Tasavvuf

Mahmat Muiz ad-dīn Jelvetī is a sufi who lived at the beginning of the XVII century and participated in the famous sufi master Aziz Mahmoud Hudāyī’s (d. 1038/1628) companionship. He is known with about ten surviving translations and information on his life is deduced from the contents of them. In this article I focus on his treatise Manāzil  as-Sālikīn. According to my findings, the treatise consists of the translations of selected parts of Kāshānī’s (d. 736/1335) work Sharh Manāzil as-Sāirīn. However, a record in the treatise indicates that the selection was made by Aziz Mahmoud Hudāyī. This also adds value to the treatise. Therefore, the treatise is a remarkable document about how and by whom Manāzil as-Sāirīn was read in the Ottoman era. Additionally, I aim to draw attention to other translations of the author on which no studies have been carried on.

Shaqīq al-Balkhī (d.194/810) is one of the most interesting Sufi figures, because he is Ibrahim b. Adham’s (d.161/778) disciple and Khātim al-Asamm’s (d.237/851) master. Probably, Shaqīq al-Balkhī was one of the first Sufis who treated the topic of states (ahwāl) and stations (maqāmāt) in a systematic manner. The epistle, Ādāb al-Ibādāt, attributed to Shaqīq al-Balkhī is a well-composed text which reflects Sufi priorities of the period when it was written. In this article, I have attempted to examine the sources providing information about the personality of Shaqīq al-Balkhī, and tried to identify the context of Ādāb al-Ibādāt by relating it to the cultural environment of its composition period with respect to its textual properties and the issues discussed in it. I have also appended a Turkish translation of Ādāb al-Ibādāt to my article.

Ismā‘īl Rusūhī Ankarawī was an author who gained a place in Sufi literature of the Ottoman period by his multi-faceted works. His books contributed to the understanding and transmission of Sufi heritage and obtained a privileged place through their contents that deal with the prevalent scholarly issues of the Islamic sciences by a certain method. Ankarawī who left permanent influences by his commentary on Mathnawī aimed to introduce a different method in his Minhāj al-Fuqarā by examining how to evaluate the elements of Sufi culture from an intellectual and practical perspective. In this book, he adopted a mode of speech that relates the acceptances and practices specific to Mawlawī order to other examples in Sufi history. In this article, we examined Minhāj al-Fuqarā from the aspects of on which kinds of sources it was based and to which results it aims to reach and tried to interpret the characteristics of the book from the aspect of Sufi literature.

The foundation of Sufism discipline independently within the faculties of theology and the emergence of products belonging to this discipline have begun after the 1980s. In particular, the studies naturally have been directed to this period because of neglecting studies of Ottoman-era mystic literature for many years. As a result, academic studies naturally emerged that emphasize general description such as tariqa monographs, personal biographies, text publishing, and determination of historical accumulation. In this period, sometimes independent from each other, scattered and fragmented, sometimes voluminous and product of effort studies have been published. After that, there is a need for conceptual studies belong to the field and for studies which have established the necessary mental ties that pay attention to intellectual coherence and with cited references. In connected studies it is important to carry what the phenomenon says to present-day whilst establishing its connection with history by using the methodologies of social sciences and pay attention to the sociological and anthropological context.

al-Ghawthiyya is a small epistle which is known for its being attributed to ‘Abd al-Qādir Jīlānī and Ibn al-‘Arabī. It is well-known for the fact that it constructs Sufi terminology around the idea of the of the perfect man. Since the XIVth century, it has been translated and commented upon, and become widely read in the Indian and Ottoman cultural geographies. These texts, which reflect sensitivities of the sufi orders rather than indicating accumulation of theoretical reflection, are quite flexible in their conceptual paradigm. Furthermore, one may trace, up to the earlier periods, objections against attribution of al-Ghawthiyya to ‘Abd al-Qādir Jīlānī. These objections seem to be mostly related to the concept of the shath and they resulted in emergence of various polemical debates in XIXth century. In this article, I provided an outline of debates concerning al-Ghawthiyya, information about Persian and Turkish commentaries on it, in Ottoman and Indian cultural geographies and examined scholarly interpretations about the nature of this epistle.