For twenty years, from 1942 to 1962, the mufti of Amasya was Mecdîzâde Mehmed Sabri Efendi, known after the Surname Law as Mehmet Sabri Yetkin, a scholar, madrasa teacher and poet born in Amasya in 1884. He was the eldest son of Abdurrahman Kâmil Efendi, mufti of Amasya during the Turkish War of Independence. In his poems he used the pen name (mahlas) "Sabrî". Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar knew him personally and in the entry he wrote for Amasya Tarihi recorded a ghazal Sabri gave him. The details of his life, however, are known from the study of Recep Orhan Özel, based on his personnel file at the Presidency of Religious Affairs and on the poet's manuscript notebooks in the National Library. He died in 1963. The entry Hüsameddin wrote on him appears separately as Sabrî Mehmed Efendi-Mecdîzâde.

Hüsameddin's Record

Hüsameddin's entry was written in the middle of Sabri Efendi's career, while the author lived in the same city:

Amasya müftüsü Hâfız Abdurrahman Kâmil Efendi bin Ahmed Rif'at Efendi bin Mecdî Mustafa Efendi'nin mahdûmudur. 1303 senesinde Gümüşlüzâde Mahallesi'nde doğdu. İbtidâî ve İdâdî mekteblerde okuyup şehâdetnâmeler aldıkdan sonra Bekir Paşa müderrisi olan pederinden ikmâl-i tahsîl edib 1326 rebîülevvelinde icâzetnâme aldı. Bu esnâda Köprülü Fâzıl Arif ve Kapancızâde Hâfız Şerîf Mehmed Efendilerden de istifâde etdi. 1327'de bi'l-imtihân ders-i âmlık ehliyetnâmesi alıp tedrîs-i ulûma başladı. "Akaid-i Nesefîyye Şerhi"ni tedrîs ederken Tevhîd-i Tedrîsât Kanûnu ile medrese tahsîli hitâma erdiğinden 1331'de Amasya Lisesi'nde Arabî muallimi, 1336'da dârü'l-hilâfe müderrisi, 1338'de İmâm ve Hatîb Mektebi Edebiyât muallimi ve bunun ilgâsında Bâyezîd Medresesi'nde tevhîd edilen kütübhâneler me'mûru oldu. Ulûm-ı Arabiyye ve Edebiyye'de mâhir, âlim, pederi gibi kâmil, usûl ve fürûa vâkıf, gâyet zekî, târih ve muhâzarâta âşinâ, tab'an edîb, şâir olup kitâplar mütâlaasından lezzet almış çalışkan bir zâtdır. Şu gazelini bana lutfetmişdir.

In English: He is the son of the mufti of Amasya Hâfız Abdurrahman Kâmil Efendi; Kâmil Efendi was the son of Ahmed Rif'at Efendi, and he of Mecdî Mustafa Efendi. He was born in 1303 in the Gümüşlüzâde quarter. After studying at the primary and secondary schools and receiving their diplomas, he completed his education with his father, teacher (müderris) at the Bekir Pasha Madrasa, and received his diploma (icazetname) in Rebiülevvel 1326. In this period he also benefited from Köprülü Fâzıl Ârif Efendi and Kapancızâde Hâfız Şerîf Mehmed Efendi. In 1327 he obtained by examination the certificate of a public lecturer (ders-i âm) and began to teach. While he was teaching the commentary on Nasafi's creed, madrasa education came to an end with the Law on the Unification of Education, so in 1331 he became teacher of Arabic at the Amasya Lycée, in 1336 teacher at the Dârü'l-hilâfe Madrasa, in 1338 teacher of literature at the School for Prayer Leaders and Preachers, and when that was abolished, keeper of the libraries united in the Bayezid Madrasa. He is a learned man, skilled in the Arabic and literary sciences, accomplished like his father, versed in the principles and branches of jurisprudence, highly intelligent, familiar with history and conversation, a man of letters by nature, a poet, and a hard-working person who takes pleasure in reading books. He has presented this ghazal of his to me.

The dates of the entry do not quite agree with each other. Hüsameddin connects the move to schoolteaching with the Law on the Unification of Education (1924), but the first post he names is dated 1331 (1915). Since the list of posts that Özel drew from the personnel file gives these years in detail and consistently, it has been followed in the account of his life below.

Life

According to Özel, Mehmet Sabri was born in Amasya in 1302 (1884); Hüsameddin gives the following year. An Ottoman identity document of 1904 describes him as a young man with hazel eyes and a wheat-coloured complexion and shows him living in the Gümüşlü quarter. He finished the Çöplüce Primary School in front of the old hospital (darüşşifa) in 1897 and the Amasya secondary school (idadi) in 1902. During his school years he read Arabic morphology and syntax with his father, and in the holidays prosody and rhyme, Sa'dî's Bostan and Gülistan and Jâmî's Bahâristan. He learned Hâfız's divan from Shaykh Emîn Medînelî, and the law of inheritance (feraiz) and the measurement of the altitude of stars from the timekeeper Kapancızâde Hâfız Şerîf Efendi. In 1908 he received his diploma from the Bekir Pasha Madrasa, and in 1911, by examination, the certificate of a public lecturer.

