Original Ottoman Turkish Text
Metre: Mefʿūlü mefāʿīlü mefāʿīlün faʿ (fāʿ) and Mefʿūlü mefāʿīlü mefāʿīlü feʿūl
Eŝnāyı ṣelātinde ümem-i dīndār
Ḥaḳḳa yönelüp ḫalḳı ider istidbār
Ḳalbiñde saña öyle ümem olmalıdır
Peşinde ḫudā-pesde ṣufūf-ı aġyār
In English
1. During their prayer the devout communities turn towards God and turn their backs on people.
2. In your heart too there must be such communities: (their faces turned to God), while the ranks of strangers are left behind. (The last line is not entirely clear.)
Literary and Historical Commentary
The previous couplet's thought of turning towards and turning away is carried here into the scene of the congregational prayer. The community standing in rows at prayer turns all together towards the qibla; at that moment the world and the people left behind are not seen. The poet turns this outer scene into an inner one: in the heart too there must be communities drawn up in such rows, that is, feelings and thoughts ever turned to God.
The use of "ümem", communities, for the heart is the most interesting side of the quatrain; man's inner self is likened to a congregation drawn up row upon row. In the last line "sufûf-ı ağyâr", the ranks of strangers, are left behind; these ranks are the desires that hold the heart back from God. The phrase the thesis reads as "hudâ-pesde" in the middle of the same line, however, yields no clear sense, and the English simply follows the general drift of the line there.
Bibliography
- Havva Tok Yıldız, Merzifonlu İbrâhîm Cûdî Dîvânı (İnceleme-Metin-Sözlük) [1b-43a], Master's thesis, Ondokuz Mayıs University, Samsun 2017, p. 100 (poem no. 87; manuscript fol. 35a). http://libra.omu.edu.tr/tezler/116853.pdf
Online sources
