Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Mefâʿîlün mefâʿîlün feʿûlün (metre identified by us)

Birisi tâlib-i ilmün Ömerdür
Mutavvel sanma medhin muhtasardur
Bizüm maksûdımuz izz-i visâli
Velî matlûb-ı âlemdür hayâli
Anun yolında ömrin itmeyen sarf
Kelâm-ı ışkdan bilmez o bir harf
Mehemmeddür birisi şeyhzâde
Hudâ virmiş ana hüsni ziyâde
Tazarru eylerüm Hakk Hazretine
Elin alup girem tâ halvetine

In English

1. One (of the beauties) is Ömer, a student of the religious sciences; do not think his praise Long (Mutavval), it is Short (Mukhtasar).

2. Our aim is the honour of union with him; but his image is what the whole world seeks.

3. He who does not spend his life on his road knows not a single letter of the discourse of love.

4. Another is Mehmed, a sheikh's son; God has given him beauty in abundance.

5. I pray to the Lord that I may take his hand and enter even into his place of retreat.

Literary and Historical Commentary

A Beauty in the Language of the Madrasa

The şehrengiz is a type of mesnevi that names and praises the beauties of a city one by one, most often young craftsmen and students. Beyânî and Kınalızâde quote five couplets of Sülûkî's şehrengiz in which two beauties are described; Kınalızâde adds that it was composed "gâyetde ḫûb", very finely. The first beauty is a student named Ömer, and the couplets on him are woven throughout with madrasa terms. Muṭavvel and Muḫtaṣar are the names of the long and short commentaries Teftâzânî wrote on the rhetorical handbook Telḫîṣ, both read as textbooks in the madrasas. When the poet says that his praise of the student should not be thought "Mutavval", Long, since it is "Mukhtasar", Short, he uses two book titles familiar to his readers both in the sense of long and short and as the books the student himself was reading. "Kelâm", discourse and theology, "harf", letter, and "matlûb", the thing sought, are words of the same world, the study circle.

The second beauty is Mehmed, a sheikh's son. In his couplet the word "ḫalvet" carries the same game into the language of the dervish lodge: the halvet is the solitary cell in which the dervish keeps his retreat; the poet wishes to take the sheikh's son by the hand and enter his "halvet". The word denotes both mystical seclusion and two people alone together.

Which City

Hüsameddin writes that the work was called "Şehr-i engiz" and that in it Sülûkî gathered the beauties of Amasya. The anthologies do not name the city. Âşık Çelebi's picture of Sülûkî wandering the towns of Rumelia and losing his heart to every beauty he saw also raises the possibility that the work was written for a Rumelian town. The five surviving couplets contain no name or place that would identify the city; the claim that the şehrengiz was written for Amasya therefore rests on Hüsameddin's record alone. Hüsameddin's account of the Sülûkîoğulları line is in Sülûkî Mehmed Çelebi (Memî Çelebizâde).

Bibliography

Primary sources

Books

Online sources