Yunus Emre's year of birth was probably 1241 and his year of death 1320 or 1321. The controversy on the authenticity of some of the poems attributed to Yunus Emre is fruitless. In many cases, it proves impossible. to determine that the poems belong to other specific poets. Furthermore, the verses held to be of dubious authenticity bear a striking resemblance, in content and style, to Yunus Emre's authenticated poems. We tend to accept as his all the poems attributed to him, even if this means the acknowledgment of Yunus Emre as a collective poetic entity rather than a single individual poet. Yunus Emre may be seen as the poetic embodiment of Anatolian Turkish Islamic humanism in the late l3th and early l4th centuries. Tradition and legend depict Yunus Emre as a poor peasant. At a time of famine, he goes on the road in search of seeds in return for the wild pear he picks on the Anatolian steppes. While travelling in the hope of bartering his wild pear for grains and seeds, he happens to come to the "tekke" (congregation place) of Hach Bektas, the founder of the most latitudinarian sect of Anatolian Islam. Hacy Bektas, a grand old man and a poet in his own right, asks Yunus if he would accept a "nefes" (a breath of blessing) in exchange for each handful of wild pear. Yunus refuses. Hacy Bektas increases his offer: "We shall give you ten breaths of blessing for each handful." Yunus still refuses. Thereupon, Hacy Bektas gives Yunus a sack full of grains. On his way back to his village, Yunus at first feels very happy, but then reconsiders the incident and realises its moral significance: "Hacy Bektas must be a great man," he ponders. "He is no doubt a man of noble spirit. Because a lesser person would have resented me for not accepting his blessing, and surely he would not have given me such a generous amount of grains." Realising his mistake, he rushes back and says: "Here's your sack of grains. Take it back and give me your blessing." But Hacy Bektas replies: "I can not, because we turned over your padlock to Taptuk Emre." This means, in mystic parlance, that a spiritual guide has been appointed to the initiate who is to embark on the path of the search for God's truth. Yunus starts searching his guide, Taptuk Emre, another great Anatolian mystic, who, according to legend, originally came to Anatolia in the guise of a pigeon, but was nearly killed by fanatic traditionalists who appeared as eagles refusing to give him passage. Although w and bleeding, the bird of peace got by the cruel eagles, and was rescued by a peasant woman who showed compassion, healed the wounds, and set the bird in flight again. This is how Taptuk Emre's spirit, it is said, roamed from one end of Anatolia to the other. The symbolism of the legend also establishes the spiritual link between the mystic and the peasant of the Turkish countryside. After a long and arduous search for his guide, Yunus Emre finally finds Taptuk Emre, and enters the congregation, where, for the proverbial forty years, he leads an ascetic, abstemious life. He toils, contemplates, seeks spiritual communion. One day, at a gathering of the faithful, Taptuk Emre asks a poet to say poems extemporaneously, but the poet fails. So Taptuk asks Yunus Emre to try: "What Hacy Bektas once told you is at last a reality. Your padlock is now unlocked." Up to this point, Yunus had not been known to have composed poems. But obviously his poetic gifts were in a state of efflorescence throughout his long years of mystic contemplation. He breaks into poems, and the congregation becomes ecstatic. From that day on, Yunus is recognised as a great poet. The soulful man whose poems are eloquent, moving, pithy, profound, and compassionate turns into a legend throughout the land. Another story-probably apocryphal-describes an encounter between Rumi and Yunus Emre. Yunus, the folk poet, is face to face with the elder poet-philosopher Rumi, about whom Yunus once wrote: "His magnificent vision is the mirror of our hearts." Rumi is the author of the world-famous Mathnawi, called the Koran of Sufism, a masterpiece in about 26,000 couplets mainly about the doctrine that God is revealed by love in the mystic soul, in the pure man. According to the story, Yunus criticises Rumi for the bulk of the Mathnawi and states that he would have expressed the same idea in two lines: I took shape in flesh and bones, And came into sight as Yunus. It is also said that Rumi admitted he would not have written his huge magnum opus if he were able to make such pithy statements. Another Anatolian legend claims