The Social and Intellectual World of a Fifteenth-Century Poem

Abstract:In the early modern Ottoman world, poetry was an important mode of political and spiritual expression for social elites. Sultans, princes, generals, judges, and merchants tried their hand at composing poetry. In this essay, it is argued that the consumption of Ottoman divan poetry, from its composition to its reception, was an act of political and spiritual negotiation between poets, Sufi masters, and sultans. The efficacy of this negotiation depended on genre as much as it did on occasion. To this end, sections of a panegyric composed by Ahmet Pasha (d. 1496/7), poet laureate in Mehmed II's court, in praise of Sufi shaykh Tacüddin İbrahim-i Karamani (d.1467) are analyzed. Poems written for Sufi shaykhs in the second half of the fifteenth century show how scholars in the imperial court communicated with charismatic Sufi masters.