Orality in the Tekke and the Circulation of “High” and “Low” Cultures of Sufism in Seventeenth-Century İstanbul

Abstract

The article draws on the Ṣoḥbetnāme (The book of companionship), a collection of Oğlan Şeyh İbrahim Efendi’s (d. 1655) oral discourses as compiled by his disciple Ṣun‘ullāh Gaybī (d. ca. 1676). Raised in a rural community in the Balkans, İbrahim Efendi was trained in the high culture of Sufism in İstanbul after he arrived in the city as a young boy. Studying the Ṣoḥbetnāme allows us to better understand İbrahim Efendi’s rootedness in the oral thought first molded by his rural beginnings and later defined by his urban associations. The contours of his oral discourse and poetry are discussed as they switch back and forth between the rural and the urban, the heterodox and the orthodox, the vernacular (Turkish) and the literary (Arabic and Persian).