Middle Eastern Literatures, Vol. 10, No. 2, August 2007 Sex in the Text: Deli Birader’s Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm and the Ottoman Literary Canon SELIM S. KURU Downloaded By: [University of Washington Libraries] At: 05:05 10 June 2011 Abstract The present Ottoman literary canon ignores texts with sexual content. Due to the use of sexually explicit vocabulary employed in them, many texts both in prose and poetry remain in manuscript form without being edited and translated. Even if such texts are being edited, their sexual content and meaning as well as their function within a classical literary tradition are not explored. This article provides a close reading of a sixteenth century collection of sexually explicit stories, Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm, by Ottoman author Deli Birader, in an attempt to situate this work within the literary canon of Ottoman literature; while doing this, it presents a cursory view of the Ottoman literary canon as it developed over the course of centuries. When he was done, the boy stood up and farted several times on the sheik’s exhausted head. He said, ‘Oh what pleasure you gave me!’ and left. Then the leader of the pederasts came forward. Putting his arm around the former sheikh of fornicators’ neck, he said, ‘Now you are one of us and on our team.’ They hugged and kissed each other. It was as if two pigs knocked each other with their asses. Seeing this situation, the rest of the fornicators proceeded to take the hand of the pederast sheik. They ceased to love girls and followed the new path of their chief. Some of the fornicators though, mired in stubbornness, tried to resist. Hearing their words, the pederasts killed some of them and took some as prisoners. They chased some of them and stuffed them into the cave of vagina, some they crammed into the crotch. When fornicators saw that it is not a place to enter due to the impure and filthy waters and stink and bad smells of that notorious mountainous region, they stopped at its door while pederasts continued pushing them with spears of penises from their spacious vantage. (70)1 How do we evaluate such a paragraph? What was the author of this text thinking when he wrote it, in Ottoman-Turkish, for his patron, one of the possible heirs to the Ottoman throne in the sixteenth century? Taken out of a lengthy narrative on a debate between ‘women-lovers’ and ‘boy-lovers’, this section represents how the debate ends with the victory of boy-lovers. A literary composition, Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm, or The Expeller of Sorrows and Remover of Worries, that was written in the early sixteenth century Selim S. Kuru, University of Washington, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations 353120 Seattle, WA 98195 USA. E-mail: selims@u.washington.edu ISSN 1475-262X print/ISSN 1475-2638 online/07/020157-18 Ó 2007 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14752620701437531 Downloaded By: [University of Washington Libraries] At: 05:05 10 June 2011 158 S. S. Kuru in Ottoman-Turkish and that was produced and reproduced in manuscript form, but has never been printed until today, introduces this debate as an opening section for a collection of sexually explicit stories from written and oral sources. The work is cited in contemporary literary histories and modern encyclopaedic works as an original yet strange work without any attempt for analysis. In this article to investigate the challenge posed by this text to the established Ottoman literary canon, I interweave two topics: a general discussion of the present canon of Ottoman Turkish literature, and an introduction to this particular text and the questions it raises with respect to the established canon. A discussion of the present canon is crucial for my reading of Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm, which is original since it redefines this text as an important literary creation, disclosing different layers of meaning that may not be clearly visible. As my analysis will show, the Ottoman literary canon must be revised in order to accommodate works such as Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm. Two major arguments underlie my approach to Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm. First, I shall argue that the production of sexually explicit texts in Ottoman literature peaked in the early sixteenth century, and that these texts were swiftly silenced thereafter. Second, I claim that the slighting of such texts by Ottoman authors and by modern scholarship helped to establish a monolithic picture of Ottoman Turkish literature. The canon’s denial of the value of texts like Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm negates our recognition of such literature as a product of culture with an organic relation to the society in which it was produced. Thus, a sweeping description of Ottoman literature in reference to a canon made up of repetitive and strictly rule-bound ‘medieval’ poetry2 denies the larger context of the historical processes through which literature was produced, and in so doing, limits our understanding of Ottoman culture. The Ottoman literary canon Even though the Ottoman literary canon fails to recognise them, literary representations of sexuality were common in the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire. Literary patrons must have been interested in the topic, for authors produced collections of sexually explicit poetry, anthologies of sexual jokes and autobiographical anecdotes with sexual content at this point in Ottoman history.3 Although these works differ in form and content, they are usually evaluated under one generic grouping: hezel, or facetiae.4 These works are preserved unedited, in manuscript format. There are a few bowdlerized editions and compilations of stories drawn from these works, but they by no means offer a definitive basis for academic examination.5 A better description of these works will allow us a more thorough evaluation of their emergence during the mid-sixteenth century. While Ottoman authors were probably aware of the existence of sexually explicit works in Arabic and Persian before this period, there are few studies about what kind of relationship they had with such works. In fact, we still do not know what kind of a canon of Arabic and Persian literature existed for Ottoman learned men in any particular period, except for the titles of certain texts vaguely mentioned in other works. Ottoman authors most probably had come across samples of sexually explicit texts before, as well as after, the sixteenth century. Unfortunately, a comprehensive history of manuscript production in the Ottoman Empire, which would shed light on these questions as well as on the question of readership and reception, is still lacking. Downloaded By: [University of Washington Libraries] At: 05:05 10 June 2011 Sex in the Text 159 I should note that there was strong resistance to such works even as they were being written. Authors of the sixteenth century and afterwards who occupied powerful positions in the Ottoman Empire seem to have ignored these works as unworthy of consideration. Like today, they were relegated to the footnotes of scholarly studies of Ottoman literary history.6 If one reads through Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm it is clear that despite its critical neglect by scholarship, this sexually explicit text presents a well-structured work of literature, which organizes folk and elite texts on sexuality through a skilful employment of high-cultural stylistics and forms, realising a coherent literary text. In the following I intend to demonstrate that a study of similar texts will enrich our understanding of Ottoman literary history while at the same time posing a serious challenge to the established Ottoman literary canon.7 General histories of Ottoman literature as they have been written thus far read as chronological lists of texts and authors. Scholars in Turkey and abroad, who have produced valuable studies of authors’ lives and critical editions of their works, generally impose upon Ottoman literature the outmoded scheme of genesis, rise, and decline that has been used to define the overall history of the Ottoman Empire.8 Recent historical studies of the empire, on the other hand, provide promising opportunities to understand Ottoman literature in its own historical context and thus, to overstep the boundaries of the prevalent conventional approaches to it. Recent work on the cultural history of the empire will contribute to a more inclusive approach to Ottoman literature. This inclusive approach, in turn, will help to interpret the rich body of sexually explicit works, which has been marginalized by a restricted understanding of Ottoman literature.9 Even though some of these texts have been published in article format, we still lack a comprehensive list of them; or do we have a way to evaluate them in the context of the existing canon of Ottoman Turkish literature? This problem is not surprising given that our study of Islamicate literatures is limited by our incomplete understanding of their function in the cultures that produced them. The present approach then shares this feature with the established canon in that it offers