that Rumi once paid the following tribute to Yunus Emre's stature as a mystic: "Whenever I arrived at a new spiritual height, there I found the footsteps left by that Turkish mystic-and I could never surpass him." In the true tradition of the power that poetry wields over Turkish intellectual life, Yunus Emre soon becomes a force to contend with. Moslem dogmatists begin to regard him as a foe. According to a popular story whose authenticity cannot be determined, a traditionalist named Molla Kashm decides to destroy the transcriptions of Yunus Emre's poems. Getting hold of all of the poems, he sits on a river bank and starts tearing all the ones he finds heretical, and throws them into the river. After having destroyed about two thirds, he catches a glimpse of a poem whose last couplet has Yunus Emre's prediction about Molla Kashm. In the couplet, Yunus Emre warns himself: Dervish Yunus, utter no word that is not true: For a Molla Kasim will come to cross-examine you. When Molla Kasim reads this prediction, he realises the greatness of Yunus, and he immediately stops destroying the poems. It is said that the poems which have come down to us are those that escaped destruction in this way, but, in the process, two thirds of Yunus Emre's entire poetic output was presumably obliterated. In Yunus Emre's poetry, a unitary vision of man and nature is dominant. His humanism seeks to enrich human existence and to ennoble it by liberating man from dogma and by placing him in a relationship of love with God. His view of love is creative and versatile: In God's world there are a hundred thousand kinds of love. Yunus Emre's poetry is intensely human in its sentiments and humane in its concern for all, particularly for the plight of deprived people. He was the first-and the most successful-poet in Turkish history to create the "aesthetics of ethics." Much of his work is a testament to the equality of all men. He expressed this idea in metaphoric terms: Water out of the same fountain Cannot be both bitter and sweet, as well as in straight hortatory statements: See all people as equals, See the humble as heroes. In an age when hostilities, rifts, and destruction were rampant, Yunus Emre was able to give expression to an all-embracing love of humanity and to his concepts of universal brotherhood which transcended all schisms and sects: For those who truly love God and his ways All the people of the world are brothers. Yunus Emre's view of mysticism is closely allied with the concept that all men are born of God's love and that they are therefore equal and worthy of peace on earth. His plea for universal brotherhood is not unlike the "world citizenship" advocated by the ancient Stoics. His world-wide vision is related to the famous quatrain by Rumi who made a plea to all faiths for unity: Come, come again, whoever, whatever you may be, come; Heathen, fire-worshipper, sinful of idolatry, come. Come, even if you have broken your vows a hundred times; Ours is not the portal of despair or misery, come. Yunus Emre decried religious intolerance and dwelt on the "unity of humanity": We regard no one's religion as contrary to ours, True love is born when a11 faiths are united as a whole. Humanism upholds the ideal of the total community of mankind. Yunus Emre's humanist credo is also based on international understanding which transcends all ethnic, political and sectarian divisions: The man who doesn't sec the nations of the world as one Is a rebel even if the pious claim he's holy. Love, in his terms, unifies the world and dispenses with differences to such an extent that Yunus Emre is able to state: I bear malice against no one, Even strangers are friends of mine. This mystic moral attitude has echoes from a hadith (tradition), a statement ascribed to the Prophet: "Bear no malice against one another, do not covet each other nor turn a could shoulder to your fellow men. Vassals of God, be brothers." Mystic is what they call me, Hate is my only enemy; I harbor a grudge against none. To me the whole wide world is one. Yunus Emre's concern for his fellow men is in the celebrated tradition of Terentius' dictum: "Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto." (I am a man: Nothing human is alien to me.) In Yunus Emre's view, service to society is the ultimate moral ideal and the individual can find his own highest good in working for the benefit of all. His exhortations call for decent treatment of deprived people: To look askance at the lowly is the wrong way and for social interdependence and charity: Toil, carn, cat, and