathered for conversation at his house. He died in Istanbul on 12 April 1967 and was buried in Zincirlikuyu Cemetery.

Merzifon appears in Danişmend's life as his birthplace, and on this point all the sources agree. His childhood was spent in his father's postings, his adult years in Istanbul, Baghdad and other cities of Anatolia. Whether he kept up any tie with the town of his birth later on, the sources at hand do not say. His tracing of his descent to Danişmend Gazi, who first brought Amasya under Turkish rule, and his writing in 1945 of Türk Tarih Kurumuna Açık Mektup (Open Letter to the Turkish Historical Society) against Mükrimin Halil Yinanç's views presenting that ruler as of Armenian origin, show that he regarded the early Turkish history of Amasya with a personal interest.

His Poetry

Copyright note: Danişmend died on 12 April 1967. The 70 years that follow his death run out at the end of 2037; until then his poems remain protected works, and we cannot give each of them a page. Once the term is over, the poems signed Muhtî and Râbia Hatun will have pages of their own as well.

Cevdet Küçük, author of his entry in the TDV Encyclopedia of Islam, counts poetry among his strengths. A romantic feeling of love dominates his poems; the Râbia Hatun quatrains are written in a diction close to Azerbaijani Turkish that gives an impression of age. His youthful poems remained in the journals of his Mülkiye years, while his later poems circulated unpublished for a long time. According to Gürhan Çopur, who wrote on Danişmend for the TEİS dictionary, his poetry stayed in the shadow of his scholarly work.

The Râbia Hatun Affair

When the quatrains began to appear in the magazine Aile, the magazine introduced them as the work of a woman poet hidden for centuries. TEİS quotes the magazine's presentation: "From this issue we begin to publish 16 poems, never before printed anywhere, by Rabia Hatun, who is rising like a star in our world of poetry." The sources differ on the year the series began: the TDV Encyclopedia of Islam gives the spring of 1947, TEİS gives 1948.

From June 1948 Nihad Sâmi Banarlı took up the matter in his articles in the newspaper Hürriyet, arguing that in language and style these poems were not old and that literary history knew no woman poet of that name. One of his pieces was titled "Rabia Hatun Efsanesi" (The Legend of Rabia Hatun). Şevket Rado answered him, and İsmail Habip, Semih Mümtaz, Bedii Faik, Abdülkadir Karahan and Halit Fahri Ozansoy joined the debate as well. In the press, opposing views were put forward on who Râbia Hatun was, in which period she had lived and how old her language was. At one point the pen name was said to belong to Danişmend's wife Nâzan Hanım. The matter was settled when the poems, fifty-one quatrains in all, were collected with a statement by Danişmend in a booklet titled Rabia Hatun Şiirleri (Istanbul 1961), which established that they came from his pen.

Mehmet Kaplan mentions the affair as one of the notable events of Republican poetry: "the fame, the affection and the word-of-mouth spread of the quatrains that the historian İsmail Hâmi Danişmend wrote under the pseudonym Rabia Hatun, once they were attributed to a woman poet of that name who had lived in earlier times." The subject held the interest of later generations too. In 1991 İsa Kocakaplan discussed the affair in an article titled "Edebiyatımızda Râbia Hatun Skandalı" (The Râbia Hatun Scandal in Our Literature), and Beşir Ayvazoğlu made Danişmend's poetic side and the controversy the subject of a biography.

We have not seen the statement Danişmend placed in the booklet, so we do not know in his own words why he attributed the poems to an invented poet of the past. A newspaper article introducing Ayvazoğlu's book reports that Ayvazoğlu describes him as "a character who loved to surprise and was fond of fantasy". According to the same article, the second part of the book tells of Danişmend's marriages and of his devotion to his wife Nâzan Hanım, who died young; Ayvazoğlu himself says of the book, "I think what I have told in this book is a great love story."

His Works

Danişmend left more than thirty works, most of them on history. The chief one is İzahlı Osmanlı Tarihi Kronolojisi, published in four volumes between 1947 and 1955; the author records that he completed it in eight years, eight months and eight days. Although the chronology runs to 1924, its silence on the Ankara government and on Mustafa Kemal Pasha caused a controversy in the press in 1955. In the second edition the tables of statesmen were gathered in a fifth volume titled Osmanlı Devlet Erkânı. His other works include Ali Suavi'nin Türkçülüğü (1942), Türk Tarih Kurumuna Açık Mektup (1945), Fâtih'in Hayatı ve Fetih Takvimi (1953), Türkler ve Müslümanlık (1959), İzahlı İslâm Tarihi Kronolojisi (1960), the series whose titles begin "Garb Menba'larına Göre" (According to Western Sources) and 31 Mart Vak'ası (1961). In the 1930s he prepared dictionaries together with Reşat Nuri, Ali Süha and Nurullah Ataç, and he translated Corneille's Le Cid and Nicomède and Molière's The Miser and The Imaginary Invalid. His only book of poetry is Rabia Hatun Şiirleri (Babıali Yayınevi, Istanbul 1961).

Chronology

1889: According to the TDV Encyclopedia of Islam and TEİS, born in Merzifon (1892 in a newspaper article).

1912: Graduates from the Mekteb-i Mülkiyye in July; begins teaching at the Maliye Mekteb-i Âlîsi in December.

1914: Appointed director of the Baghdad law school on 30 November.

1919: Publishes the newspaper Memleket between 10 February and 14 August; attends the Sivas Congress, opened on 4 September, as a delegate from Istanbul.

1939: Becomes chief writer of Türklük, a journal that begins publication on 1 April.

1947-1948: Quatrains signed Râbia Hatun begin to appear in the magazine Aile; from June 1948 the debate grows with Banarlı's articles.

1947-1955: The four volumes of İzahlı Osmanlı Tarihi Kronolojisi are published.

1961: The booklet Rabia Hatun Şiirleri is printed in Istanbul.

1967: Dies in Istanbul on 12 April and is buried in Zincirlikuyu Cemetery.

Bibliography

Academic studies

Books

  • Gürhan Çopur, "İsmail Hami Danişmend", Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü, 01.02.2019 (updated 19.12.2020). https://teis.yesevi.edu.tr/madde-detay/danismend-ismail-hami
  • Mehmet Kaplan, Şiir Tahlilleri 2: Cumhuriyet Devri Türk Şiiri, Istanbul: Dergâh Yayınları, 2009, p. 346 (as cited by Çopur).
  • İsa Kocakaplan, "Edebiyatımızda Râbia Hatun Skandalı", Türk Edebiyatı, no. 216, Istanbul 1991, pp. 41-47 (as cited by Küçük).

Other sources

Online sources