at most a limited understanding of Ottoman Turkish literature, detached from its social world. There is a growing interest in Ottoman literature in Turkey today, yet sexually explicit works are still studied mostly to strengthen nationalist arguments against the moral values of Ottoman elites, since literature which purposefully intertwines fiction and fact offers an easy target for such attacks. Ottoman literary works with sexually explicit material are targeted in order to deprecate them as perverse productions that reflect the perversity of a homogeneous group of writers and readers, simply called ‘Osmanlılar’, i.e. Ottomans. Thus such ahistorically subjective readings of Ottoman literary texts are utilized to prove that modern sexual norms of the nation-state are superior. For instance, one of the most important researchers of Ottoman cultural studies, Abdülbaki Gölpınarlı, openly attacked Ottoman literature as perverse in his fierce 1945 critique, Divan Edebiyatı Beyanındadır, or On Ottoman Court Literature.10 In this work, he claims that the depiction of young boys as the beloved in lyric poetry points to the inferior morality of Ottoman poets. Other researchers generalised and carried on this approach in order to condemn the whole canon of Ottoman poetry.11 The more prevalent and institutionalised academic approach, on the other hand, totally denies the erotic voice as worthy of study. This approach claims that Ottoman poetry has nothing to do with human love, and is only concerned with allegorical, mystic infatuation.12 Works with exclusively sexual themes are anachronistically labelled pornography, or simply ‘ugly,’ and are thus categorised as lacking any literary value or scholarly worth.13 Though these Downloaded By: [University of Washington Libraries] At: 05:05 10 June 2011 160 S. S. Kuru two approaches may include some valid points, together they create a vicious circle that obstructs the serious academic consideration of Ottoman textualisations of sexuality. These two approaches – the total neglect of them or the condemnation of sexually explicit texts – have their roots in late-nineteenth-century literary criticism. During the nineteenth century, there emerged a new understanding of literature in the Ottoman Empire, an understanding facilitated by contemporaneous Ottoman poets. They transformed the traditional form and content of poetry by drawing on the Western tradition. This mid-nineteenth-century shift from Persianate forms of Ottoman literature to Westernised forms marks an important break. It suggests that new ideals and moral values, together with new forms of cultural production, were beginning to dominate Ottoman cultural domains. The ‘modern’ intellectuals of the late Ottoman Empire cast classical Ottoman literature into the ideological margins, asserting that poetry was merely copied from Persian originals and characterising it as the cultural production of the ‘Palace’.14 This shift followed the change in patronage relations in an empire where a bureaucratic elite gained some sort of autonomy as new forms of patronage appeared. The intellectual cadres of the ‘new literature’ in the Ottoman Empire were drawn from this bureaucratic elite. Hostile attitudes towards the conservative elite emerged during the late-nineteenth-century and were strengthened with the establishment of the Republic in 1923. The social transformation of the secular state determined the tragic fate of this older literature, the single most dominant theme of which was the blurred boundary between the secular and divine. Despite the important ideological break with the past signified by the establishment of Turkish Republic as a secular nation state, Turkish universities retained some of the older traditions. Scholars working on Ottoman literature had, after all, been educated in the pre-Republican era and trained in educational institutions of the Ottoman Empire which, however much modernised, still incorporated some elements of Arabic and Persian, the building blocks of classical Ottoman literature. Somewhat paradoxically, a handful of scholars simultaneously represented an old school of thought and disseminated a new approach to Ottoman literature. They continued to work according to the scheme established in the wake of the Tanzimat period (1839). As noted above, this scheme presented Ottoman literature as the production of a small group of poets who curried the favour of Palace elites and who produced similar works that were basically copies of Arabic and mostly Persian originals. This scheme still constitutes the canon of Ottoman literature, which casts its long shadows over much of today’s scholarship. The present canon is well defined in encyclopaedias, anthologies, and textbooks, and is taught in the Turkish Language and Literature departments of universities. The canon relies on an established set of categories and generalisations, and portrays Ottoman literature as a monolithic entity, devoid of historically determined characteristics.15 And it deliberately neglects many important aspects of Ottoman literary culture. For example, according to this canon, Ottoman literature is necessarily written in Turkish. Studies of a particular author, accordingly, consider his or her Turkish works, and more often than not overlook the fact that authors tended to know at least one other language. In fact, most Ottoman authors wrote in Arabic and Persian as well as Turkish, and their sources could be written in any or all of these languages.16 The established canon suggests a distinction between two schools of Ottoman literature. In textbooks and scholarly studies, court literature is strictly and consistently distinguished from religious and mystical literature, or so-called Sufi literature. Downloaded By: [University of Washington Libraries] At: 05:05 10 June 2011 Sex in the Text 161 This distinction ignores the multifaceted and close relationship of the court and its authors to the heterodox/Sufi orders. Consequently, most textbooks imagine a profane court, which patronised a corrupt form of literature, and a religiously stratified dervish lodge, which sponsored a mystical form of literature. With respect to imagery and formal features, however, works classified under the headings of court literature and Sufi literature were the same. All Ottoman Muslim authors dealt with a complex system of mystical imagery, which drew on a particular conception of Islam. This particular conception in turn was delineated, refined, strengthened and promoted by the Ottoman state beginning in the sixteenth century. Furthermore, Ottomans did not distinguish between so-called Sufi poets and so-called Palace poets. A critical analysis of the relations between the dervish lodge and the Palace should disrupt this reductive and canonical distinction. The canon further distinguishes court and Sufi literatures from so-called folk literature, which is defined as truly ‘Turkish’ and ahistorically ‘national’ in comparison. Thus, the complexity of Ottoman Turkish literary culture is lost as a result of the imposition of these three categories: court, Sufi and folk literatures. These categories imply a class-based society made up of a ruling elite, a community of Sufis, and ‘the people.’ Each of these groups is imagined to be homogeneous, and the possibility of interaction between them is disregarded. This categorization needs revision, given that Ottoman society was more complicated than this schematic portrayal would suggest. Another misleading characteristic of the accepted canon is that it defines Ottoman literature as poetry, by which is meant a synchronic system that repeats itself constantly, resists change, and eventually turns into mere word play. This view prevents us from seeking a historically situated interpretation of this poetry, which might explain its persistence and cultural relevance over the course of at least 500 years. Furthermore, it prevents us from seeing the internal transformations of poetry and the evolution in the taste of poets and patrons. Ultimately, such a view of poetry fails to help us understand the presence of poetry in all sorts of works, from religious works to jokes and lampoons. Ottoman literature may indeed rely on a depository of poetic imagery, but today’s canon fails to represent its variety, and consider how it determined the dominant rhetorical structures that constitute the discursive convention that favours poetry over prose,17 In contrast to both the canonical portrayal of lyrical poetry as the central form of Ottoman literature, and the panegyric as the main sign of the corruption of a ‘free’ poet, several authors’ extant works show much variation. The present scholarship pushes chronograms, verse narratives of different genres, prose works, and several other genres to the margins of the canon. To conclude this brief account of the Ottoman Turkish literary canon, we should also note its vagueness. Rather than relying on lists of masterpieces, this canon is genrebound, and its emphasis on verse over prose parallels the convictions of many nineteenth-century Ottoman authors. In effect, prose texts, even those that combine both verse and prose, are treated as unproblematic major-source material, and rarely subjected to analytic study. Further, the addition