THE LIFTING OF MYSTICAL VEILS :
REFLECTIONS OF HOMOSEXUALITY IN THE DIVAN-I NEDIM
By Kemal Siley
REFLECTIONS OF HOMOSEXUALITY IN THE DIVAN-I NEDIM
By Kemal Siley
.
Before dealing with the homosexual themes in the poetry of Nedim, it seems necessary to devote a few pages to the reflections of homosexual relationships in Middle Eastern literatures, in general, and in Ottoman literature, in particular. When we turn to the scholarship on the subject, unfortunately we are disappointed to find that researchers have rarely accorded serious attention to the (homo)sexual aspects of Ottoman court poetry.Studies dealing with (homo)sexuality in other Islamic literary traditions, such as Arabic, Persian and Urdu, are infrequently encountered as well. Although more research on the subject may be expected to appear soon, thanks to the rapidly growing interest in cross cultural gender studies, Islamist scholars most likely will continue to withdraw from the religious, cultural and political sensitivity of the subject. Even some Western researchers still feel uncomfortable dealing with such an issue. The well-known scholar of Islamic literatures, J. C. Burgel, presented a very informative scholarly paper on eroticism in early Islamic literature. In the beginning of his study, he found it necessary to make the following statement to his audience: "In this paper I do not intend to be indecent; I do not report a single story for the sake of mere indecency. Nor, however, do I refrain from bringing to the knowledge of the reader what I think is the stuff of which eroticism in medieval Islam was made." John Boswell brings forth other interesting examples of the cautious approach adopted by Western scholars of Middle Eastern Islamic literatures when homosexuality is an issue: "[W]hen the Persian moral fables of Sa'di were translated into English in the early nineteenth century, Francis Gladwin conscientiously transformed each story about gay love into heterosexual romance by altering the offending [English] pronouns. As late as the mid-twentieth century, the ghazels of Hafiz were still being falsified in this way."
It is, then, no surprise that in Middle Eastern Islamic countries, the study of homosexuality in Islamic literatures is hindered by a vigorous resistance from the guardians of morality. The falsification of the gender of the beloved, as Boswell describes, still remains the most effective tool in keeping homosexuality veiled. During my undergraduate education at Ankara University's Department of Turkish Language and Literature, I never heard a single lecture delivered about homosexual themes in Ottoman court poetry. When some liberal professors did attempt to make extremely guarded statements about the "possibility" of homosexuality in classical literature, they endeavored to discover a "foreign," specifically Ancient Greek, origin for what was found in Ottoman poetry. This seems to stem from a moralizing and perhaps Islamist effort to avoid telling Turkish children about such unacceptable issues or, when it is undeniable, to blame such behavior on someone else. According to this rhetoric, what looks like homosexuality in Ottoman poetry is in fact nothing more than an unfortunate continuation of the Persian poetic vocabulary which carried into the Ottoman tradition certain Persian homosexual themes, and furthermore, they maintain, these elements had entered Islamic Persian literature from the Ancient Greek tradition. This kind of criticism has resorted to other remedies to cover up a "shameful" part of the Turkish cultural heritage. The fact that neither Turkish nor Persian shows grammatical distinction of gender was and still is one of the greatest opportunities for the moralist/Islamist critic to translate every pronoun concerning the beloved as she.
Homosexuality was openly reflected in the literatures and other artistic productions of the Ancient Greeks and Romans. Sometimes these works were accompanied by pictures that required no further explanations. John Boswell mentions that exclusively homosexual characters were common in ancient literature. Perhaps someday scholarship will indeed prove with certainty that many homosexual themes were carried into Persian literature through the Greek connection. In any case, moralist, Islamist, or nationalist approaches cannot change the fact that homosexuality was and still is common in the Islamic Middle East, or that it constitutes a part of this literary tradition.
In the previous chapter, I maintained that the Ottoman-Turkish society--as is the case in other Middle Eastern Islamic countries--was a veiled society, and that pre- and extramarital heterosexual interactions were severely prohibited. The woman was isolated from the man. And I added that, in that veiled society, social and psychological factors conditioned the Ottoman poet to cultivate the imagination of an idealized and fetishized woman. That woman served the Ottoman poet as a replacement for his absent loved one who was forbidden to him by the strict norms of the "society of the veil."
Eyuboglu believes that the only form of love depicted with realism in Ottoman divan literature was homosexual love. Although a comparison of the different manners of treatment of this feature in Ottoman poetry would require an extended research and analysis, we may establish that the conditions of possibility for the existence and survival of such sexual activity were present in Ottoman-Turkish society. Besides veiling, the separation of men and women in daily life and the formation of exclusively male and female groups must have provided some of the required circumstances for the expression of homosexuality in that society. It is well-known that many Westerners who travelled to the lands of the Ottoman Empire mentioned in their letters their observations concerning homosexuality among Ottoman-Turkish men and women. Although these Westerners might have imposed their own biases and expectations about the "East" upon the culture which they actually observed, the fact that some Ottoman and Turkish sources indicate the same information lends more credibility to their accounts. For example, a representative of the last generation of Ottomans, Refik Ahmet Sevengil, said that homosexuality was a "problem" among both male and female dancers. Concerning lesbianism, he remarked:
This psychological sickness, which clinical medicine calls "love between the same gender," was common in the past among women, too. There were such wealthy women who made love to each other in the harems. They had several young and beautiful girls and women in their service in order to satisfy their sexual desires. They made these women take care of their private and secret affairs.
Although such remarks attest to the existence of homosexual practice in Ottoman-Turkish society, it is rather more difficult to uncover evidence of homosexual love in written texts, and specifically in poetry. One of the major questions to be asked is whether the poet is really trying to convey homosexual messages to his reader or whether what he describes is but a "mystical" relationship.
The Holy Qur'an strictly prohibits any kind of homosexual interactions, and, to be sure, Ottoman-Turkish society was organized according to Islamic law. The court poets lived in a predominantly Islamic environment as well. Almost all of them had to write poetry in praise of Muhammad and the religion which was revealed to him. To try to determine the degree of the poets' religious faith is beyond the scope and purpose of this study. It is, however, crucial to note that the poets of the court often followed paths away from the norms of canonical religion and toward mystical Islam. With its extremely ambiguous vocabulary, Islamic mysticism was perhaps the strongest and--more importantly--safest vehicle for the poets to say what they really wanted to say. Homosexuality was one of the subjects that many court poets wanted to talk about, and the best method for them was to write about it in a discourse that was open to multiple interpretations.
