Fuzuli (1482-1556)

One of the greatest lovers raised in the Eastern geography, a man who described not only love, but all aspects of love, was Fuzuli. Every love that is described in the gazels and every love scene depicted in the wonderful mesnevi (poem composed of rhymed couplets) Leyla and Mejnun appears before us with deep meaning. The reason for this is that in the world of Fuzuli it is not the lover or the beloved that is important, rather it is love itself that takes center stage. According to Fuzuli, life can only be a lover because love exists, and the rest is merely dry words, baseless perceptions. He says that the world was created upon love and that Absolute Beauty can only be understood with love. The soundest connection between Allah and his servant is the total of the relationship between servants, while the behavior between the servant and objects takes shape with love and thus attains positive or negative energy. Human beings look at all things that exist; only when they see them with love do they reflect the süveyda (black spot) in their heart, fashioning their souls with the design of love, sewing clothes from the cloth of beauty. It is for this reason that poems constantly describe the pain and torment of love. Every line searches for separation, troubles and sorrow; meeting, happiness and joy are chased from this world. Fuzuli believes that the torments of love lead to maturation, that this in turn elevates people, allowing them to find pleasure in the essence of the wings of sorrow. Fuzuli, fashioned from the raw material of love, defines the place he deserves as follows:

        There can be no doubt that throughout time all loves resemble one another and that lovers take over from one another. The rules established by Adam and Eve are still valid in this contest, and Fuzuli is a poet who wants to find his name at the top of the honor list among the Ferhads, the Kerems, the Pauls or Romeos. The connection between himself and Mejnun is so strong that throughout the divan Fuzuli envies most the love of Mejnun and constantly feels jealous, wanting the love of Leyla, the heroine of the story he is telling. For this reason, when he can, he takes revenge by disparaging Mejnun.

        According to Fuzuli, Mejnun is of the same nature as the author, and trouble and madness are the capital of the poet. A person who has no trouble in their heart, who has no wounds on their breast, who has not undergone an intellectual crisis, in fact one who has not been happy from the pain they are suffering, can find no satisfaction in poetry. For this reason Fuzuli identifies with Mejnun and this adds flavor to the poem; he lives for the beloved, proving true his claim that life is lived with sacrifice and he wanders for the sake of the beloved. Fuzuli is the one who arrives at the door of love like a poor beggar and lives his life like a magnificent ruler, no matter how much he says to the contrary.

                     That is; A beggar like a sultan; I am a wonderful servant..!

      Fuzuli aims to be the guardian of all the doors of love, the fish in all the seas, the nightingale in all the heavens, the melody in all the sounds.

      Perhaps no Turkish poet has described love as sincerely, joyously, enthusiastically, sensitively or honestly as Fuzuli. He removes love from its garb of the purely physical and loads on it all the abstract thoughts, raising it to a level of respect and expressing it through an aesthetic dimension that all of humanity can comprehend. Of course, his taking love from the aesthetic program formalized centuries before by Plato and presenting his emotions in a concrete manner in the imaginary word is enough to carve Fuzuli’s name on the skies as ‘‘the lover’’. Perhaps what connects us to him is that he has a powerful ability to direct the insatiable impotent emotions to a lofty literary love that causes us to learn of the beauty distilled from the truth of the ages.

      Pushkin, Dante, Shakespeare…all of these had a national and eternal mission. Fuzuli was thus for the Turkish nation.

I have many of Mejnun’s talents in love.

Wonderful Gazels-1 İskender Pala