of a scandalously sexual vocabulary to prose works causes these hezel-amiz, or facetious works, to be entirely neglected and marginalised as inconsequential to our understanding of Ottoman literature.18 A story never told before The text quoted at the beginning of this article, Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm, resists and challenges the canon outlined above. Even though sex was conspicuous in Downloaded By: [University of Washington Libraries] At: 05:05 10 June 2011 162 S. S. Kuru story collections and medical books before Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm, this text is the first Ottoman Turkish work, to my knowledge, that makes illicit sexuality the central theme of a literary composition. In trying to situate this work within the body of Ottoman literature, I have found that it is difficult to historicise and analyse this text or similar texts within the established norms of the field. My main objective in introducing this text is to situate this work, which has been reproduced for centuries in manuscript form, in the literary history of the Ottoman Empire, in order to display several gaps in the present canon outlined above.19 Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm was composed some time between 1483 and 1511, most probably in Manisa, at the provincial court of Prince Korkud (1467 – 1513), one of the sons of Beyazid II. The author’s name was Mehmed, but he would later become famous as Deli Birader, or ‘Crazy Brother’ (d. 1535), and he used the penname _ Gazalı̂ for his poems. Born in Bursa, he was educated in Istanbul. After his education, Deli Birader held a position as a müderris, or professor, at the Bayezid Pasha Medresesi in Bursa, and later attended Korkud’s court. His two extant works from this period of his life were dedicated to Korkud through Piyale Bey, one of Korkud’s courtiers.20 Deli Birader’s major work, Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm, was composed in response to a wish of Piyale Bey’s. After hearing other people’s accounts of their amorous adventures, Piyale Bey declared, ‘I wish there was an interesting collection, and a curious book, which would compile such pleasant jokes, and witty conversations, so that in days of sorrow and times of anxiety, reading from it would bring exhilaration to the confused of hearts, and relief to sad lovers’ (40). Upon hearing this wish, which is related in his introduction (38 – 42), Deli Birader composed Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm. As already mentioned, this book appears to be the first literary work in Ottoman Turkish that directly and exclusively deals with sexual ‘vice’. In Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm illicit forms of sexuality appear in seven chapters, which are presented under the following subtitles: (1) The benefits of marriage and sexual intercourse (43 – 55); (2) The war between the pederasts and the fornicators (57 – 71); (3) How to enjoy the company of boys (72 – 104); (4) How to enjoy the company of girls (105 – 129); (5) Masturbation, nocturnal emissions and bestiality (130 – 137); (6) The passive homosexuals (138 – 142); (7) The pimps (143 – 149). These classifications tell us much about the work: those depicted under these headings are all objects and/or perpetrators of illicit sexual passion. Women, boys, girls, passive homosexuals and animals are all listed as sexual objects for men. Since all extra-marital sexual intercourse was considered illicit in Ottoman society of the period, it is clear that this text explicitly examines forbidden sexual practices. Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm is written mainly in prose. In each chapter, there are definitions and classifications of sexual passion; generally these are followed by two or more couplets. These epigrams summarise the topic under examination.21 There are also longer poetic digressions with a repeating rhyme, generally in the form of an ode dedicated to the topic of the chapter. Deli Birader follows each definition with stories, anecdotes and witticisms drawn from traditional sources in Arabic and Persian and from contemporary oral traditions. These formal characteristics are consistently employed throughout the text. I claimed above that this text is a classified list of sex objects of men who engage in illicit sexual relationships and male masturbation, but an exception to this rule occurs in the book’s first chapter, which deals with marriage. In this chapter, after listing the benefits of marriage, Deli Birader includes a section that appraises sexual intercourse. Downloaded By: [University of Washington Libraries] At: 05:05 10 June 2011 Sex in the Text 163 When revealing the origin of sexual passion, the author differentiates women from men (49 – 50). According to his explanation, at the beginning of time, God had divided sexual passion into ten parts, and gave nine to Eve and only one to Adam, making women more passionate than men. Even though Eve was later slashed with the whip of modesty by the Archangel Gabriel, and straightened herself up, not all women followed her example. Such passionate women, who defy modesty, are characterised as a major threat to men. In short then, this chapter, though seemingly unrelated to sexual vice, in fact opens the door for the following chapters. That Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm is intended for a male audience, who are entitled to penetrate, is clear in the ‘how to’ sections on boys and girls. In the third chapter, boys and men as objects of sexual desire are classified according to their ages (77 – 81); girls and women are defined accordingly in the following fourth chapter (105 – 107). Age determines two major categories in this classification: one physical, the other cultural. For example, young boys and young girls are depicted as physically more suitable for maximum sexual pleasure, due to their ‘freshness’ and ‘tightness’. Women who have given birth to many children are classified as the worst possible sexual partners in this respect. Also, young men with body hair are less acceptable, since body hair is considered problematic for the ease of penetration. In short, childbirth experience and body hair appear as signs of ageing and are undesirable physical attributes in a sex partner. As for cultural aspects, Deli Birader considers young boys to be the best targets of seduction, for they are easily tempted by little gifts, or a few silver coins and because they naturally inhabit the all-male public sphere. Virgins are presented as the least threatening partners due to their lack of previous experiences or high expectations. While penetrating a boy emasculates him and eliminates any threat to the masculine identity of the perpetrator, a virgin without any experience poses no threat by virtue of her femininity. These differing treatments of boys and girls provide an important contrast. Throughout the text, Deli Birader gives several examples that establish women as active sex partners, while boys are presented as pacified men. As soon as they taste sexual pleasure, as with Eve, women’s abundant passion makes them insatiable partners capable of wearing men out. Women’s passion is threatening, and thus they, rather than boys, present a challenge to the male ego.22 Boys, on the other hand, are undemanding partners, as their pleasure is not considered at all. They are either taken by force or sodomised by a trick. Boys are further characterised as better partners because they are accessible to men, and unable to resist seduction. Women, and especially young girls, are indicated to match boys in terms of physical pleasure, but several anecdotes relate the dangers they pose in illicit relationships. In spite of these factors, most anecdotes imply that accessibility is the major reason for the choice of boys as ideal sex partners. Love and sexual positions are discussed, interestingly, in the third chapter, which is about boys, rather than the preceding chapter on women. Love is defined separately from sexual passion. Where love and sexual passion intersect, the lover who attains his desire is called hasisü ’l-aşıkin, a contemptible lover, and re’isü ’l-fasikin, leader of sinners. Those who are content merely to kiss and hug are called aşık-ı sadık, loyal lovers.23 These titles, used only to denote relations with boys, are not mentioned in the chapter on women. As for the sexual positions described, they are clearly intended for male-to-male relations. One manuscript copy of the work records this section in the chapter on women, but the descriptions of positions always mentions ‘a boy’.24 Downloaded By: [University of Washington Libraries] At: 05:05 10 June 2011 164 S. S. Kuru After these two sections, Deli Birader’s classification seems to become incoherent, or haphazard. Why are masturbation, nocturnal emissions and bestiality evaluated together in the fifth chapter? Perhaps the common theme here is the method of sexual satisfaction in the absence of boys or girls. If so, this classification lends support to the interpretation of this text as a hierarchical list of preferences.25 Passive homosexuals are introduced in the sixth chapter. Deli Birader argues that the sperm of young boys who have just entered adolescence inspires an excessive sexual appetite in the women or men who have intercourse with them. If a woman or a man has sexual intercourse with a young boy, the young boy’s sperm turns into a worm in the woman’s womb or the man’s anus (138). This worm craves sperm, creating an itch in these organs. The craving expresses itself in the increased sexual appetite of the afflicted individual. An individual so afflicted is considered a rencur, or a sick person. Even though Deli Birader’s explanation fosters some tolerance for passive homosexuals by ascribing their sexual desire to a sickness, they are still mentioned in this pantheon as one of the objects of aberrant desire. This anecdote further confines boys as passive objects of love, through a forewarning to men (and interestingly, to women in a work intended for men) not to be on the receiving side of sexual relations with young boys. Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm neglects to mention certain types of sexual partnerships. For example, incest and oral sex are not referenced at all. Incest is a topic in legal documents of this period; in fact, such documents clearly define and delineate the blood relatives with whom one is allowed to have sex. It is possible that the prohibition of incest was taken too seriously and its transgression punished too severely, for Deli Birader to consider incest even in a work of this sort. As for oral sex, I have not come across any mention of it whatsoever in Ottoman Turkish literature.26 Still, it would be premature to jump to conclusions about the absence of any mention of incest and oral sex in Deli Birader’s work until we have editions of the other works in this genre. The wanton world of sexual sinners In the second chapter,27 Deli Birader depicts a debate between pederasts and fornicators, with the Devil as the mediator. This section includes odes on the anus and vagina (64 – 65, 68 – 69),28 and readers are invited to reflect upon the sexual passions of pederasts and fornicators as they consider the debate over the relative merits of the two sexual organs in question.29 The debate starts and ends with a plethora of descriptions of pederasts and fornicators. Deli Birader’s descriptions are especially detailed when he focuses on the garments they wear. The Devil, as the mediator of the debate, dresses and acts just like a Sufi; the fornicators dress like women and take on feminine mannerisms; and the pederasts, who are described like warriors, are manly and fierce. While the detailed description of the Devil as a Sufi is, without question, indicative of a negative attitude towards the members of certain Sufi orders, the descriptions of the fornicators and the pederasts are more difficult to explain. The gendered distinction between them becomes clearer, however, when one considers the possible social positions of those who have easy access to women and those of lower social stature who have access only to boys. The description of the feminised and etiquette-bound fornicators contrasts sharply with that of the warrior-like pederasts, and these descriptions correspond closely to two distinct social groups: the bureaucratic elite and the soldiers. Deli Birader suggests that elite-fornicators have easier access to women Downloaded By: [University of Washington Libraries] At: 05:05 10 June 2011 Sex in the Text 165 in their urban setting and that soldier-pederasts have access primarily to boys in their allmale barracks. Contrary to the convictions of our day, this section of the text implies that relationships with women emasculate men, while those with boys enhance masculinity. Deli Birader’s implication seems to parallel the aforementioned contrast between boys and women as sex objects, since women’s insatiable passion exhausts and corrupts men. As such, they are depicted in many anecdotes as being more ‘active’ than the male. This chapter does not adapt to the formal characteristics of the rest of the work. It has no definitions of practices. It is not embellished with stories and anecdotes. Rather, it is a unique narrative, using symbolic descriptions of another world where fornicators and pederasts, those who follow the Devil, engage in wars and debates. The text still makes use of poetic digressions to strengthen the arguments of each party, but these digressions are more complex and made up of longer verses reflecting a debate contest, unlike the two-line verses in the following chapters. At the end of this chapter, the pederasts win the debate by attesting to the greater accessibility of boys as opposed to women and by pointing out the potentially disastrous consequences of illicit relationships with women. The Devil rewards the pederasts by promising them the offspring of adulterous relationships. With this final solution, he resolves the debates and prevents the fight between his two groups of followers, and the world of vicious sinners is separated for good from the world of pious believers. In short, this chapter, immediately following the one on marriage, establishes Deli Birader’s interest in the dark world of sexual sinners, which includes perpetrators of illicit sexual relationships, carriers of abominable passions, and agents of sexual intercourse. The objects of their desire are listed, along with popular anecdotes and tales, and embellished with poetic digressions, in the following five chapters (i.e. chapters 3 – 7 described above). In keeping with the emphasis on accessibility, the order of presentation is determined by the relative accessibility of the object of desire. Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm is transgressive on many counts. First its outrageous accounts of sexual behaviour would almost certainly have inspired in the reader bursts of laughter. To this end, the text relies on witty remarks, painstaking descriptions, anecdotes, tales and poems about illicit forms of sexuality and its objects; and therefore it repels sorrow and removes heavy thoughts as its name promises to do. In a way, these amusing stories offer a form of escapism.30 Furthermore, the way in which Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm makes use of humour as a means innocuously to stratify, control and perpetuate established convictions about gender positions and relations is itself transgressive. In a way, by being read without being published (as jokes are performed rather than read), such texts still continue to realise their intended function: suppression and/or control of aberrant behaviour.31 Despite its formal peculiarities, Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm is one of these texts. Biographical anecdotes, story compilations, lyric poetry, satirical works and debate contests all mock transgressive behaviour, thus condemning, suppressing and censoring what is deemed unacceptable. A canon in the making The standard canon of Ottoman literature, promoted in Ottoman literary anthologies and adopted almost verbatim into the curricula of universities, sorely neglects works like Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm, which is as interesting for its formal characteristics as for its content. How are we to fit Deli Birader’s text into the Ottoman literary canon? Downloaded By: [University of Washington Libraries] At: 05:05 10 June 2011 166 S. S. Kuru In the limited number of cases in which sexually oriented texts in Islamicate literatures have been studied, they have generally been studied as social, not literary, examples. Most modern scholarship on these texts makes no attempt to contextualise them, but instead makes generalisations about the social and sexual practices described, using only a limited study of texts. As a result, the function and ‘use’ of such works has not been sufficiently evaluated, if at all. Furthermore, the comic element in works like Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm has not received the attention they deserve. If we consider Ottoman literature to be an amalgam of several forms and functions and consider the utility of scandal and comedy, we can appreciate the complexity of Deli Birader’s work, which otherwise seems to be little more than a record of sixteenth-century shower room talk. An understanding of the formation of the Ottoman literary canon definitely demands more detailed research on manuscript publishing and the dissemination of certain texts (especially those in Persian or Arabic) in the Ottoman Empire. Here, I offer an overview of how critics have evaluated Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm from the time it was published until today and how individual evaluations pushed this particular work to the margins of Ottoman literature. Between the late-fifteenth and the early-sixteenth centuries, a number of poetic innovations were produced, which varied from the mystical to the profane. Furthermore, poetic imagery had already permeated all levels of society under the patronage of the _ state elite, including grand vizier Ibrahim Paşa (1493 – 1536) and the powerful _ bureaucrat Iskender Çelebi (d. 1534), both of whom would later be executed at the start of an era of increasing religious stratification.32 Deli Birader’s contemporary critics considered him an author of mocking and graphic works, as well as a scholar. The sexually explicit content