Mystical vocabulary came to the rescue of the homosexual poet by offering a means of expressing his desires symbolically and therefore ambiguously or even equivocally. C. M. Naim states that "[i]n Islamic societies, poetry's symbolic language has always been seen as a more appropriate or safe medium to depict controversial ideas." A. Schimmel points out that, linguistically speaking, there is indeed a relationship between the mystical language and the "tendency of the Arabs to play with the words." For centuries the medieval Islamic poet struggled to create extremely abstract allegorizations. This abstraction was there in early Arabic literature and later on became even stronger in Persian, Ottoman, and Urdu poetry. And some "mystics drew up whole charts to explain the simplest words in a mystical sense." This "mystical" vagueness created a poetic discourse that indeed saved those poets who sought to refer in their poetry to "immoral" activities, like homosexuality. Arslan Yuzgun mentions in his study of homosexuality in modern Turkey that some homosexuals use a kind of secret language when they want to talk to each other in public about their homosexual activities.[13] Secret or coded speech serves as a protection from the discrimination and threats of the dominant social values which would condemn the group. It is then quite understandable that the Islamic poets used the recondite characteristics of the mystical discourse for their own security.
The mystical ambiguity indeed not only helped the poets themselves but also, as I mentioned before, continues to provide twentieth-century moralists and religious nationalists with a means of denying or explaining away such "inappropriate" elements in their cultural heritage. One of the most respected scholars of Ottoman poetry, Harun Tolasa, for example, refrained from dealing with the homosexual beloveds of Ahmed Pasa (a well-known fifteenth-century poet) in his "detailed" analysis of Ahmed Pasa's divan. We do know that Ahmed Pasa wrote several independent gazels for his male beloveds. He even mentioned their names, such as Ishak, 'Ali, Kasim, etc., which are exclusively male names. Although Tolasa stated in his Introduction that his analysis avoided "subjective ideas and judgements," his approach could only see heterosexual lovers and beloveds in the divan of Ahmed Pasa by the help of a prescribed literary criticism of religious nationalism based on Islamic or mystical solutions for almost any given classical poem. It is true that one can easily find mystical concepts in the whole of Ahmed Pasa's works. However, to propose a purely mystical interpretation of the gazels mentioned above, written for and about men, seems impossible to me. Tolasa's book, which is basically a concordance of the various themes in the divan, supposedly examined, treated, and drew conclusions from every single couplet of the collection. It is then a distortion not to mention in his section on love the theme of homosexuality in Ahmed Pasa. We must assume that, if he has examined the poems mentioned above, he has forced upon them a "mystical" meaning or some other such interpretation, since he remains virtually silent about homosexual themes. What we find here is actually typical of the moralist/Islamist critic's "mystical" paradigm.
Although this type of criticism could distort any homosexuality through the mystical interpretation, based on the presence of mysticism in many poems of a given divan, it was categorically unable to apply these paradigms to the male beloveds of Nedim, because his divan did not show signs of Islamic mysticism anywhere. The so-called "problem of homosexuality" was still there, especially in some of his most "beautiful" poems, poems that the critics and editors could not overlook or strike from their editions. While some of these homosexually-oriented couplets even found their way into high school text books with their modern Turkish translations, the editors of these books did not provide commentaries, thereby avoiding the need to inform the students about the gender of Nedim's beloveds. Perhaps these students enjoyed the poems for their musical sound and their worldly tone but--to be sure--many of them had no idea about the gender of Nedim's beloveds. The tactic of the moralist/Islamist critic in the case of Nedim has been to remain silent. Even Hasibe Mazi-oglu--whose profound knowledge of Ottoman court poetry has always impressed her students and colleagues--chose not to deal with the homo-sexual characteristics in her study on Nedim.
Here are some of Nedim's poems in which the theme of homosexuality is reflected the most clearly. His following sarki is of importance not only for its homosexual subject matter but for the fact that it has been available even in Turkish high school books without a single footnote about the gender of Nedim's "beloved cypress":
Bir safa bahs idelim gel su dil-i nasadaGidelim serv-i revanim yuru Sa'dabadaIste uc cifte kayik iskelede amadeGidelim serv-i revanim yuru Sa'dabada
Gulelim oynayalim kam alalim dunyadanMa'-i tesnim icelim cesme-i nev-peydadanGorelim ab-i hayat akdigin ejderhadanGidelim serv-i revanim yuru Sa'dabada
Geh varip havz kenarinda hiraman olalimGeh gelip Kasr-i Cinan seyrine hayran olalimGah sarki okuyup gah gazel-hwan olalimGidelim serv-i revanim yuru Sa'dabada
Izn alip cum'a namazina deyu maderdenBir gun ugrilayalim carh-i sitem-perverdenDolasip iskeleye dogru nihan yollardanGidelim serv-i revanim yuru Sa'dabada
Bir sen u bir ben u bir mutrib-i pakize-edaIznin olursa eger bir de Nedim-i seydaGayri yarani bu gunluk idup ey suh fedaGidelim serv-i revanim yuru Sa'dabada
Let us bestow joy upon this heart filled with woe; let us go to Sa'dabad, my beloved cypress; here is the six-oared boat awaiting us; let us go to Sa'dabad, my beloved cypress.// Let us laugh and play, let us enjoy the world; let us drink nectar from the newly-made fountain; let us watch the elixir pour from the dragon's mouth; let us go to Sa'dabad, my beloved cypress// Let us go, for a while, and wander around the pond; let us later gaze upon the Heavenly Pavilion; let us always sing songs and recite poems; let us go to Sa'dabad, my beloved cypress// Ask your mother's permission to go to the Friday prayer; let us steal a day from reproachful destiny; going through the secret roads towards the quay, let us go to Sa'dabad, my beloved cypress// Just you and me and a nice, old musician and, if you permit, the mad poet Nedim, let us, today, forget about the others; let us go to Sa'dabad, my beloved cypress.
