© Copyrighted Material © Copyrighted Material www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com www.ashgate.com Chapter 14 Battling Kufr (Unbelief) in the Land of Inidels: Gülşehri’s Turkish Adaptation of ʿAṭṭār’s Manṭiq al-Ṭayr Sara Nur Yıldız Introduction If the Shaykh devotes himself to these locks, he’ll gird his Sui cloak around them as if it were a Christian belt 1 for whenever I reveal the unbelief of my hair, I make a Christian out of many a muslim. 2 The poetic image of the power of the Christian beauty’s seductive locks, enticing the believer into kufr (unbelief), illustrates a central theme in Gülşehri’s Mantıku’t-Tayr (Speech of the Birds), 3 an early fourteenth-century anatolian turkish 4 adaptation of ʿAṭṭār’s 5 Persian mystical mathnawī of the 1 Kemal Yavuz (ed.), Gülşehri’nin Mantıku’t-Tayr’ı (Gülşen-nāme). Metin ve Günümüz Türkçesine Aktarma, vol. 1 (Ankara: Kırşehir Valiliği Yayınları, 2007) (hereafter cited as Gülşehri, Mantıku’t- Tayr, ed. Yavuz), 68, line 456: Şeyh eger bu zülfe ikrar eyleye / Hırkasın bu zülfe zünnar eyleye. all English translations are my own unless otherwise speciied. 2 Gülşehri, Mantıku’t-Tayr, ed. Yavuz, couplet 458: Çün saçum küfrini peyda eyleyem / Çok Müsülmanları Tersa eyleyem. 3 In addition to Kemal Yavuz’s recent edition, this work has been published in various formats: Agh Sırrı Levend (ed.), Gülşehri. Manṭiḳu’ṭ-ṭayr. Tıpkıbasım (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1957), (hereafter as Gülşehri, Mantıku’t-Tayr, ed. Levend); and Aziz Merhan, (ed.), Die ‘Vogelgespräche’ Gülşehris und die Anfänge der türkischen Literatur (Gttingen: Pontus-Verlag, 2003), (hereafter as Gülşehri, Mantıku’t-Tayr, ed. Merhan). 4 For an overview of the Oğuz or western Turkish variety spoken and written in medieval Anatolia, usually referred to as Anatolian Turkish, or Old Anatolian Turkish (in distinction to Ottoman Turkish, which did not technically exist until the late ifteenth century, if not later), as well as its relationship to the classical Persian literary tradition, see Barbara fleming, ‘old Anatolian Turkish Poetry in its Relationship to the Persian Tradition’, in Turkic-Iranian Contact Areas: Historical and Linguistic Aspects, ed. Lars Johanson and Christiane Bulut (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006), 49–68. 5 We know little about the life of Farīd al-Dīn Muḥammad al-ʿAṭṭār (d. 1221), author of the original Persian Manṭiq al-Ṭayr (‘Speech of the Birds’, or ‘Conference of the Birds). A native of nishapur and pharmacist by trade, he is believed to have died during the mongol sack of Nishapur (John Andrew Boyle, ‘The Religious ‘Mathnavīs’ of Farīd al-Dīn Aṭṭār’, Iran 17 (1979): 9; J.T.P. de Bruijn, ‘Comparative Notes on Sanāʾī and ʿAṭṭār’, in Classical Persian Suism: From its Origins to Rumi, ed. Leonard Lewisohn (London and New York: Khaniqahi Nimatullahi Publications, 1993), 362–4). From A.C.S. Peacock, Bruno De Nicola and Sara Nur Yıldız (eds), Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia, published by Ashgate Publishing. See: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472448637 © Sara Nur Yıldız (2015)