of his work was not, however, favoured by the court after the 1550s, when a Sunni revival occurred in reaction to the Shiite challenge from the East. Several literary and historical works of the ensuing period report complaints by poets about a decrease in the income they formerly enjoyed from the court. Clearly, there was some change in the Palace’s attitude towards poets. This shift was undoubtedly related to the fact that as the empire was beginning to have difficulties in its programme of conquest, poets who were expressing themes other than the power of the sultan and mystical experiences of the world experienced a decline in popularity and official tolerance.33 The literary canon, in other words, underwent a transformation. The major influence on the establishment of the Ottoman literary canon at this time was the emergence of the tezkire, or ‘biographies of poets’, genre in the sixteenth century. Already a popular genre in other Islamic literary traditions, the first Ottoman work of this sort appeared in 1538, framing Turkish literature in the Ottoman Empire. This work relates information about the birthplace, education and life style of Anatolian poets with examples of their verses. It achieved long-lasting popularity, as many extant manuscript copies from different periods testify. This first biographical dictionary started a fad, and two more works of a similar nature followed it within approximately 30 years.34 By penning introductions on the meaning and nature of poetry, and by including more or less the same group of poets from a 150-year period, these first biographers not only started a long tradition of biographical dictionaries,35 they also paved the way for a rigidly established canon.36 Interestingly enough, although the content of Deli Birader’s work was transgressive, its reception by some sixteenth-century biographers (who remain not only the primary Sex in the Text 167 biographers of Ottoman poets, but the authoritative critics of this period as well) seems to have been very positive. Gelibolulu Mustafa Âlı̂ (1541 – 1600) mentions Deli Birader’s work and quotes a lyric poem from the work with the repeating rhyme büzük, or anus: Downloaded By: [University of Washington Libraries] At: 05:05 10 June 2011 He composed a novel work and truly passed beyond all his predecessors in this genre, and in this work he composed excellent couplets and quatrains. Among these, the following is famous for its originality, so much so that reading it compares with orgasm: It opens like a smiling rose, O anus, And closes a rosebud-lip in wonder, O anus! The vagina is a house built in a narrow place like the crotch, But, it is in a plaza to play boccie ball, O anus!37 But an earlier response to Deli Birader is not so favourable. The first biographer of Ottoman poets, Sehı̂ Bey (1470 – 1548), complained: ‘Maybe Deli Birader wrote unparalleled poetry, but his lampoons are so ugly that it is impossible for the heart not to be disgusted by them. To put such lampoons into this clean book is not proper, nothing of that sort is quoted here.’38 Aşık Çelebi’s (1520 – 1569) biographical dictionary of poets from the sixteenth century could be considered the swan song of an era.39 Aşık Çelebi, like his successor Kınalızade Hasan Çelebi (1546 – 1604), devotes his lengthiest section to Deli Birader.40 Both biographers express favourable opinions of Deli Birader’s work, but they do not quote from Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm as Mustafa Âlı̂ does. These are diverse opinions, ranging from excessive reverence, in the case of Mustafa Âlı̂, to disgust in Sehı̂, but they do not change the fact that Deli Birader’s sexually explicit subject matter did not in any way seem to hinder his career. On the contrary, he was appointed a sheik to a dervish lodge after writing Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm, and was a scholar at several institutions of higher education, where he taught Islamic law.41 Although originally a part of public discourse, Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm has been sequestered to the private domain by recent scholarship that excludes Deli Birader’s work from the Ottoman literary canon. Its exclusion however does not mean that this text is not known. The existence of many manuscript copies from several centuries testifies to the fact that this text was never forgotten, and never fell from popularity. Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm became a literary text that was being read and, most probably, mentioned but never seriously dealt with. In fact, Deli Birader’s authorial voice was an erotic one – an erotic voice that was constrained, stabilised and appropriated by a change of taste in the Empire. Biographical dictionaries from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were increasingly like anthologies in nature and touched little on poets’ lives, except for one work. This exceptional work, including information about the poets, sheiks and artists of Bursa was composed in that city in 1723, almost 200 years after the composition of Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm _ ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm. The author, Ismail Belig, relates a story in which, repenting for composing such an ugly work of literature, Deli Birader attempts to destroy all extant copies of his work. I cannot however find any trace of this story in contemporary sources _ Belig, whose taste differed from from the sixteenth century.42 I hypothesise that Ismail that of Deli Birader and his readers, was in fact responsible for this tale of repentance. This effort to divorce Deli Birader from his work, through a story of repentance was echoed in a recent publication on Ottoman poets by a Turkish scholar. In amazing 168 S. S. Kuru Downloaded By: [University of Washington Libraries] At: 05:05 10 June 2011 _ _ detail, Iskender Pala builds upon Ismail Belig’s account to explain how Deli Birader repented and secluded himself in Mecca out of shame and describes how he paid enormous sums of money to collect all extant copies of Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve râfi‘ü ’l-humûm.43 However, the contents of a letter sent by Deli Birader from Mecca to his poet friends in Istanbul towards the end of his life proves that he had not abandoned the genre of erotic or pornographic texts. In this verse letter, he uses several derogatory, 44 _ _ _ sexual words to mock or insult his enemies in Istanbul. Ismail Belig and Iskender Pala’s fallacious accounts of Deli Birader’s repentance provide telling examples of the ways in which a characterisation of a work or author substantiates and perpetuates a chain of stories that may have little basis in fact. At this point I want to make another assumption and consider the reading of erotic or pornographic works ‘silent readings.’ Silent readings suppress the transgressive voice and confine it to private spheres; even in our time, pornographic texts are primarily consumed in such a manner. In contrast, early Ottoman eroticism seems to have been produced in a period of ‘reading aloud,’ where sexual anecdotes, shared as jokes, were included in circulating literature and widely commented upon and where poets could name the objects of their desire even in lyric poems.45 Compilations of jokes included those that were shared by men in social gatherings. Zati (1471 – 1546) and Fakiri’s (early sixteenth century) letâyifs are not only small joke books, but also collections of literary anecdotes, which show how these poets used verse to interact with the society in which they lived. Several poets, such as Me’ali (d. 1536), beautified and openly expressed ‘worldly’ love for their beloveds, using their names (Mustafa, Ali, etc.) in their poems.46 It appears that this period came to an end after the sixteenth century. From then onwards, sexually graphic works were relegated to private collections: they were still being reproduced and read, but did not receive a warm reception from the palace or praise from historians, probably due to a lack of interest from patrons. Most probably, a transformation in patronage relations pushed Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm and similar texts to the margins, and they were (and currently are) read silently. Instead of being discussed openly and commented on, just like poets’ life stories and anecdotes about them, sexually explicit texts and discussion of sexuality receded to the realm of story collections, medical and encyclopaedic works. Indeed, sexuality would never be the main topic of another text after Deli Birader and his circle were rendered, particularly by great biographer of poets Aşık Çelebi, a wanton group in the 1530s. Several manuscripts produced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries testify to the fact that Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm was read silently, i.e. read, copied, but not mentioned elsewhere. After these years of ‘silent reading,’ we next encounter Deli Birader’s name in the nineteenth century, the century that initiated a completely different chapter in Ottoman literature. In 1837, Deli Birader’s life and works were studied by Joseph Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall in his history of Ottoman