The sarki, as a poetic form, is generally quite light in tone. This sarki is completely free from any mystical elements and aptly represents the external reality of Nedim, his this-worldly concerns and pleasant nature. Like hundreds of other court poets before him, Nedim employs here a classical metonymy, serv-i revan (literally meaning "the walking cypress"), to refer to his beloved. This cliché was used for centuries to evoke the tall stature of the beloved and was considered one of the primary elements of "beauty" in the classical tradition. Nedim uses the same signifier; however, he overturns the signified by substituting for the commonplace image of the beloved a real human being, a human being whose gender is male. On the basis of the first three stanzas, the reader can easily assume that the poem is about a woman with whom Nedim is in love. The fourth stanza, however, discloses the metaphor and reveals Nedim's homosexual intention. In the first line of this stanza, the poet suggests his beloved come away and have a great day together, and he proposes a way to deceive his mother: "ask your mother's permission to go to the Friday prayer." In the Islamic tradition, only men go to the mosque to pray on Fridays in a unified group. Even though it is believed in the Islamic world that to worship together is much more valuable than to worship alone, it is very rare to find women in that group along with men. On the basis of this fundamental social and religious principle, there is no room for doubt that the beloved cypress Nedim is talking about in this poem is a male. Since this male beloved is advised to ask for his mother's permission, the person Nedim is talking to must be a teenage boy.
I would suggest that there might be (homo)sexual overtones in the second stanza as well. Ab-i hayat is a well-known expression for elixir, the water of life in Persian and Ottoman court poetry. As I mentioned earlier, the eighteenth century was a time during which significant changes took place in Ottoman-Turkish society. The construction of lavish and elaborate new buildings and fountains was one of the landmarks of that period. Nedim, in the verse "gorelim ab-i hayat akdigin ejderhadan" (let us watch the elixir coming from the dragon's mouth), is describing one of those extravagant fountainheads of the Tulip Period. Here, the fountainhead is a special one; it has the shape of a dragon from whose mouth water is gushing. There is in fact a close relationship between ab-i hayat, 'life elixir' and ejderha, 'dragon'. The latter in world cultures often symbolizes fertility in general and, in its association with water, rain. It was, however, used in Ottoman court poetry until Nedim as the symbol of the beloved's hair in association with its aim to capture and destroy the poor lover. (We may again refer to Plate 1.) If we take the theme of the poem in its entirety into consideration, we can, I believe, conclude that Nedim was using this image with a sexual connotation. To the best of my knowledge, this is a totally new image in the classical tradition. We do know that the fountain in modern poetry has been used metaphorically to suggest ejaculation, and it seems to me that, in this poem about a boy beloved, Nedim aptly chose this male-oriented image.
What is reflected in this poem is not accidental. Throughout the divan, there are many other examples which exhibit the homosexual dimensions of Nedim's discourse. In one of his gazels, for instance, Nedim addresses the beloved in the following manner:
Kizoglan nazi nazin sehlevend avazi avazinBelasin ben de bilmem kiz misin oglan misin kafir"
You have the coquetry of a virgin girl and the voice of a tall handsome man; you cause such trouble, oh my infidel beloved; I am not quite sure whether you are a girl or a boy!
It is imperative to note here that the word oglan, which I have translated as boy, now is used in modern Turkish to refer to a gay man.Homosexual desire is again articulated in one of Nedim's most famous and admired gazels. In the first couplet, he freely displays his passionate dream of a young, handsome man:Ben olsam bir de mutrib bir de tarf-i cuybar olsaHos imdi bir de farza bir cuvan-i sivekar olsaI wish there were me, a musician and a river side; and should there be an attractive young man, too...
By the same token, another gazel informs us about his desire for a man wearing a turban:
Ben bu gun bir nev-bahar-i husn u an seyr eyledimTarf-i destarinda sunbul gibi mular var idi
Today I watched a spring of beauty and elegance; on the side of his turban, his hyacinth-like hair was peeking out.
The hyacinth was a common image used by Persian and Ottoman poets for the beloved's curly hair. It is also interesting to note, though, that the Greco-Roman mythological figure, Hyacinth, was a symbol of homosexuality. When the bard, Thamyris, fell in love with Hyacinth, he was said to be the first man to have loved another man. Hyacinth also inspired love in Apollo and Zephyrus, the West Wind.[28] We do not know for sure whether the Persian and Ottoman poets explicitly knew of this mythological interpretation. In addition, the Persian Ottoman word sunbul does not at all resemble the Greek, unlike nergis and narcissus, for example; however, we should bear in mind the possibility that Nedim used this flower image in order to carry a homosexual connotation, especially since it is found in association with the turban.
Challenges to the religious canon constitute the dominant theme in many of his other poems and, especially in the following couplets, he articulates his dislike for hypocritical religious men, openly declaring his desire for a beautiful young man:
Sine saf olsun heman reyb u riyadan zahidaElde tesbihe bedel cam olsa da mani' degil
Husnini seyreyleyim de gordugum yer ol guliGulsitan olmazsa hammam olsa da mani' degil
Oh ascetic, as long as one's heart is free from suspicion and hypocrisy, it doesn't matter whether there is a wine glass in his hand or prayer beads. // As long as I can watch the beauty of that rose (hthe man), it doesn't matter whether the place where I watch him is a rosegarden or a bathhouse!
It is the suggestion of seeing this "rose" in the bathhouse which leads us to suspect that the "rose" is a man since there was and still is a complete separation of men and women there. The tesbih, 'prayer beads' and cam, 'wine glass' are not objects used exclusively by men, although they are most often associated with primarily male-oriented activities. It must also be pointed out that the tesbih is not used only for praying; in fact, it is often fondled and the beads are passed through the fingers almost unconsciously. These three elements taken in conjunction leave little room for doubt about the gender of the "rose."
Nedim continues on every possible occasion to criticize the ascetic for his intolerance of (homo)sexual relationships and persists in defying the established religious values with his bitter tone. In the following couplet he even boasts that his sexual activity is more than imagination or voyeurism:
Guzel sevmekde zahid muskilin var ise bizden sorBizim ol fende cok tahkikimiz itkanimiz vardir
Oh ascetic, if you have any problems in making love to the beauties, ask me! I have in that science done quite some research and I do it very well!
