Original Ottoman Turkish Text
Metre: Mefʿūlü mefāʿīlü mefāʿīlün faʿ (fāʿ) and Mefʿūlü mefāʿīlü mefāʿīlü feʿūl
ʿİrfān iledir ḳuvvet-i dīn, ʿizzet-i ḳavm
Bu cehle ne yapsun o ṣalāt ile bu ṣavm
ʿİrfān ile göster eŝer-i bīdārı
Ġāfilleri farż ile bir sāʾir-i nevm
In English
1. The strength of the faith and the honour of the nation both lie in knowledge; what can that prayer and this fasting do for such ignorance?
2. Show the work of wakefulness through knowledge; count the heedless, though they perform their obligatory duties, as people walking in their sleep.
Literary and Historical Commentary
The strength of the faith and the honour of the nation depend on "irfan", knowledge and understanding; neither prayer nor fasting can gain anything for an ignorant community. Few of the divan's poems on education speak as bluntly. The naming of "kavm", nation, beside "dîn", faith, gives the quatrain the voice of the Constitutional-era debates on nationhood and progress.
The comparison in the second couplet is the quatrain's most striking place: the heedless man who lacks knowledge, even if he performs his obligatory duties, is a "sâ'ir-i nevm", one who walks in his sleep. The sleepwalker moves outwardly like someone awake, but is not aware of what he does; whoever performs his worship without awareness is like him. Coming from a poet who spent his life teaching, these words do less to lessen the worth of worship than to say that knowledge and wakefulness are what fill worship from within.
Bibliography
- Havva Tok Yıldız, Merzifonlu İbrâhîm Cûdî Dîvânı (İnceleme-Metin-Sözlük) [1b-43a], Master's thesis, Ondokuz Mayıs University, Samsun 2017, p. 108 (poem no. 116; manuscript fol. 37a-39b). http://libra.omu.edu.tr/tezler/116853.pdf
Online sources
