Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: mef‘ūlü / fā‘ilātü / mefā‘īlü / fā‘ilün

Şeb-i Ḳad(i)rde ṭoġınca dinildi tārīḫi
Nūr-ı Muḥammed indi eve leyletü’l-Ḳad(i)r (1238)

In English

1. When he was born on the Night of Power, his chronogram was spoken thus: "On the Night of Power the light of Muhammad came down into the house."

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

It is a single-couplet birth chronogram in the muzâri pattern "mef‘ūlü fā‘ilātü mefā‘īlü fā‘ilün". Babaarslan records it as "chronogram for someone born on the Night of Power (1238)"; the year 1238 corresponds to 1822-23. This single couplet, where no rhyme is required, opens with the name of the Night of Power and closes with it again ("Şeb-i Ḳadir" and "leyletü'l-Ḳadir"); a Persian and an Arabic phrase describe the same night. A chronogram (tarih) gives the year of an event through a phrase or line whose letters, added up by their numerical values (the ebced system), yield that year; here the chronogram is the whole of the second line.

Written as "نور محمد ایندی اوه لیلة القدر", it gives "nūr" 256, "Muḥammed" 92, "indi" 75, "eve" 12, "leyle" 75 and "el-Ḳadr" 335, and the total stops at 845. If the round te at the end of "leyle" is counted as 400 like an open te (or if the word is spelled "لیلت"), the total becomes 1240, which is two more than the edition's 1238. With the spellings we tried, 1238 could not be reached. The calculation is ours; the chronogram could not be fully verified.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The Night of Power (Kadir gecesi) is the night on which the revelation of the Qur'an began, called "better than a thousand months" in the sura al-Qadr; the same sura says that on that night the angels and the Spirit come down. The verb "indi" (came down) in the couplet alludes to this descent: the child born on the Night of Power has come into the house like a light descending from heaven. The phrase "Nūr-ı Muḥammed" can also be read in two ways: in Sufism the "Nûr-ı Muhammedî" is the light of the Prophet, the first light of creation; if the child's name was Muhammed, the phrase also means "the light named Muhammed". That the child was named Muhammed is our guess; Babaarslan and Özçakmak do not give the name of the child. The analysis is ours.

Historical Context

Whose son the child was is not stated in the poem or its heading. Since the Night of Power is traditionally held to be the twenty-seventh night of Ramadan, the birth probably took place in Ramadan 1238. Vâzıh's own sons were born in 1237 (Ni'metullah) and 1240 (Ahmed Tayyib); this child is not one of them.

Bibliography

Academic studies

  • Giyasi Babaarslan, "Amasyalı Vâzıh ve Dîvânçesi", Akademik Dil ve Edebiyat Dergisi, 5(4), 2021, pp. 1922-1984 (text of the poem: p. 1978; Mustafa Vâzıh, Dîvânçe, Ankara University, Department of Manuscripts, Mustafa Con A 495/III, fol. 74b). https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/pub/akaded/article/993264
  • Giyasi Babaarslan, "Amasyalı Vâzıh ve Dîvânçesi", Akademik Dil ve Edebiyat Dergisi, 5(4), 2021, pp. 1924-1930 (life and description of the Dîvânçe; chronograms: pp. 1929-1930). https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/pub/akaded/article/993264
  • Fatma Özçakmak, "Mustafa Vâzıh Efendi ve Dîvânçe'si", Kesit Akademi Dergisi, 7(26), 2021, pp. 255-278, p. 275.

Online sources