Nedim is not alone in criticizing the ascetic or orthodox Muslim figures. It was common in both the Persian and Ottoman poetic traditions for poets under the influence of Islamic mysticism to criticize and even mock the orthodoxy with which it was always at odds. However, many of those "mystical" poets were merely imitating common thematic paradigms in their invectives and following preexisting patterns. Furthermore, though they criticized certain religious elements, the mystics were still religious men. This is what distinguishes Nedim from almost all of his predecessors, mystic and otherwise. Throughout his divan, Nedim shows so few signs of any serious or genuine religious feeling, mystic or orthodox, that we can say he was completely sincere in his criticism of religion and of asceticism and that this was quite different from a mere imitation of common themes and patterns.
In his Persian poems, Nedim seems to articulate his homosexual tendencies in a much more unrestrained voice. In one of them, for example, he says that "compared to a beard, the eyelashes and waist of the beloved, as thin as a hair, have no value" for him. (His criticism of the prescribed features of the beloved is again quite clear here.) And in the last couplet of the same poem, he reinforces the message of his homosexual desire: "Oh Nedim, hair, beauty spot, eyes, lips, and the lovelocks... All these [characteristics of hers] have captured you; however, only his beard has captured me!" More courageously, in a mufred he openly writes that "there are hundreds of beauties in every corner of Istanbul, and to be able to deal with them one has to have an iron penis!" Open declarations in Persian of his homosexual desire continue, as when he asks his companion during their love-making: "From hair to hair, I consider every part of your body kissable; please help me to choose which part of your body you would like me to kiss." Along with the other Persian poems which praise the beard and masculine features of the beloved, we may assume in this poem that it is a man's body he praises since he implies that every part of this person is covered with hair. For an Ottoman, this would certainly not be found attractive in a woman.
It should be recalled here that Persian was not Nedim's native tongue. As an Ottoman court poet, he was cultivated in both the Arabic and Persian languages and--like many other Ottoman poets--he proved his knowledge of these languages by actually writing poetry in them. What is significant, though, is that Nedim sounds much more unrestrained in talking about his sexuality in a foreign language, a language which could be understood only by a specific coterie. His openness in Persian may have psychological dimensions as well. It may be readily observed that a non-native speaker can articulate many socially censored or sexually oriented words and expressions in a foreign language much more easily than in her/his mother tongue. Sociolinguists refer to this as "code switching."[36] Despite these openly sensual themes, however, Nedim does not stoop to gratuitous vulgarity or cursing, with the exception, perhaps, of the mufred cited above.
Nedim's homosexual desire is best represented in his poem about the bathhouse, commonly called "Hammamiyye." It is a kaside written in Ottoman Turkish. Although no couplet of this poem is as unrestrained as the Persian couplets cited above, it is still clear that the object of the poet's attention is a beautiful boy--perhaps a tellak, 'bath attendant' (for an example, see Plate 9 reproduced here from the Hubanname of Fazil-i Enderuni)--and Nedim does not in any way try to hide the homosexual themes with a religious or mystical veil. This poem, entitled "Tesbib be-meth-i vezir-i a'zam Ibrahim Pasa" ("An erotic poem in praise of the Grand Vizier Ibrahim Pasa"), is about Nedim's going to the bathhouse, meeting a beautiful boy there, and his fascination with him. The first couplets of this poem are of especially great importance in providing an explicit expression of his homosexual desire:
Sepide-dem ki olup dide-i hwabdan bidarHurusa basladi nagah serde derd-i humar
Hezar za'f ile hammama togri 'azm ittimKemer gusiste peragende guse-i destar
Varip o hal ile hammama uft u hiz iderekIdince guse-i halvetde cay-gah-i karar
Ne gordum ah aman el-aman bir afet-i canGelip yanimda gunes gibi oldi lemca-nisar
Saci futadesinin hwabi gibi pejmurdeNigahi 'asikinin hatiri gibi bimar
Vucudi ham gumusden beyaz gulden nermBoyi henuz yetismis nihalden hemvar
Kamer hamiresi yahod gunes murabbasiBil(l)ur sah mi ya nahl-i lu'lu-i sehvar
O kadd u had o tenasub o gabgab ol pistanO yal u bal o temayul o sive-i reftar
Tamam reng u baha mu-be-mu kirisme vu nazTamam husn u serapay su'le-i didad
Velik hissolunur kim o naz-perverdinDeruni icre bir endise vu bir ates var
Early in the morning I woke up, but suddenly my hangover began to bother me.// Hardly had I set out for the bathhouse, when my belt was already loosening and the corner of my turban was fluttering.// Arriving in the bathhouse in that shape, I found a solitary spot there.// Oh my God! I saw a beauty, a calamity for the soul. Approaching me, he began to emanate gleams like the sun.// His hair was scattered just like his lover's sleep; his look was distracted, just like his lover's [Nedim's] heart.// His body was whiter than pure silver, softer than a rose; his posture was straighter than a fresh, young sapling.// Was his body a moon-like dough or a sunny confection? Was his stature a crystal bough or a precious pearl tree?// That stature, that cheek, that perfect proportion, that double chin, those nipples; that beauty and strength, that coquetry, that graceful walk // were all colorful and precious, they were truly flirtatious and alluring; they were from head to toe beautiful like a resplendent face.// However, I could see that there was thought and a burning deep inside that coquettish beloved.
Apart from the fact that the "Hammamiyye" is one of Nedim's most important poems as a typical example of his homosexual tendencies, it is also significant that it was presented to the grand vizier of the Ottoman Empire. This means that Ibrahim Pasa had no objection to the erotic theme. Although to my knowledge no document indicates this, the "Hammamiyye" was probably written upon the request of the grand vizier. If one takes the life-style of this vizier of the Tulip Period into consideration, there is, I believe, sufficient reason for such an assumption. Sevengil indicates that Ibrahim Pasa used to invite the poets into his presence and enjoy their "indecent" writings.
What I have aimed to demonstrate in this chapter is that Nedim, as the most successful representative of the localization efforts in Ottoman literature, continues to present the characteristics of his breakthrough poetic discourse in representing his homosexual tendencies. However, by no means do I intend to suggest that there was no such sexual discourse before Nedim. He consistently expressed this desire in a poetry devoid of mystical veiling or any other means of protection against the established moral norms of the times. In this, he continued to challenge social norms, the poetic canon and the religious restrictions which had dominated and, to an extent, still dominate artistic activity.