His years of service, in his own words, exceeded half a century. In 1909 he began as a drafting clerk in the Amasya mufti's office; he taught calligraphy to madrasa students, religious knowledge and Arabic at the Amasya Sultani, jurisprudence, history and geography at the Dârü'l-hilâfe Madrasa, and literature, rhetoric and composition at the School for Prayer Leaders and Preachers. When the schools were closed he worked briefly as an accounts clerk in 1926, became librarian in Amasya in the autumn of the same year and stayed in this post for eleven years. He wrote in his own notes that this change brought him financial hardship. After 1939 he worked at the Bayezid Library. In January 1942 a committee of public lecturers, preachers, prayer leaders and members of the municipal council elected him mufti by secret ballot; his brother Ahmet Emrî Yetkin was also on the same list but withdrew his candidacy. Sabri Yetkin, who became mufti of Amasya in March 1942, suffered a heart attack in the mufti's office in 1955, left the post in 1962 after a petition in which he wrote that he was in need of rest, and died in 1963.

He left manuscript works, none of them printed, most of them in the National Library. Among them are the translation and commentary of Jâmî's Persian Lüccetü'l-esrâr, made in 1931 while he was librarian, a commentary on the Zeynebiyye ode attributed to Ali, commentaries on the Burda of Ka'b b. Zuhayr and on the Nûniyye ode of al-Busti, commentaries on the suras Yâsîn and al-Insân, sermon notes, and the memoir notebook he called Kefe-i Sabrî. This last notebook contains, along with his own memories and thoughts, some poems and letters of his close friends.

Family

The Mecdîzâdes are a family who migrated from Crimea to Amasya and produced scholars for several generations. His father Abdurrahman Kâmil Efendi was teacher at the Bekir Pasha Madrasa and mufti during the years of the War of Independence; he too was a poet, and his poems are discussed in Abdurrahman Kâmil Efendi: Poet and Works. Sabri's two brothers, Ahmet Emrî Yetkin (1886-1974) and Mustafa Niyazi Yetkin (d. 1959), were also trained as religious scholars; Emrî was a poet as well; the entry Hüsameddin devoted to him is on the site as Emrî Ahmed Efendi-Mecdîzâde. Their sister Fatma Zehra died young. Osman Fevzi Olcay, who wrote memoirs of Amasya, recalls studying together with the brothers Sabri and Emrî at the secondary school in Saraydüzü.

Poetry

Copyright note: Since Mehmet Sabri Yetkin died in 1963, his poems are protected by copyright for 70 years after his death, that is, until the end of 2033. For this reason they cannot be published on our site as separate pages; only short quotations are given below. When the term of protection expires, his poems too will be published, each on its own page, as with the other poets.

Sabri Efendi left no divan; his poems are scattered through his notebooks and have never been published as a collection. Two of his ghazals are known from printed sources. The first is the five-couplet ghazal in Hüsameddin's entry. This ghazal, which says that he would not exchange the friendship of books and the pleasure of reading in a quiet corner for Solomon's throne, the garden of paradise or a stroll in a rose garden, opens thus:

Zevk-i dilimi cilve-i hûbâna değişmem
Gönlüm gülünü gonce-i handâna değişmem

(I would not exchange my heart's delight for the coquetry of beauties; I would not exchange the rose of my heart for a smiling bud.) The ghazal's refrain "değişmem" (I would not exchange) has a ring that suits Sabri Efendi's years as a librarian; the closing couplet ends with the poet saying he would not exchange his verse, which he holds clear as a mirror, for the colourful anthologies of his friends.

Özel published the second ghazal from the poet's notebook Kefe-i Sabrî. While Sabri Efendi was librarian at the Bayezid Library, Ahmet Efendi, son of Yumuk Osmanzâde Hâfız Tevfik Efendi, told him that in the Turkish divans he had read he had never come across a poem with the refrain "geldin" (you came); upon this he wrote a ghazal of five couplets. The ghazal is built on man's coming into the world weeping and leaving it weeping, and begins thus:

Ne güldün gül gibi bir dem, ne kalbin eyledin hurrem
Dilâ sen bu harâb içre hemân feryâda mı geldin

(O heart, you neither laughed like a rose for a moment nor made your heart glad; did you come into this ruin only to cry out?) In the fourth couplet the poet brings the occasion of the poem into the poem itself: he asks his interlocutor whether he came into the world to propose to "the master" that he write this poem and so to have a newly invented poem made. Preserved together with the story of its composition, this ghazal shows a mufti of the Republican period, trained in Ottoman madrasa culture, keeping up the refrain and rhyme games of the old poetry as a topic of conversation.

Chronology

1302 (1884): Born in Amasya (1303 according to Hüsameddin).

1902: Finishes the Amasya secondary school.

1908: Receives his diploma from the Bekir Pasha Madrasa.

1911: Obtains by examination the certificate of a public lecturer.

1926-1937: Librarian in Amasya.

21 March 1942: Becomes mufti of Amasya.

1962: Leaves the office of mufti.

1963: Dies.

Bibliography

Online sources