poetry. In this work, Hammer-Purgstall compares Deli Birader to the Italian poet Aretino (1492 – 1556). In Rome in 1524 (approximately ten years after Deli Birader composed Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm), Aretino published sonnets on 16 sexual positions, and barely escaped punishment for this act by taking refuge in Florence.47 Interestingly enough, though Hammer-Purgstall condemns Deli Birader’s work as offensive, he also considers its formal aspects to be perfect.48 Hammer-Purgstall was not alone: other critics who mention that they were repulsed by Deli Birader’s work also admit that his work demonstrates an exemplary use of stylistic devices in both verse and prose. Sex in the Text 169 Downloaded By: [University of Washington Libraries] At: 05:05 10 June 2011 Elias John Wilkinson Gibb was an influential critic at the end of the nineteenth century and is still considered an authority on Ottoman literature. In the introduction to his translation of the famous story cycle, The Histories of Forty Viziers (1886), he carefully makes the following excuse for transliterating three stories into Latin script (but not translating or publishing them in Arabic script), one of which is found also in Deli Birader’s work: Being products of a more outspoken age, many of the following tales are, as was to be expected, of a character that is contrary to the taste of the present time. I have, however, omitted nothing in this book; but in the case of a few isolated passages and of three entire stories, the nature of which is such as to preclude the possibility of their publication in these days, I have been content to print the original transliterated into the Roman alphabet, but untranslated. The three stories in question are very similar in character in many of the Fabliaux, and I have little doubt that variants of them exist in one or more of the many collections of these tales. All such matters, it should be added, are as offensive to the modern Ottoman as to the modern English reader.49 It is interesting that later Ottoman intellectuals like Fuat Köprülü would adopt the voice of their Western predecessors, who criticised the work on moral grounds, but defended Deli Birader’s literary talents, depicting him as a foolish but talented author.50 This ambivalent attitude towards Deli Birader disappeared with the establishment of the Republic of Turkey as the Ottoman literary canon became stricter and less permissive with respect to anything that did not conform to its schematic categories. Deli Birader and Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm illustrate that the canon as upheld by most scholars at present inadequately organises the study of Ottoman literature, and fails to reflect the variety of literary forms employed in the sixteenth century and the richness of the available information about the authors of the period. Furthermore, the canon fails to consider the modes of production of literature and the diversity of issues that this literature addresses. The works included in the canon that we study today overwhelmingly express and represent a court-oriented literature after the sixteenth century. This body of work is insufficient to reflect the power of a poetic imagery that constituted a medium of communication, which transcended prevalent socio-economic boundaries. Consequently, obscured is the fact that people from diverse professional backgrounds (including scholars, soldiers and sailors) employed poetry and prose as a powerful form of communication. Deli Birader poses several questions concerning the position of the author and the boundaries of literature in the Ottoman Empire. There are many fundamental questions concerning the formal as well as the functional properties of literature within the empire. Deli Birader’s work, at first glance, may startle even the jaded, contemporary eye. So, too, may it be confusing for scholars of Ottoman literature to confront such a sexually explicit work when, as scholars, we by and large lack the interpretative tools the study of such material requires. Deli Birader’s work, combining various detailed representations of sex and sexuality, provokes several questions. One of the major questions is: should we read it as representative of the sexual life of Ottoman Turks? ‘Hardly,’ would be my answer. Deli Birader’s text is written, as mentioned earlier and as the title of the work asserts, with the express purpose of providing amusement and distracting the reader from his worries and Downloaded By: [University of Washington Libraries] At: 05:05 10 June 2011 170 S. S. Kuru distress. Deli Birader presents an exaggerated account of sexuality, which relies on jokes and stories gleaned from the rich written and oral traditions of centuries. The illicit practices he studies and the types of people he describes are meant to be funny with a critical edge, not realistic. Still under this curtain of comedy, his work reflects the convictions of an intellectual during the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth century, an intellectual who was in close contact with several walks of life. Most probably, his habitus determined his selections from an existing body of literature and orally transmitted jokes and anecdotes. Further, his decision to present this work to a patron, probably in order to gain some sort of a favour in return, tells us much about how his contemporaries viewed sexuality and what they found humorous about it. Deli Birader’s choice of material, to some extent determined by his idea of what would please his patron, can only be as representative of Ottoman society as the TV talk shows and/or pornographic publications of today are representative of ours. The tastes Deli Birader’s work reflects cannot be generalised to define the taste of a whole linguistic community; rather, it is symptomatic of one particular taste among many that was prevalent among the Turkish-speaking elite. Through jokes about scholars, viziers, and people from different linguistic, ethnic and religious groups, Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm also reflects the transculturation of the Ottoman elite by the communities that surrounded it; a transculturation that only marginal works from the centre reflect in Ottoman literature. Consequently, Deli Birader’s work becomes indicative of an imperial core that has pretensions of dismissal of its periphery. Finally, my reading of Deli Birader’s Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm documents certain attitudes towards sexuality that may reveal much about Ottoman culture. But as long as there is no attempt to investigate the perimeters of the canon, and to provide a more thorough interpretation of Ottoman literature, Deli Birader and authors like him will continue to inhabit the margins. I hope that my translation and publication of Deli Birader’s work will incite a healthy and refreshed interest in, and promote renewed interest towards, innovative readings of suppressed voices in order to extend the limits of the Ottoman literary canon. Notes 1. Numbers in parentheses following quotations refer to the transcribed text of Dâfi’ü ’l-gumûm râfi’ü ’l-humûm in my dissertation ‘Scholar and Author in the Sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire: Deli Birader and his work Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm râfi‘ü ’l-humûm’ (Harvard University, May 2000). I want to thank Matthias Scheiblehner for commenting on an earlier draft of this article, Alan Mikhail for his detailed and critical reading, and the anonymous reader of Middle Eastern Literatures for their valuable comments. 2. Even though surveys of Ottoman Turkish literature include works of prose, and even though some _ and Mertol Tulum, approached prose, especially its scholars, such as Andreas Tietze, Fahir Iz morphological and syntactic characteristics, with particular interest in the classification of types of composition and methods for preparing critical editions of manuscripts, the role of these texts in the field of Ottoman literature is taken as rudimentary, and they are referred to at best as sources for literary history. There are MA and PhD dissertations that present critical editions of major story collections and historical texts, but ‘critical readings’ of these texts are yet to be taken into consideration as both a way to determine the layers of meaning dormant in them and as a way to understand how they functioned in Ottoman literature. Finally, there are histories and anthologies devoted to ‘Ottoman poetry’ and/or ‘Ottoman Literature’ and, even if these include prose texts, they include insufficient information regarding the development of prose in Ottoman Turkish. 3. There was a strong tradition of sexually explicit texts in Arabic and Persian literatures, which was adapted as a part of the Ottoman Turkish literary canon in the Ottoman Empire. There is a limited Sex in the Text 4. 5. Downloaded By: [University of Washington Libraries] At: 05:05 10 June 2011 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 171 but rich scholarship in English on such works, including Paul Sprachman, Suppressed Persian: An Anthology of Forbidden Literature (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 1995). On sexual themes in Arabic literary traditions see J. W. Wright (ed.) Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). For a basic list of Ottoman Turkish works defined as hezeliyyât by scholars – whether or not they contain sexually explicit vocabulary see A. S. Levend, Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi I (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1978): 154 – 155. Most of the works listed there were produced during the first half of the sixteenth century. For a collection of sexually explicit texts targeting the lay reader see, Murat Bardakçı, Osmanlı’da seks: Sarayda gece dersleri [Sex among the Ottomans: Night lessons at the Palace] (Istanbul: Gür Yayınları, 1992). Also there is a popular collection of translations from such texts printed in Turkish with no commentary and bibliographical notices: Sema Nilgün Erdogan, Sexual Life in Ottoman Society _ (Istanbul: Dönence Yayınları, 1996). As a matter of fact, since the publication of E. J. W. Gibb’s monumental six-volume work, History of Ottoman Poetry, (ed.) E. G. Browne (London: Luzac 1901 – 1909), no other interpretative work on Ottoman literature has been published. There are general anthological accounts and some valuable shorter articles. For example, the following offers an evaluative account of fifteenth century Ottoman literature: Gönül Tekin, ‘Fatih Devri Türk Edebiyatı [Turkish Literature during the Reign of _ _ Mehmed II],’ in Mustafa Armagan (ed.), Istanbul Armag anı: Fetih ve Fatih 1 (Istanbul: Büyük Sehir Belediyesi Yayınları, 1995): 161 – 236. For a general essay see Günay Kut, ‘Anadolu’da Türk _ Edebiyatı [Turkish Literature in Anatolia]’ in E. Ihsano glu (ed.) Osmanlı Devleti ve Medeniyeti Tarihi (Istanbul: IRCICA, 1998): 21 – 68. A recent study by Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet Kalpaklı presents a selection of such texts from sixteenth-century Ottoman Turkish literature and compares the gendering tactics in these texts with ‘European Culture’, The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2005). This scheme can be followed in nineteenth-century Orientalist accounts of the Ottoman Empire, and it was adopted for literature at the turn of the twentieth century by E. J. Gibb in his A History of Ottoman Poetry. Also Fuat Köprülü’s Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi [History of Turkish Literature] compounds the impact of this decline paradigm. Both works are still very influential and they support an understanding of an Eastern mode of literature, Islamic and/or Oriental, which is suppressive of a genuine and original national voice. For a critique of Gibb and Köprülü’s approach to literature see the Introduction chapter in, Walter G. Andrews, Poetry’s Voice Society’s Song: Ottoman Lyric Poetry (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1985). For a critique decline hypothesis in Ottoman history and bibliography see, Linda Darling, ‘Another Look at Periodization in Ottoman History,’ Turkish Studies Association Bulletin 26(2) (Fall 2002): 9 – 27. Sureyya Faroqhi and Cemal Kafadar put issues such as the reading of literary and historical texts for Ottoman historical studies into a new perspective. See Faroqhi, Subjects of the Sultan: Culture and Daily Life in the Ottoman Empire (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000): 185 – 203, and Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1995): 60 – 117. Abdülbaki Gölpınarlı, Divan Edebiyatı Beyanındadır (Istanbul: Marmara Kitabevi, 1945). _ One of the most articulate works of this sort is Ismet Zeki Eyüboglu’s Divan Şiirinde Sapık Sevgi [Perverse love in Ottoman Turkish Poetry] 2nd edn (Istanbul: Broy Yayınları 1985), in which, through a representative interpretation of symbolic lyric poems, the author claims that Ottoman poets pursued homosexual relations. Consequently, according to Eyüboglu, this proves that Ottoman Turkish literature is unworthy of study since it consists of the productions of servile poets for the entertainment of perverse and corrupt elite. Another less scholarly, yet aggressive, approach in some magazines and dailies interprets this so-called ‘perversity’ in Ottoman Turkish literary works as a sign of a more sexually permissive society, as a means to criticise the rigidity in gender roles enforced by the nationstate. Advocated by radical Turkish journals, this approach anachronistically assumes gay identities in the Ottoman Empire. Such approaches imply a transformation in the role of sexual norms in nationalist identity construction during the passage from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey. For a recent example of this approach see Ahmet Atilla Şentürk’s article, ‘Osmanlı Şiirinde Aşka Dair [On Love in Ottoman Poetry]’ Dog u Batı 7(26) (2004): 55 – 68. See Levend, ibid. 154. At the end of the nineteenth century, the famous Turkish modernist poet Tevfik Fikret described classical Ottoman poetry as consisting of a few couplets that were multiplied by parallels and renewed 172 15. Downloaded By: [University of Washington Libraries] At: 05:05 10 June 2011 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. S. S. Kuru by copying Persian poetry. See his essay ‘Musâhabe-i Edebiyye: Nazı̂reperdâzlık [Literary Conversations: Writing Parallel Poems]’ Servet-i Fünûn 263 (14 Mart 1312 ¼ 26 Mart 1896): 34, _ reprinted in Tevfik Fikret: Dil ve Edebiyat Yazıları (ed.) Ismail Parlatır (Ankara 2000): 7. For a later discussion between Ali Emiri, who defended the value of Persianate poetry, and Fuat Köprülü, who was one of the defenders of Western poetics as superior to classical poetic media, see, Nuri Saglam, _ ‘Ali Emiri Efendi ile Mehmet Fuad Köprülü Arasındaki Münakaşalar I-II’, Ilmı̂ Araştırmalar, 10 (2000): 113 – 134, 11 (2001): 89 – 98. Even a cursory look at editions and analyses of poetry collections makes this understanding quite clear. For a recent critical essay on major analytical interpretations of divans, i.e. poetry collections, which are generally called ‘tahlil’ see Yekta Saraç, ‘Divan Tahlilleri Üzerine [On Critical Studies of _ Divans],’ Ilmı̂ Araştırmalar 8 (1999): 209 – 219. Fortunately there are some marvellous exceptions in Turkey, where some scholars transcend the departmental divisions imposed upon the multilingual realities of Ottoman literary culture. Works by certain scholars, including Günay Kut, Tunca Kortantamer, Mertol Tulum, Cem Dilçin and their students, are gradually establishing a more nuanced understanding of Ottoman literature. Still, multilingualism should be concerned a basic prerequisite of the field. This shift will require better educational opportunities in Arabic and Persian languages and Islamicate literary cultures than those that presently exist in Turkish Language and Literature Departments. For example, see G. Kut’s illuminating article on the scope of an Ottoman poets’ literary production: ‘Lami’i Çelebi and His Works,’ Journal of Near Eastern Studies 35(2) (April 1976): 73 – 93. Lami’i was a prolific author who wrote in prose and poetry and in different genres, and his case was not unique. Of course my crude portrayal of one general understanding of Ottoman literature is only preliminary and, as such, calls for further detailed research to uncover the established and solidified critical positions towards this particular literary tradition. For a list of the manuscripts I reviewed for my edition of the text see Kuru: 39 – 41. For a preliminary translation of this text see, Kuru: 153 – 279. I am working on an annotated edition of a new English version of this text. While working on this article, an English translation has appeared in Turkey: _ Mehmed Gazali, Book of Shehzade: Dâfi‘ü’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü’l-humûm. (Istanbul: Dönence 2001). This translation is, however, incomplete consisting of merely a haphazard selection of jokes from different sections of Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm. Günay Kut, ‘El-Ghazali,’ EI2: 1042 – 1043. For detailed information on Gazalı̂’s life and works see Kuru: 4 – 14. My work on this author’s life story as narrated by his contemporaries is in progress. The use of epigrams in the form of two couplets, sometimes four line stanzas (kıt’a), is yet to be studied. I argue that such epigrams are mnemonic devices used to easily recall the different topics in a specific argument, establishing a summary-in-verse of prose compositions. It is possible to understand the gist of the whole text from reading these stanzas alone. While Islamicate literatures depict girls and boys as whimsical objects of desire, women, especially in popular story cycles, are depicted as treacherous creatures lacking any control whatsoever over their desire. Women’s wiles start most of the story cycles, such as the One Thousand and One Nights, where the deception of two brothers’ wives constitutes the pretext for Sehrazad’s stories. For an interesting reading of these story compilations, see Afsaneh Najmabadi, ‘Reading and Enjoying ‘Wiles of Women’ Stories as a Feminist,’ Iranian Studies 32(2) (Spring 1999): 203 – 222. There is a similar classification of types of lovers in al-Ris ala fı ’l-‘ishq by Avicenna (980 – 1037). For an edition and Turkish translation of this work see, Ibn Sina, Aşkın mahiyeti hakkında risale (ed. and _ trans.) Ahmet Ateş (Istanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Yayınları, 1953): 12 – 13. As Ateş shows _ in his introduction, there are many manuscript copies of this work in Istanbul Libraries, which clearly demonstrates its popularity among Ottoman intellectuals. _ See Istanbul Üniversitesi Kütüphanesi, TY 9659: folio 27a. See Everett K. Rowson, ‘The Categorization of Gender and Sexual Irregularity in Medieval Arabic Vice Lists’ in J. Epstein and K. Straub eds., Body Guards: the Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity (New York: Routledge, 1991): 50 – 79. Even though Deli Birader’s work has a similar layout, it differs from Arabic vice lists, insofar as he composes Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm in the form of a mock treatise, while the Arabic vice lists are mostly anthological collections lacking any such intent. See my forthcoming critical edition of the text, which includes a comparison of formal peculiarities of this text with the vice lists in Arabic. Incest and oral sex, on the other hand, come together in a Nasrettin Hoca joke, see P. N. Boratav, Nasrettin Hoca (Istanbul: Edebiyatçılar Dernegi, 1996): 103 (no. 46). About Deli Birader’s possible Sex in the Text 27. 