Known mockingly in Amasya as "the Sheikh with the Tail" because he wore the taylasan scarf, Süleyman Efendi of Tirebolu was a sheikh and poet who carried on the Naqshbandi-Khalidi path in the citadel quarter of the city from 1875 until his death in 1915. In his poems he used the pen names "Mir'ât-nümâ" (the one who shows the mirror) and "Mir'âtu'llâh". Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar knew him personally and called him in his Amasya Tarihi "a poet who left a divan". The work of his that survives today is Âdâbü'l-müeddeb, a verse book on the etiquette of the order completed in 1296 (1878-79), whose only manuscript is in Amasya. This work of more than eleven hundred couplets shows how another Naqshbandi voice spoke in Amasya in the same years as the circle of Mîr Hamza Nigârî.

Hüsameddin's Record

Hüsameddin's entry in the tenth volume is a long biography that also reflects the author's personal acquaintance with the sheikh:

Süleyman Efendi-eş-Şeyh, Mir'ât-nümâ Tireboluludur. Buhâra ümerâsından Ya'kûb Hân evlâdından Edhem bin Mustafa'nın mahdûmudur. Tirebolu kazâsı dâhilinde Harşîd nâhiyesinde 1263'de doğdu. Tahsîl-i ilm u kemâl için İstanbul'a gidip meşâyih-i Nakşîbendiyyeden Yanyalı eş-Şeyh Mustafa İsmet Efendi hazretlerinin dergâhına girdi. Orada şeyh-i müşârün-ileyhe on iki yıl kadar hizmet ve füyûzât-ı ilmiyye ve sûfiyyesinden istifâza ederek ahz-ı hilâfet edib şeyhinin emriyle 1290'da Gümüş kasabasına geldi. İki yıl kadar burada Nakşîbendiyye usûlü üzere halkı irşâda çalışdı. Fakat 1292'de ba'zı zevâtın arzûsu ve şeyh-i müşârün-ileyhin işâret-i ma'neviyyesi üzerine Amasya'ya gelip İçerişehir'de Ahî Sa'deddîn Mahallesi'nde eski zâviye-i Sa'diyye kurbunda kendisine tedârik edilen hânede yerleşdi. Ba'dehû hânesinin bir kısmını ibâdet-gâh ittihâz edib Nakşîbendîlere hâs bir vakâr u sükûnetle hatm-i hâcegâna mülâzemet ve inzivâ-gâhında zikr ü ibâdet ederek neşr-i tarîkata himmet eyledi. Bu esnâda Hazret-i Şeyh Hacı Hamza Nigârî Efendi'nin ihdâs eylediği ta'n ü la'net tavrına muhâlefet edib Risâlet-penâh Efendimiz Hazretlerine hürmeten sohbet-i nebeviyyesiyle müşerref olan bütün ashâb-ı kirâm hakkında âdâb-ı İslâmiyyeye fevka'l-âde ri'âyet ederek halkın teveccühât-ı kalbiyyesini kazandı. Fethiye Mahallesi'nde mürîdânı çoğaldığından ekseriyyetle Fethiye Câmi-i şerîfinin mü'ezzinlere mahsûs odasında hatm-i hâcegânı bir sekînet-i sûfiyyâne ve sukûnet-i kâmilâne üzere icrâya devâm etdi. Hacı Hamza Efendi'nin tagayyüb ü irtihâlinden sonra âmmenin hüsn-i nazarını celb etdiği hâlde hırs-ı şöhretten ictinâb etdi. 1323 şevvâlinde dâr-ı kudse irtihâl eden "Helvâcı Şeyh" demekle meşhûr Türkmenzâde eş-Şeyh Abdullah Efendi Hazretlerinin vefâtı üzerine Amasya'da teferrüd etdiği hâlde tavr ü mesleğine devâm edib 1333 senesi rebîülevvelinin onikinci perşembe günü akşam üzeri dâr-ı kudse intikâl etdi. Ertesi Cum'a günü büyük bir ihtifâl içinde Sultân Bâyezîd Câmi-i şerîfinde namazı ba'de'l-edâ aynı ihtifâl ile kaldırılıp Yörgüç Paşa İmâreti ittisâlinde kâ'in mezârlığın yol üstüne tesâdüf eden yerine defn edildiği halîfesi olan eş-Şeyh Hâfız Burhân Efendi tarafından haber verildi. Merhûm-ı müşârün-ileyh gâyet müteşerri', dîndâr, müttakî, sâlih, ma'ârif-i sûfiyyeden haberdâr, âdâb-ı şerî'ate fevka'l-âde mürâ'î, şöhretten müctenib, zâhid, zî-ilm ü edeb, gayet sâkin, vakûr, şekl ü şemâ'ili güzel âbid, pâk-i'tikâd, şâir-i sâhib-i dîvân, mazınneden bir zât-ı kerâmet-simât idi. Gazeliyyâtı sûfiyyâne, mesneviyâtı hakîmâne idi.