Before dealing with the homosexual themes in the poetry of Nedim, it seems necessary to devote a few pages to the reflections of homosexual relationships in Middle Eastern literatures, in general, and in Ottoman literature, in particular. When we turn to the scholarship on the subject, unfortunately we are disappointed to find that researchers have rarely accorded serious attention to the (homo)sexual aspects of Ottoman court poetry.Studies dealing with (homo)sexuality in other Islamic literary traditions, such as Arabic, Persian and Urdu, are infrequently encountered as well. Although more research on the subject may be expected to appear soon, thanks to the rapidly growing interest in cross cultural gender studies, Islamist scholars most likely will continue to withdraw from the religious, cultural and political sensitivity of the subject. Even some Western researchers still feel uncomfortable dealing with such an issue. The well-known scholar of Islamic literatures, J. C. Burgel, presented a very informative scholarly paper on eroticism in early Islamic literature. In the beginning of his study, he found it necessary to make the following statement to his audience: "In this paper I do not intend to be indecent; I do not report a single story for the sake of mere indecency. Nor, however, do I refrain from bringing to the knowledge of the reader what I think is the stuff of which eroticism in medieval Islam was made." John Boswell brings forth other interesting examples of the cautious approach adopted by Western scholars of Middle Eastern Islamic literatures when homosexuality is an issue: "[W]hen the Persian moral fables of Sa'di were translated into English in the early nineteenth century, Francis Gladwin conscientiously transformed each story about gay love into heterosexual romance by altering the offending [English] pronouns. As late as the mid-twentieth century, the ghazels of Hafiz were still being falsified in this way."
It is, then, no surprise that in Middle Eastern Islamic countries, the study of homosexuality in Islamic literatures is hindered by a vigorous resistance from the guardians of morality. The falsification of the gender of the beloved, as Boswell describes, still remains the most effective tool in keeping homosexuality veiled. During my undergraduate education at Ankara University's Department of Turkish Language and Literature, I never heard a single lecture delivered about homosexual themes in Ottoman court poetry. When some liberal professors did attempt to make extremely guarded statements about the "possibility" of homosexuality in classical literature, they endeavored to discover a "foreign," specifically Ancient Greek, origin for what was found in Ottoman poetry. This seems to stem from a moralizing and perhaps Islamist effort to avoid telling Turkish children about such unacceptable issues or, when it is undeniable, to blame such behavior on someone else. According to this rhetoric, what looks like homosexuality in Ottoman poetry is in fact nothing more than an unfortunate continuation of the Persian poetic vocabulary which carried into the Ottoman tradition certain Persian homosexual themes, and furthermore, they maintain, these elements had entered Islamic Persian literature from the Ancient Greek tradition. This kind of criticism has resorted to other remedies to cover up a "shameful" part of the Turkish cultural heritage. The fact that neither Turkish nor Persian shows grammatical distinction of gender was and still is one of the greatest opportunities for the moralist/Islamist critic to translate every pronoun concerning the beloved as she.
Homosexuality was openly reflected in the literatures and other artistic productions of the Ancient Greeks and Romans. Sometimes these works were accompanied by pictures that required no further explanations. John Boswell mentions that exclusively homosexual characters were common in ancient literature. Perhaps someday scholarship will indeed prove with certainty that many homosexual themes were carried into Persian literature through the Greek connection. In any case, moralist, Islamist, or nationalist approaches cannot change the fact that homosexuality was and still is common in the Islamic Middle East, or that it constitutes a part of this literary tradition.
In the previous chapter, I maintained that the Ottoman-Turkish society--as is the case in other Middle Eastern Islamic countries--was a veiled society, and that pre- and extramarital heterosexual interactions were severely prohibited. The woman was isolated from the man. And I added that, in that veiled society, social and psychological factors conditioned the Ottoman poet to cultivate the imagination of an idealized and fetishized woman. That woman served the Ottoman poet as a replacement for his absent loved one who was forbidden to him by the strict norms of the "society of the veil."
Eyuboglu believes that the only form of love depicted with realism in Ottoman divan literature was homosexual love. Although a comparison of the different manners of treatment of this feature in Ottoman poetry would require an extended research and analysis, we may establish that the conditions of possibility for the existence and survival of such sexual activity were present in Ottoman-Turkish society. Besides veiling, the separation of men and women in daily life and the formation of exclusively male and female groups must have provided some of the required circumstances for the expression of homosexuality in that society. It is well-known that many Westerners who travelled to the lands of the Ottoman Empire mentioned in their letters their observations concerning homosexuality among Ottoman-Turkish men and women. Although these Westerners might have imposed their own biases and expectations about the "East" upon the culture which they actually observed, the fact that some Ottoman and Turkish sources indicate the same information lends more credibility to their accounts. For example, a representative of the last generation of Ottomans, Refik Ahmet Sevengil, said that homosexuality was a "problem" among both male and female dancers. Concerning lesbianism, he remarked:
This psychological sickness, which clinical medicine calls "love between the same gender," was common in the past among women, too. There were such wealthy women who made love to each other in the harems. They had several young and beautiful girls and women in their service in order to satisfy their sexual desires. They made these women take care of their private and secret affairs.
Although such remarks attest to the existence of homosexual practice in Ottoman-Turkish society, it is rather more difficult to uncover evidence of homosexual love in written texts, and specifically in poetry. One of the major questions to be asked is whether the poet is really trying to convey homosexual messages to his reader or whether what he describes is but a "mystical" relationship.
The Holy Qur'an strictly prohibits any kind of homosexual interactions, and, to be sure, Ottoman-Turkish society was organized according to Islamic law. The court poets lived in a predominantly Islamic environment as well. Almost all of them had to write poetry in praise of Muhammad and the religion which was revealed to him. To try to determine the degree of the poets' religious faith is beyond the scope and purpose of this study. It is, however, crucial to note that the poets of the court often followed paths away from the norms of canonical religion and toward mystical Islam. With its extremely ambiguous vocabulary, Islamic mysticism was perhaps the strongest and--more importantly--safest vehicle for the poets to say what they really wanted to say. Homosexuality was one of the subjects that many court poets wanted to talk about, and the best method for them was to write about it in a discourse that was open to multiple interpretations.
