Original Ottoman Turkish Text
Metre: Mefʿūlü mefāʿīlü mefāʿīlün faʿ (fāʿ) and Mefʿūlü mefāʿīlü mefāʿīlü feʿūl
Ey muʿcize-i sūre-i “Āl-i ʿİmrān”
İncīl olamaz heybetiñe ḳarşı ʿayān
İʿcāz-ı Mesīḥ açdı ise ḳalb gözini
Çeşm-i dili fetḥ itdi belāġ-ı Kurʾān
In English
1. O miracle of the sura Âl 'Imrân! The Gospel cannot stand plainly (as a miracle) against your majesty.
2. If the miracle of the Messiah opened the eye of the heart, the eloquence of the Qur'an conquered the eye of the soul.
Literary and Historical Commentary
Âl 'Imrân, one of the suras that tell the story of Jesus and Mary at greatest length, is the subject of this link in the chain of sura quatrains. The sura tells that Jesus healed the blind and the leprous and raised the dead (3:49). Cûdî sets this miracle at the centre of the quatrain and compares it with the miracle of the Qur'an.
The comparison rests on an image of the eye. The miracle of the Messiah opened eyes; the poet calls this "the eye of the heart". The Qur'an, by its eloquence, conquered "çeşm-i dil", the eye of the soul. One is a miracle that heals the body's eye, the other a miracle that opens the heart by the power of speech; the idea in Islamic theology that the Qur'an's real miracle is its i'câz as speech, its inimitability, becomes poetry here. Like the divan's other poems concerning Christianity, the quatrain is built on a claim of superiority, but this time its language is more one of admiration than of polemic.
Bibliography
- Havva Tok Yıldız, Merzifonlu İbrâhîm Cûdî Dîvânı (İnceleme-Metin-Sözlük) [1b-43a], Master's thesis, Ondokuz Mayıs University, Samsun 2017, p. 99 (poem no. 83; manuscript fol. ). http://libra.omu.edu.tr/tezler/116853.pdf
Online sources