Rendered in full: Sheikh Süleyman Efendi, pen name Mir'ât-nümâ, was from Tirebolu. He was the son of Edhem bin Mustafa, a descendant of Yakub Khan, one of the emirs of Bukhara. He was born in 1263 in the Harşit district of the kaza of Tirebolu. To acquire learning and spiritual maturity he went to Istanbul and entered the lodge of Sheikh Mustafa İsmet Efendi of Yanya, one of the Naqshbandi sheikhs. There he served this sheikh for about twelve years, drew on his learned and Sufi grace, received his authorisation as deputy, and at his sheikh's command came to the town of Gümüş in 1290. For about two years he worked there to guide the people according to the Naqshbandi method. But in 1292, at the wish of certain persons and on a spiritual sign from his sheikh, he came to Amasya and settled in a house provided for him in the Ahî Sadeddin quarter of the citadel, near the old Sadiyye lodge. Later he turned part of his house into a place of worship and, with the dignity and calm peculiar to the Naqshbandis, kept up the hatm-i hâcegân gatherings and strove to spread the order through remembrance of God and worship in his retreat. At this time he opposed the attitude of "ta'n ü la'net" (reviling and cursing) introduced by Sheikh Hacı Hamza Nigârî Efendi and, out of reverence for the Prophet, observed Islamic propriety with the utmost care towards all the Companions honoured with his company, and so won the hearts of the people. As his disciples multiplied in the Fethiye quarter, he continued to hold the hatm-i hâcegân mostly in the room of the Fethiye Mosque set aside for the muezzins, with Sufi tranquillity and perfect calm. After the banishment and death of Hacı Hamza Efendi he attracted the goodwill of the public, yet he shunned the desire for fame. When Türkmenzâde Sheikh Abdullah Efendi, known as "the Helvacı Sheikh", died in Şevval 1323, he was left alone in Amasya but kept to his manner and path, and died towards evening on Thursday, the twelfth of Rebiülevvel 1333. His deputy Sheikh Hâfız Burhân Efendi reported that the next day, a Friday, after his funeral prayer was performed at the Sultan Bayezid Mosque before a great crowd, he was carried by the same crowd and buried in the part of the cemetery beside the Yörgüç Pasha soup kitchen that lies along the road. The late sheikh was strictly observant of the sacred law, devout, God-fearing, righteous, versed in Sufi knowledge, exceedingly careful of the proprieties of the law, averse to fame, ascetic, a man of learning and refinement, very calm, dignified, handsome in appearance, given to worship, pure in belief, a poet who left a divan, and a person believed to work wonders. His ghazals were Sufi in spirit, his mesnevîs full of wisdom.

The entry then continues with personal recollections. Hüsameddin writes that because he wore the taylasan as a custom of the early Muslims, the Hamzavîs and "some impudent people" called him "the Sheikh with the Tail", that he performed the five daily prayers at the Sultan Bayezid Mosque, and that he sometimes sat on the bench of the timekeeper's room conversing with scholars. He was believed to have spiritual insight; it was said that he could tell what kind of person lay in a grave he visited. He often went to the Yörgüç Pasha cemetery and said that many luminous men were buried there. One day he showed Hüsameddin a grave in the south-west of the cemetery and said, "A man named Ahmed lies here, he is full of light"; when Hüsameddin told him that the man buried there was Sheikh Ahmed Efendi, called "the Pole", a deputy of the great Halveti master Memi Dede, the sheikh was delighted.

From Tirebolu to Amasya

There are three stations in Süleyman Efendi's life. The first is Istanbul. Mustafa İsmet Efendi of Yanya was a deputy of Abdullah Mekkî, himself a deputy of Mevlânâ Hâlid-i Bağdâdî; born in Yanya in 1223 (1808), he died on 16 Zilkade 1289 (15 January 1873) and was buried in his lodge at Çarşamba in Istanbul. Süleyman Efendi stayed with him for twelve years, and he says himself in a ghazal in Âdâbü'l-müeddeb, "Cezbe-i seyr ü sülûk ‘İṣmet'de itmâm eyledim", that he completed his spiritual journey under İsmet. Hüsameddin writes that he came to Gümüş in 1290 "at his sheikh's command"; since the sheikh died in 1289, this command must have been a bequest or instruction given before his death.

