Dervish Poets and ‘Vernacular Islam’ in Medieval Turkey

Akbar's Chamber - Experts Talk Islam

While the Quran was revealed in Arabic, for more than a thousand years Muslims have explored its meanings and implications in many other languages. In the medieval period, this process of ‘vernacularization’ accelerated as wandering holy men — known as dervishes and abdals — preached profound mystical doctrines in languages understood by ordinary people. Their preferred medium was poetry, leading distant contemporaries like Yunus Emre (d.1321) in Anatolia and Amir Khusro (d.1325) in Delhi to lay the foundations of Turkish and Hindi literature. This episode looks at these developments through the Turkish poems of Kaygusuz Abdal, whose verses are still read — and sung — across Turkey to this day. Nile Green talks to Zeynep Oktay Uslu, the translator and editor of Mesnevî-i Baba Kaygusuz (Harvard University Department of Near Eastern Languages and Literatures, 2013).