28. 29. Downloaded By: [University of Washington Libraries] At: 05:05 10 June 2011 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 173 awareness of these jokes see Mustafa Duman, ‘Nasreddin Hoca konusunda yeni bir tesbit’, Tarih ve Toplum 116 (1993): 118 – 120. In this article Duman employs four manuscript copies of Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm found in private collections. For a slightly modernised version of this chapter in the modern Turkish alphabet, see Murat Bardakçı, Osmanlı’da seks: Sarayda gece dersleri [Sex among the Ottomans: Night lessons at the Palace] (Istanbul: Gür Yayınları, 1992). For the parallel verses inspired by these odes, and added by readers on some manuscript copies, see Kuru: 64. For more information on this debate topic see Rowson, 73, and F. Rosenthal, ‘Male and Female: Described and Compared,’ in J. W. Wright (ed.) Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 24 – 54. Also see Jan Schmidt, ‘Sünbülzâde Vehbı̂’s Shevkengı̂z, an Ottoman Pornographic Poem,’ Turcica 25 (1993): 9 – 37, for an analysis of a work of the same genre and for references to older texts from Arabic literature. In another work of this nature in Arabic, A hmad al-Tıfashı (1184 – 1253)’s Nuzhat al-alb ab _ translated partially into English as The Delight of Hearts, the reason to compile ‘ugly jokes’ is explained as merely ‘intellectual relaxation’. Translated by W. Leyland (San Francisco, CA: Gay Sunshine Press 1988): 51. Most of the jokes in Dâfi‘ü ’l-gumûm ve Râfi‘ü ’l-humûm are still in circulation in Turkey. This makes the work resist time, unlike many other highly esteemed Ottoman Turkish texts. Here I draw on Gülru Necipoglu’s important article, ‘A Kânun for the state, a canon for the arts,’ in Soliman le Magnifique et son temps, (ed.) G. Veinstein (Paris: La documentation française 1992): 195 – 216. Developments in the literary scene support Necipoglu’s thesis on the transformation in the patronage of arts in the mid-sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire. For example, the poet Me‘âlı̂’s sexually explicit verses and Zâtı̂’s, another more famous poet, sexually condemning anecdotes about his contemporaries, or sexually more explicit imagery in early romances would disappear or be silenced, in the following centuries. All these poets would be the topic of nostalgia evident in the biographical tradition that will flourish in the mid-sixteenth century. For references to these poets’ works see note 46 below. The first biographical dictionary was by Sehi Bey, Heşt bihişt: Sehı̂ beg tezkiresi, inceleme, tenkitli metin dizin, (ed.) Günay Kut (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978). The second was by Latifı̂, and composed in 1546, Tezkiretü’ş-şuara ve Tabsiratü’n-nuzama, (ed.) Rıdvan Canım (Ankara: Atatürk Kültür Merkezi, 2000). The third by Aşık Çelebi, composed in 1566, G. M. MeredithOwens, Meşa‘irü‘üş-şu’ara or Tezkere of ‘Āşık Çelebi: edited in facsimile from the manuscript Or. 6434 in _ the British Museum with introduction and variants from the Istanbul and Upsala manuscripts (London: Luzac, 1971). For a study on these sources in English see John Stewart-Robinson, ‘The tezkere genre in Islam.’ Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 23 (1964): 57 – 65. In Turkish there are several studies of _ these works: for a descriptive study see Haluk Ipekten, Türk edebiyatının kaynaklarından Türkçe şu’ara tezkireleri (Erzurum: Atatürk Üniversitesi Fen-Edebiyat Fakültesi, 1988). _ The last work of this sort was published in 1930. See Ibnülemin Mahmut Kemal, Son Asır Türk _ Şairleri (Istanbul: Türk Tarih Encümeni). In the introduction Ibnülemın Mahmut Kemal gives brief descriptions of 26 dictionaries as his predecessors (pp. 5 – 11). After Kınalızade Hasan Çelebi published his biographical dictionary Tezkı̂retü’ş-şu’arâ in 1586 [critical edition of the text in _ Ottoman Turkish alphabet by Ibrahim Kutluk, 2 v. (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1981)], his followers continued to compile information about poets starting from where he had ended, forming a chain of works complementing the ones that precedes them. More research is conducted on different genres and types of manuscripts, which are preserved in many libraries all over the world. Until then my formulation here will remain a conjecture. Gelibolulu Mustafa Âlı̂, Künhü’l-ahbar’ın tezkire kısmı (Ankara: Atatürk Kültür Dil ve Tarih Yüksek Kurumu 1994): 249, translation is mine. Sehı̂ Bey, 231, translation is mine. But Sehı̂ Bey does not refrain from quoting a lampoon from another sixteenth-century poet Çakşırcı Şeyhi, which includes the following quotation: ‘The porter hit and took away the silver dome [i.e. ass] of Topuklu’ (p. 287). This couplet is similar to the bawdy verses of Deli Birader. It is clear that there were different approaches to literary works in the sixteenth century, but it is also possible that personal relationships determined the literary taste of critics as well. The influence of Aşık Çelebi’s biographical dictionary is identifiable in the historiography of Ottoman literature. Even though his approach and evaluation techniques are yet to be analysed, his work is 174 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. Downloaded By: [University of Washington Libraries] At: 05:05 10 June 2011 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. S. S. Kuru liberally employed for much literary historical study without any critical perspective. For the section on Deli Birader, see Meredith-Owens, 292a – 296a. Kınalızade Hasan Çelebi, 721 – 723. His verse translation of Hidaye, a canonical religious text on the pillars of Islam, is a clear indication of his prowess on this subject. _ _ Ismail Belig, Güldeste-i Riyaz-i Irfan in Kadir Atlansoy, Bursa Şairleri: Bursa vefeyatnamelerindeki Şairlerin biyografileri (Bursa: Asa Kitabevi 1993): 240. _ _ Iskender Pala, Şiirler, şairler ve meclisler. (Istanbul: Ötüken Yayınları 1997): 82 – 94; Pala doesn’t use references to his sources. Apparently this letter was very popular and was reproduced in several manuscripts, as Kınalızade records in his 1586 biographical work (723). For an exemplary annotated edition of this letter see _ Günay Kut (Alpay), ‘Gazâlı̂’nin Mekke’den Istanbul’a yolladıgı mektup ve ona yazılan cevaplar.’ TDAY Belleten (Ankara, 1973 – 1974): 223 – 249. The erotic works that were composed until the mid-sixteenth century are very different from those of the eighteenth century in terms of content, form, production, and readership. For Zatı̂ and Fakirı̂’s letayifs see: Mehmet Çavuşoglu, ‘Zati’nin Letâyifi,’ Türk Dili ve Edebiyatı Dergisi 18, 22 (1970, 1974/6): 1 – 51, 143 – 161; Edith Ambros, ‘The Letâ’if of Faqı̂rı̂, Ottoman poet of 16th century,’ Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 80 (1990): 59 – 78. For Me‘âlı̂’s poetry see Edith Ambros’ excellent edition of his collection of poems, Candid Penstrokes: the Lyrics of Me‘âlı̂, an Ottoman Poet of the 16th Century (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag 1982). For lyric poems written for boys citing their names, see my ‘Naming the Beloved in Ottoman Turkish Gazel: The Case of Ishak Çelebi (d. 1537/8)’, in Ghazal as World Literature II. From a Literary Genre to a Great Tradition. The Ottoman Gazel in Context (ed.) Angelika Neuwirth, Michael Hess, Judith Pfeiffer and Boerte Sagaster, Beiruter Texte und Studien 84 (Beirut/Würzburg 2005). Interestingly, sexual positions fit into Deli Birader’s scheme presented in the third chapter, which is about boys (103 – 107). To my knowledge this section is one of the earliest sex manuals. Hammer-Purgstall, Geschichte der Osmanischen Dichtung bis auf unsere Zeit v. 2 (Pest: C. A. Hartleben, 1837): 189 – 199. History of Forty Vezirs, or the Story of the Forty Morns and Eves, written in Turkish by Sheykhzada trans. E. J. W. Gibb (London: Luzac 1886): xx – xxi. I would like to thank Andras Riedlmayer, who shared this information with me. M. F. Köprülü, ‘Harabat Erenleri: Deli Birader,’ Yeni Mecmua 15 (1917): 275 – 288.