The second station is present-day Gümüşhacıköy. After two years there the sheikh moved to the city in 1292 (1875) at the request of some people of Amasya and settled in a house prepared for him in the Ahî Sadeddin quarter of the citadel, near the old Sadiyye lodge. He turned part of his house into a place of worship and held there the hatm-i hâcegân gatherings, which rest on the silent remembrance of the Naqshbandis. When his disciples multiplied in the Fethiye quarter, the gatherings moved mostly to the muezzins' room of the Fethiye Mosque.

The third and longest station is the forty years in Amasya. What defined the sheikh's position in the city was the difference between him and the Amasya circle of Mîr Hamza Nigârî, the Naqshbandi sheikh from Karabakh. Hüsameddin relates that Nigârî introduced an attitude of "reviling and cursing" towards some of the Companions, whereas Süleyman Efendi opposed it by holding all the Companions in respect, and won the hearts of the people for that reason. The section of Âdâbü'l-müeddeb devoted to Amasya is the reflection of this dispute in verse: the sheikh complains of the "sürh-ser" ("red-heads") who "in this town" keep mourning in Muharrem, curse Ibn Süfyân, that is, Muâviye, among the people of prayer, and reproach anyone they see on a prayer rug. After Nigârî was exiled to Harput in 1885 and died there in 1886, Süleyman Efendi's influence grew, and with the death of the Helvacı Sheikh Türkmenzâde Abdullah Efendi in 1323 (1905) he remained the only Naqshbandi sheikh of standing in Amasya.

The sheikh died on the evening of Thursday, 12 Rebiülevvel 1333, that is, on 28 January 1915. The next day his funeral left from the Sultan Bayezid Mosque, and he was buried in the cemetery beside the soup kitchen of Yörgüç Pasha, the place he had often visited in his lifetime. He was succeeded by Burhâneddîn Ahmed Efendi, grandson of the Amasya scholar Hâfız Burhân Efendi. According to Hüsameddin's record in the seventh volume, this deputy had first been a bookseller and then opened a haberdashery, and after losing his capital through his son's extravagance withdrew into a frugal life in his sheikh's circle of remembrance.

Âdâbü'l-müeddeb

The divan Hüsameddin mentions has not been found. Süleyman Efendi's poetry is known today through the work whose full title is Risâle-i Nakşibendiyye-i Hâlidiyye-i Müceddidiyye-i Âdâbü'l-müeddeb. Its only manuscript is held in the Amasya Beyazıt Manuscript Library under number 05 Ba 1286: 44 folios in ta'lik script, 17 lines to the page. The library record attributed the work to his sheikh Mustafa İsmet Efendi. In 2017 Abdurrahman Şensöz published a transcription of the text in his master's thesis at Marmara University and, on the basis of the phrase "Tercüme-i hâl-i müellif-i fakîr eş-Şeyh Süleymân Mir'âtu'llâh" in one of the section headings and of the pen names in the couplets, showed that the work belongs to Süleyman Efendi.

The work is a manual of the order in which prose and verse sections alternate. It opens with the basmala, a hymn on God's unity and a supplication, and contains nine na'ts in praise of the Prophet; the sections beginning "Bu bâb …" treat devotion to the master, rabıta (the bond with the master), silent remembrance, the hatm-i hâcegân, obedience to the sacred law, the superiority of the Naqshbandi sheikhs, false sheikhs, and enemies of the law who claim to be dervishes. Verses of the Qur'an, hadiths and sayings of Sufi masters are added in Arabic at the end of the sections. The place where the book comes closest to daily life is the couplets in the section on spiritual striving that recommend one or two glasses of tea after a meal to the traveller and say that in tea there is "an endless science". By Şensöz's count, of the 1152 couplets 747 are mesnevî in the metre "Fâilâtün Fâilâtün Fâilün" and 373 belong to ghazals; to these are added a müseddes, two kasides, a rubai, a few Persian couplets, a Persian ghazal and chronogram poems. The book ends in 1296 (1878-79) with a Persian verse chain of the Naqshbandi lineage, a section in which the author describes his own condition, and two chronograms.