Mystical vocabulary came to the rescue of the homosexual poet by offering a means of expressing his desires symbolically and therefore ambiguously or even equivocally. C. M. Naim states that "[i]n Islamic societies, poetry's symbolic language has always been seen as a more appropriate or safe medium to depict controversial ideas." A. Schimmel points out that, linguistically speaking, there is indeed a relationship between the mystical language and the "tendency of the Arabs to play with the words." For centuries the medieval Islamic poet struggled to create extremely abstract allegorizations. This abstraction was there in early Arabic literature and later on became even stronger in Persian, Ottoman, and Urdu poetry. And some "mystics drew up whole charts to explain the simplest words in a mystical sense." This "mystical" vagueness created a poetic discourse that indeed saved those poets who sought to refer in their poetry to "immoral" activities, like homosexuality. Arslan Yuzgun mentions in his study of homosexuality in modern Turkey that some homosexuals use a kind of secret language when they want to talk to each other in public about their homosexual activities.[13] Secret or coded speech serves as a protection from the discrimination and threats of the dominant social values which would condemn the group. It is then quite understandable that the Islamic poets used the recondite characteristics of the mystical discourse for their own security.
The mystical ambiguity indeed not only helped the poets themselves but also, as I mentioned before, continues to provide twentieth-century moralists and religious nationalists with a means of denying or explaining away such "inappropriate" elements in their cultural heritage. One of the most respected scholars of Ottoman poetry, Harun Tolasa, for example, refrained from dealing with the homosexual beloveds of Ahmed Pasa (a well-known fifteenth-century poet) in his "detailed" analysis of Ahmed Pasa's divan. We do know that Ahmed Pasa wrote several independent gazels for his male beloveds. He even mentioned their names, such as Ishak, 'Ali, Kasim, etc., which are exclusively male names. Although Tolasa stated in his Introduction that his analysis avoided "subjective ideas and judgements," his approach could only see heterosexual lovers and beloveds in the divan of Ahmed Pasa by the help of a prescribed literary criticism of religious nationalism based on Islamic or mystical solutions for almost any given classical poem. It is true that one can easily find mystical concepts in the whole of Ahmed Pasa's works. However, to propose a purely mystical interpretation of the gazels mentioned above, written for and about men, seems impossible to me. Tolasa's book, which is basically a concordance of the various themes in the divan, supposedly examined, treated, and drew conclusions from every single couplet of the collection. It is then a distortion not to mention in his section on love the theme of homosexuality in Ahmed Pasa. We must assume that, if he has examined the poems mentioned above, he has forced upon them a "mystical" meaning or some other such interpretation, since he remains virtually silent about homosexual themes. What we find here is actually typical of the moralist/Islamist critic's "mystical" paradigm.
Although this type of criticism could distort any homosexuality through the mystical interpretation, based on the presence of mysticism in many poems of a given divan, it was categorically unable to apply these paradigms to the male beloveds of Nedim, because his divan did not show signs of Islamic mysticism anywhere. The so-called "problem of homosexuality" was still there, especially in some of his most "beautiful" poems, poems that the critics and editors could not overlook or strike from their editions. While some of these homosexually-oriented couplets even found their way into high school text books with their modern Turkish translations, the editors of these books did not provide commentaries, thereby avoiding the need to inform the students about the gender of Nedim's beloveds. Perhaps these students enjoyed the poems for their musical sound and their worldly tone but--to be sure--many of them had no idea about the gender of Nedim's beloveds. The tactic of the moralist/Islamist critic in the case of Nedim has been to remain silent. Even Hasibe Mazi-oglu--whose profound knowledge of Ottoman court poetry has always impressed her students and colleagues--chose not to deal with the homo-sexual characteristics in her study on Nedim.
Here are some of Nedim's poems in which the theme of homosexuality is reflected the most clearly. His following sarki is of importance not only for its homosexual subject matter but for the fact that it has been available even in Turkish high school books without a single footnote about the gender of Nedim's "beloved cypress":
Bir safa bahs idelim gel su dil-i nasadaGidelim serv-i revanim yuru Sa'dabadaIste uc cifte kayik iskelede amadeGidelim serv-i revanim yuru Sa'dabada
Gulelim oynayalim kam alalim dunyadanMa'-i tesnim icelim cesme-i nev-peydadanGorelim ab-i hayat akdigin ejderhadanGidelim serv-i revanim yuru Sa'dabada
Geh varip havz kenarinda hiraman olalimGeh gelip Kasr-i Cinan seyrine hayran olalimGah sarki okuyup gah gazel-hwan olalimGidelim serv-i revanim yuru Sa'dabada
Izn alip cum'a namazina deyu maderdenBir gun ugrilayalim carh-i sitem-perverdenDolasip iskeleye dogru nihan yollardanGidelim serv-i revanim yuru Sa'dabada
Bir sen u bir ben u bir mutrib-i pakize-edaIznin olursa eger bir de Nedim-i seydaGayri yarani bu gunluk idup ey suh fedaGidelim serv-i revanim yuru Sa'dabada
Let us bestow joy upon this heart filled with woe; let us go to Sa'dabad, my beloved cypress; here is the six-oared boat awaiting us; let us go to Sa'dabad, my beloved cypress.// Let us laugh and play, let us enjoy the world; let us drink nectar from the newly-made fountain; let us watch the elixir pour from the dragon's mouth; let us go to Sa'dabad, my beloved cypress// Let us go, for a while, and wander around the pond; let us later gaze upon the Heavenly Pavilion; let us always sing songs and recite poems; let us go to Sa'dabad, my beloved cypress// Ask your mother's permission to go to the Friday prayer; let us steal a day from reproachful destiny; going through the secret roads towards the quay, let us go to Sa'dabad, my beloved cypress// Just you and me and a nice, old musician and, if you permit, the mad poet Nedim, let us, today, forget about the others; let us go to Sa'dabad, my beloved cypress.
