The name Nâibzâde comes from the family's work in the courts: Tevfîk İbrâhim Efendi's father, Hacı Mehmed Efendi, served as deputy judge (naib) in the Islamic court. The son followed the same road; trained in the madrasas of Amasya in the second half of the eighteenth century, he rose from deputy judge to judge and died in 1228 (1813). His teachers were two well-known Amasya teachers of that generation, Çelebizâde Hacı Hüseyin Efendi and the poet Kara Müftü Hâtif İsmâil Efendi. In the entry Tevfîk İbrâhim Efendi-Nâ'ibzâde of Amasya Tarihi, Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar calls him "a scholar, a poet, of a well-to-do and generous household". No poem signed Tevfîk is known.

Hüsameddin's Entry

Amasyalıdır. Nüvvâb-ı şer'iyyeden el-Hâc Mehmed Efendi bin el-Hâc Ömer Efendi bin el-Hâc İbrâhim Efendi bin Hacı Efendizâde Ömer Efendi'nin mahdûmudur. Amasya fuzalâsından Çelebizâde el-Hâc Hüseyin, Kara Müftü el-Hâc İsmâ'îl Hâtif Efendilerden ikmâl-i tahsîl edib ders-i âm oldu.
Ba'dehû kudâta nâib olarak terakkî edib kasabât u bilâda kâdı oldu. Amasya'da oldukça meclis-i a'yân a'zâsı olup 1228'de vefât etdi. Âlim, şâir, servet ü sâmânı düzgün, kerîm bir hânedân idi. Mahdûmu Abdullah Şefîk Efendi'dir.

Turned into English: He came from Amasya. His father, Hacı Mehmed Efendi, was one of the deputy judges of the Islamic court, and the line goes back through Hacı Ömer Efendi and Hacı İbrâhim Efendi to Hacı Efendizâde Ömer Efendi. He completed his studies with the learned men of Amasya Çelebizâde Hacı Hüseyin Efendi and Kara Müftü Hacı İsmâil Hâtif Efendi and became a ders-i âm (licensed public teacher). He then rose as deputy to judges and served as judge in various towns and cities. Whenever he was in Amasya he was a member of the council of notables (meclis-i a'yân); he died in 1228. He was a scholar, a poet, a man from a well-to-do and generous family. His son is Abdullah Şefîk Efendi.

The Nâibzâdes

The family name arose from a nickname. Hüsameddin's entry Hacı Efendi-el-Hâc Mustafa Efendi in the eighth volume traces the descendants of Hacı Mustafa Efendi, who began in the sixteenth century as a secretary in Prince Mustafa's divan, rose to chief treasurer and died in Amasya in 1006 (1598). In one branch of this line are Ömer Efendi of the mevâlî (senior judges), his son İbrâhim Efendi, and İbrâhim Efendi's son Mehmed Efendi, known as "Nâ'ib"; Hüsameddin writes that Mehmed Efendi's descendants were called "the Nâ'ibzâdes". The pedigree in Tevfîk's entry bears the same names, but the order of the generations is somewhat different: here Hacı Efendizâde Ömer Efendi is followed by İbrâhim, Ömer and the deputy judge Mehmed Efendi. Whether this difference arises from a skipped generation or from repeated names cannot be made out from the source. That Tevfîk İbrâhim Efendi bore the name of his great-grandfather is itself evidence that names recurred from generation to generation in the family.

The poet and judge Hıfzî Abdurrahman Efendi, who bore the same nickname, came from another family: his father was Hasan Efendi bin İsmâil Efendi, calligrapher and deputy judge of Amasya, and he himself died in 1103 (1691-92). Hüsameddin establishes no kinship between the two Nâibzâdes. Kırmacızâde Tevfîk Ali Efendi, who comes immediately after Tevfîk in the eighth volume, served as steward of the cloth merchants and died in 1269 (1852-53); he too is a different person.

His Teachers and His Career

Çelebizâde Hacı Hüseyin Efendi won fame in 1179 (1765-66) as teacher of the madrasa beside the Saraçhâne Mosque, taught the hadith lesson in the Sultan Bayezid Mosque, became mufti of Amasya in 1191 and died at the beginning of Rajab 1192 (July-August 1778). Hâtif İsmâil Efendi, for his part, was known as the first teacher of the Sungurlu Madrasa, was appointed mufti of Amasya three times and died in 1198 (1784); of his poems only a chronogram couplet recorded by his son Vâzıh survives. That Tevfîk "completed" his studies with these two teachers suggests that he finished his education by the 1770s at the latest, before Çelebizâde's death in 1778.

The deputy judgeship was an assistant post in which one conducted court business in place of or alongside a judge, and it was counted as the first step on the road to a judgeship. The towns and cities where Tevfîk served as judge are not given in the entry. Membership of the "meclis-i a'yân" shows that at the beginning of the nineteenth century he was among the notables who ran the city's affairs; the qualification "oldukça", that is, whenever he was in Amasya, indicates that he left the city from time to time to serve as judge.

His Poetry

Whether "Tevfîk" was a pen name (mahlas) or a byname added to his name the entry does not make clear; Hüsameddin gives the word in the heading, in the place reserved for a pen name. He leaves the epithet "şâir" without an example and makes no mention of his poems being collected in an anthology (mecmua) or a small divan. The Dîvânçe of Mustafa Vâzıh, son of his teacher Hâtif, full of chronograms written for Amasya people of the same generation, is silent too: neither his name nor a line of his appears there. For these reasons no poem of Tevfîk İbrâhim Efendi has been traced.

Bibliography

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