Two pieces in the work speak directly to Amasya. One is the ghazal beginning "Ey Amasya ḫalḳı kim ṣanmañ ziyânım var size"; here the sheikh asks the people of Amasya not to suppose that he means them harm and tells them he has come as a "pure-hearted" man of prayer. The other is the section describing the mischief of the "sürh-ser" sheikhs and dervishes of Amasya. The section on the reason for writing also says that the book was written "for the city of Amasya", to encourage its people on the path of God.

The State of the Sources

Hüsameddin and Şensöz are two sources unaware of each other, and they complement one another. Şensöz did not see Hüsameddin's tenth volume, unpublished at the time, and wrote that he could find no information about Süleyman Efendi apart from his work. Hüsameddin, for his part, does not name Âdâbü'l-müeddeb; he speaks only of a divan. The ties joining the two sources are clear: the pen name Mir'ât-nümâ, the sheikh Mustafa İsmet Efendi, Amasya, and the Naqshbandi-Khalidi identity. Whether the thirty-one ghazals in the book were part of the divan Hüsameddin saw is not known.

Two points are disputed. The first is the account of his life written in the sheikh's own voice: there he says that he did not study the exoteric sciences, had no teacher besides his master, never completed the Qur'an even once, and wrote a faulty hand. This humility clashes with Hüsameddin's description of him as "a man of learning and refinement"; it is impossible to tell whether the familiar modesty formula of Sufi texts or a real lack of schooling is speaking. The second is the identity of "Şeyhzâde Abdullah Bahâeddîn", for whom the book contains an elegiac chronogram dated 1292 (1875). Şensöz takes him to be Süleyman Efendi's son. Yet in the section on the reason for writing, the sheikh mentions Mustafa İsmet Efendi and immediately adds "bâ-ḫuṣūṣ evlâdı ‘Abdullâh Bahâ", "especially his son Abdullah Bahâ"; in a supplication within the book, too, after praying for İsmet he asks mercy for "evlâdı Bahâ'eddîn", his son Bahâeddîn, and says that this youth reached sainthood at fifteen and died at sixteen; the title "Şeyhzâde", son of the sheikh, and the statement in the chronogram that the deceased was buried in İsmet Efendi's lodge suggest that he was the son of Mustafa İsmet Efendi. It also seems hardly possible that Süleyman Efendi, born in 1263, had a son who had completed sixteen years, as the chronogram says, by his death in 1292. This reading is an interpretation drawn from the text; it is not confirmed by any other source.

Poetry

Hüsameddin's verdict, "his ghazals were Sufi in spirit, his mesnevîs full of wisdom", describes the poems of Âdâbü'l-müeddeb well. The mesnevîs are written in a plain, didactic language that counsels the disciple; as Şensöz also notes, the poet paid little attention to metre and built lines full of lengthened and shortened syllables. In the ghazals the language grows heavier in places, Arabic and Persian compounds multiply, and the motifs of love and intoxication take on a Sufi meaning. The pen name is used in two ways: sometimes "Mir'ât-nümâ" appears as a complete name, sometimes the words "mir'ât" (mirror) and "nümâ" (showing) are spread across the line to play on the image of the mirror. The work contains ninety-five verse pieces, including the mesnevî sections, ghazals, na'ts, supplications and chronograms; to these is added a Persian verse lineage that the edition prints like prose, without dividing it into lines.

Chronology

1263 (1846-47): Born in the Harşit district of Tirebolu.

Zilkade 1289 (January 1873): His master Mustafa İsmet Efendi of Yanya dies in Istanbul.

1290 (1873): Comes to the town of Gümüş (Gümüşhacıköy).

1292 (1875): Settles in Amasya; in the same year he composes a chronogram for Şeyhzâde Abdullah Bahâeddîn.

1296 (1878-79): Completes Âdâbü'l-müeddeb.

Şevval 1323 (November-December 1905): The Helvacı Sheikh Türkmenzâde Abdullah Efendi dies; Süleyman Efendi is left alone in Amasya.

12 Rebiülevvel 1333 (28 January 1915): Dies in Amasya; buried in the cemetery beside the Yörgüç Pasha soup kitchen.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

Books

  • Süleyman Efendi (Mir'ât-nümâ), Risâle-i Nakşibendiyye-i Hâlidiyye-i Müceddidiyye-i Âdâbü'l-müeddeb, Amasya Beyazıt Yazma Eser Kütüphanesi, no. 05 Ba 1286, 44 fols. amasya.bel.tr