give others your wages. Our first duty is good character and good deeds. Hand out to others what you carn, Do the poor people a good turn. Yunus Emre was not contented with simple gnomic statements about charity and philanthropy. He was not a prophet or visionary, not an ordinary dervish engaged in evangelical work nor an ascetic monk. Although his religious thinking was steeped in metaphysical abstractions and his poetry occasionally given to dithyrambic outbursts, he was a man of the people and for the people-a spokesman for social justice. He stood in the mainstream of the humanist tradition which, from the outset, has claimed the moral right to criticise the establishment and the powers that be. Unlike the literary humanism of the Renaissance, which was elitist, Yunus Emre's humanism was populist. He spoke out courageously against the oppression of underprivileged people b, the rulers, landowners, wealthy men, officials, and religious leaders: Kindness of the lords ran its course, Now each one goes straddling a horse, They cat the flesh of the paupers, All they drink is the poor men's blood. He struck hard at the heartlessness of men in positions of power: Th lords are wild with wealth and might, Thy ignore the poor people's plight Immersed in selfhood which is blight, Their hearts arc shorn of charity. Yunus Emre also lambasted the illegitimate acquisitions of hypocrites who pose as men of high morals: Hypocrites claim they never make a gain Through any means which might be illicit; Th truth of it is: they only refrain When they are certain they cannot grab it. In poem after poem, he denigrated the orthodox views and the strict teachings of the pharisees: The preachers who usurp the Prophet's place Inflict distress and pain on the populace. Yunus Emre, despite his profound belief in the natural goodness of man, occasionally complained bitterly about the moral climate of his time: "Men of dark deeds are held in great esteem ... The novice ferociously fights his master ... Sons and mothers are locked in fierce combat. .." His most vehement criticisms are levelled at religious teachers and preachers who abuse the people and make a mockery of the fundamentals of the faith. Yunus Emre consistently rhapsodises the tenets of humanist ethics, a moral life based on love, and a poetic appreciation of God. He has no use whatever for the trappings of organised religion: True faith is in the head, not in the headgear. A single visit into the heart is Better than a hundred pilgrimages. The Moslem zealots, like the bigots of medieval Christianity, preached submission to God, denial of the human worth, and strict observance of religious practices. Yunus Emre and other mystics denigrated these views, which had as their concomitants an insistence on the hereafter with its Hell or Paradise and a preoccupation with the punishment that God inflicts. The dogma dwelt on the fear of a God of punishment (mysterium tremendum). The mystic felt the love of a God of mercy and compassion (mysterium fascionum), and sought to arrive at a sense of arete or virtues, the truly human kind of excellence. Yunus Emre's poems are full of the concept of the supremacy of love for true faith: For heaven's sake, what is faith or creed without love? The heart is where God's truth rests. The true lovers of God have no craving for 'Paradise. They strive beyond Paradise to arrive at His domain. Yunus Emre directs his scathing satire at bigots who offer narrow, superficial, and formalistic interpretations of Islam. He brings some orthodox views into a sharp focus in a devastating poem. Heaven's bridge is sharper than a sword, thinner than hair. You know, I d like to go on it and build houses right there. Way down below the bridge, raging with flames, crackles Hell's pit, I want to walk over to its shade and lie there a bit. Because I call your fire a shade, don't scold me, pharisees; May it please you, I think a little burning is a bliss. Himself posing as a hypocrite who projects devoutness and puts on airs of piety, Yunus Emre lampoons the clergy: In public I am pious, always seen with my prayer beads; My tongue arms the ways of God, not that my heart accedes. They kiss my hands, they take my cap and cape for religion; They think I am the way I look, they think I commit no sin. Claiming that the true believer "Has no hope of Paradise nor fear of Hell," the mystic poet is capable of taking even God himself to task: You set a scale to weigh deeds, for your aim Is to hurl me into Hell's crackling flame. You can see everything, you know me-fine |