The sarki, as a poetic form, is generally quite light in tone. This sarki is completely free from any mystical elements and aptly represents the external reality of Nedim, his this-worldly concerns and pleasant nature. Like hundreds of other court poets before him, Nedim employs here a classical metonymy, serv-i revan (literally meaning "the walking cypress"), to refer to his beloved. This cliché was used for centuries to evoke the tall stature of the beloved and was considered one of the primary elements of "beauty" in the classical tradition. Nedim uses the same signifier; however, he overturns the signified by substituting for the commonplace image of the beloved a real human being, a human being whose gender is male. On the basis of the first three stanzas, the reader can easily assume that the poem is about a woman with whom Nedim is in love. The fourth stanza, however, discloses the metaphor and reveals Nedim's homosexual intention. In the first line of this stanza, the poet suggests his beloved come away and have a great day together, and he proposes a way to deceive his mother: "ask your mother's permission to go to the Friday prayer." In the Islamic tradition, only men go to the mosque to pray on Fridays in a unified group. Even though it is believed in the Islamic world that to worship together is much more valuable than to worship alone, it is very rare to find women in that group along with men. On the basis of this fundamental social and religious principle, there is no room for doubt that the beloved cypress Nedim is talking about in this poem is a male. Since this male beloved is advised to ask for his mother's permission, the person Nedim is talking to must be a teenage boy.
I would suggest that there might be (homo)sexual overtones in the second stanza as well. Ab-i hayat is a well-known expression for elixir, the water of life in Persian and Ottoman court poetry. As I mentioned earlier, the eighteenth century was a time during which significant changes took place in Ottoman-Turkish society. The construction of lavish and elaborate new buildings and fountains was one of the landmarks of that period. Nedim, in the verse "gorelim ab-i hayat akdigin ejderhadan" (let us watch the elixir coming from the dragon's mouth), is describing one of those extravagant fountainheads of the Tulip Period. Here, the fountainhead is a special one; it has the shape of a dragon from whose mouth water is gushing. There is in fact a close relationship between ab-i hayat, 'life elixir' and ejderha, 'dragon'. The latter in world cultures often symbolizes fertility in general and, in its association with water, rain. It was, however, used in Ottoman court poetry until Nedim as the symbol of the beloved's hair in association with its aim to capture and destroy the poor lover. (We may again refer to Plate 1.) If we take the theme of the poem in its entirety into consideration, we can, I believe, conclude that Nedim was using this image with a sexual connotation. To the best of my knowledge, this is a totally new image in the classical tradition. We do know that the fountain in modern poetry has been used metaphorically to suggest ejaculation, and it seems to me that, in this poem about a boy beloved, Nedim aptly chose this male-oriented image.
What is reflected in this poem is not accidental. Throughout the divan, there are many other examples which exhibit the homosexual dimensions of Nedim's discourse. In one of his gazels, for instance, Nedim addresses the beloved in the following manner:
Kizoglan nazi nazin sehlevend avazi avazinBelasin ben de bilmem kiz misin oglan misin kafir"
You have the coquetry of a virgin girl and the voice of a tall handsome man; you cause such trouble, oh my infidel beloved; I am not quite sure whether you are a girl or a boy!
It is imperative to note here that the word oglan, which I have translated as boy, now is used in modern Turkish to refer to a gay man.Homosexual desire is again articulated in one of Nedim's most famous and admired gazels. In the first couplet, he freely displays his passionate dream of a young, handsome man:Ben olsam bir de mutrib bir de tarf-i cuybar olsaHos imdi bir de farza bir cuvan-i sivekar olsaI wish there were me, a musician and a river side; and should there be an attractive young man, too...
By the same token, another gazel informs us about his desire for a man wearing a turban:
Ben bu gun bir nev-bahar-i husn u an seyr eyledimTarf-i destarinda sunbul gibi mular var idi
Today I watched a spring of beauty and elegance; on the side of his turban, his hyacinth-like hair was peeking out.
The hyacinth was a common image used by Persian and Ottoman poets for the beloved's curly hair. It is also interesting to note, though, that the Greco-Roman mythological figure, Hyacinth, was a symbol of homosexuality. When the bard, Thamyris, fell in love with Hyacinth, he was said to be the first man to have loved another man. Hyacinth also inspired love in Apollo and Zephyrus, the West Wind.[28] We do not know for sure whether the Persian and Ottoman poets explicitly knew of this mythological interpretation. In addition, the Persian Ottoman word sunbul does not at all resemble the Greek, unlike nergis and narcissus, for example; however, we should bear in mind the possibility that Nedim used this flower image in order to carry a homosexual connotation, especially since it is found in association with the turban.
Challenges to the religious canon constitute the dominant theme in many of his other poems and, especially in the following couplets, he articulates his dislike for hypocritical religious men, openly declaring his desire for a beautiful young man:
Sine saf olsun heman reyb u riyadan zahidaElde tesbihe bedel cam olsa da mani' degil
Husnini seyreyleyim de gordugum yer ol guliGulsitan olmazsa hammam olsa da mani' degil
Oh ascetic, as long as one's heart is free from suspicion and hypocrisy, it doesn't matter whether there is a wine glass in his hand or prayer beads. // As long as I can watch the beauty of that rose (hthe man), it doesn't matter whether the place where I watch him is a rosegarden or a bathhouse!
It is the suggestion of seeing this "rose" in the bathhouse which leads us to suspect that the "rose" is a man since there was and still is a complete separation of men and women there. The tesbih, 'prayer beads' and cam, 'wine glass' are not objects used exclusively by men, although they are most often associated with primarily male-oriented activities. It must also be pointed out that the tesbih is not used only for praying; in fact, it is often fondled and the beads are passed through the fingers almost unconsciously. These three elements taken in conjunction leave little room for doubt about the gender of the "rose."
Nedim continues on every possible occasion to criticize the ascetic for his intolerance of (homo)sexual relationships and persists in defying the established religious values with his bitter tone. In the following couplet he even boasts that his sexual activity is more than imagination or voyeurism:
Guzel sevmekde zahid muskilin var ise bizden sorBizim ol fende cok tahkikimiz itkanimiz vardir
Oh ascetic, if you have any problems in making love to the beauties, ask me! I have in that science done quite some research and I do it very well!
Nedim is not alone in criticizing the ascetic or orthodox Muslim figures. It was common in both the Persian and Ottoman poetic traditions for poets under the influence of Islamic mysticism to criticize and even mock the orthodoxy with which it was always at odds. However, many of those "mystical" poets were merely imitating common thematic paradigms in their invectives and following preexisting patterns. Furthermore, though they criticized certain religious elements, the mystics were still religious men. This is what distinguishes Nedim from almost all of his predecessors, mystic and otherwise. Throughout his divan, Nedim shows so few signs of any serious or genuine religious feeling, mystic or orthodox, that we can say he was completely sincere in his criticism of religion and of asceticism and that this was quite different from a mere imitation of common themes and patterns.
In his Persian poems, Nedim seems to articulate his homosexual tendencies in a much more unrestrained voice. In one of them, for example, he says that "compared to a beard, the eyelashes and waist of the beloved, as thin as a hair, have no value" for him. (His criticism of the prescribed features of the beloved is again quite clear here.) And in the last couplet of the same poem, he reinforces the message of his homosexual desire: "Oh Nedim, hair, beauty spot, eyes, lips, and the lovelocks... All these [characteristics of hers] have captured you; however, only his beard has captured me!" More courageously, in a mufred he openly writes that "there are hundreds of beauties in every corner of Istanbul, and to be able to deal with them one has to have an iron penis!" Open declarations in Persian of his homosexual desire continue, as when he asks his companion during their love-making: "From hair to hair, I consider every part of your body kissable; please help me to choose which part of your body you would like me to kiss." Along with the other Persian poems which praise the beard and masculine features of the beloved, we may assume in this poem that it is a man's body he praises since he implies that every part of this person is covered with hair. For an Ottoman, this would certainly not be found attractive in a woman.
It should be recalled here that Persian was not Nedim's native tongue. As an Ottoman court poet, he was cultivated in both the Arabic and Persian languages and--like many other Ottoman poets--he proved his knowledge of these languages by actually writing poetry in them. What is significant, though, is that Nedim sounds much more unrestrained in talking about his sexuality in a foreign language, a language which could be understood only by a specific coterie. His openness in Persian may have psychological dimensions as well. It may be readily observed that a non-native speaker can articulate many socially censored or sexually oriented words and expressions in a foreign language much more easily than in her/his mother tongue. Sociolinguists refer to this as "code switching."[36] Despite these openly sensual themes, however, Nedim does not stoop to gratuitous vulgarity or cursing, with the exception, perhaps, of the mufred cited above.
Nedim's homosexual desire is best represented in his poem about the bathhouse, commonly called "Hammamiyye." It is a kaside written in Ottoman Turkish. Although no couplet of this poem is as unrestrained as the Persian couplets cited above, it is still clear that the object of the poet's attention is a beautiful boy--perhaps a tellak, 'bath attendant' (for an example, see Plate 9 reproduced here from the Hubanname of Fazil-i Enderuni)--and Nedim does not in any way try to hide the homosexual themes with a religious or mystical veil. This poem, entitled "Tesbib be-meth-i vezir-i a'zam Ibrahim Pasa" ("An erotic poem in praise of the Grand Vizier Ibrahim Pasa"), is about Nedim's going to the bathhouse, meeting a beautiful boy there, and his fascination with him. The first couplets of this poem are of especially great importance in providing an explicit expression of his homosexual desire:
Sepide-dem ki olup dide-i hwabdan bidarHurusa basladi nagah serde derd-i humar
Hezar za'f ile hammama togri 'azm ittimKemer gusiste peragende guse-i destar
Varip o hal ile hammama uft u hiz iderekIdince guse-i halvetde cay-gah-i karar
Ne gordum ah aman el-aman bir afet-i canGelip yanimda gunes gibi oldi lemca-nisar
Saci futadesinin hwabi gibi pejmurdeNigahi 'asikinin hatiri gibi bimar
Vucudi ham gumusden beyaz gulden nermBoyi henuz yetismis nihalden hemvar
Kamer hamiresi yahod gunes murabbasiBil(l)ur sah mi ya nahl-i lu'lu-i sehvar
O kadd u had o tenasub o gabgab ol pistanO yal u bal o temayul o sive-i reftar
Tamam reng u baha mu-be-mu kirisme vu nazTamam husn u serapay su'le-i didad
Velik hissolunur kim o naz-perverdinDeruni icre bir endise vu bir ates var
Early in the morning I woke up, but suddenly my hangover began to bother me.// Hardly had I set out for the bathhouse, when my belt was already loosening and the corner of my turban was fluttering.// Arriving in the bathhouse in that shape, I found a solitary spot there.// Oh my God! I saw a beauty, a calamity for the soul. Approaching me, he began to emanate gleams like the sun.// His hair was scattered just like his lover's sleep; his look was distracted, just like his lover's [Nedim's] heart.// His body was whiter than pure silver, softer than a rose; his posture was straighter than a fresh, young sapling.// Was his body a moon-like dough or a sunny confection? Was his stature a crystal bough or a precious pearl tree?// That stature, that cheek, that perfect proportion, that double chin, those nipples; that beauty and strength, that coquetry, that graceful walk // were all colorful and precious, they were truly flirtatious and alluring; they were from head to toe beautiful like a resplendent face.// However, I could see that there was thought and a burning deep inside that coquettish beloved.
Apart from the fact that the "Hammamiyye" is one of Nedim's most important poems as a typical example of his homosexual tendencies, it is also significant that it was presented to the grand vizier of the Ottoman Empire. This means that Ibrahim Pasa had no objection to the erotic theme. Although to my knowledge no document indicates this, the "Hammamiyye" was probably written upon the request of the grand vizier. If one takes the life-style of this vizier of the Tulip Period into consideration, there is, I believe, sufficient reason for such an assumption. Sevengil indicates that Ibrahim Pasa used to invite the poets into his presence and enjoy their "indecent" writings.
What I have aimed to demonstrate in this chapter is that Nedim, as the most successful representative of the localization efforts in Ottoman literature, continues to present the characteristics of his breakthrough poetic discourse in representing his homosexual tendencies. However, by no means do I intend to suggest that there was no such sexual discourse before Nedim. He consistently expressed this desire in a poetry devoid of mystical veiling or any other means of protection against the established moral norms of the times. In this, he continued to challenge social norms, the poetic canon and the religious restrictions which had dominated and, to an extent, still dominate artistic activity.
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