13th century AD

UNESCO Courier, Dec, 1991 by Talat Sait Halman

THIS year we celebrate the 750th anniversary of the birth of Yunus Emre, who was probably the most significant folk poet in the history of Islamic literature, besides being the most important Turkish poet up to the twentieth century. His poetry embodies the quintessence of Turkish-Anatolian Islamic humanism and has been a source of inspiration in Turkish intellectual life through the ages. His verses include eloquent specimens of tolerance and universalism:

Mystic is what they call me, Hate is my only enemy. I harbour a grudge against none. To me the whole wide world is one.

Many of Yunus Emre's fundamental concepts are rooted in the Sufi tradition, particularly as exemplified by the thirteenth-century mystic and poet Rumi, who lived in Anatolia but wrote in Persian. In this Rumi resembled the writers and thinkers of medieval Europe who used Latin in preference to their national languages. But Yunus Emre, like Dante, adopted the vernacular of his own people. Because he spoke their language and brought a message of divine love, he became a legendary figure and came to be regarded as a saint. For seven centuries his verses have been memorized, recited and celebrated in the heartland of Anatolia. Even today most Turks can read and appreciate him without too much recourse to the dictionary, while they find many classical poets of the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries quite unintelligible.

But it is not for reasons of language alone that Yunus Emre appeals to us today. His themes and concerns are both timeless and universal, relevant to not only to Turkey but to the whole world, and as much now as ever before. For we live in an age that sees war as evil and the supreme crime against humanity. Love is the celebration of life, an idea which is forcefully expressed in the catchword from the 1960s and 1970s: "Make love, not war". Translated into mystical terms, this means that it has both a human and a divine dimension, and it is here that we catch an echo from the poetry of Yunus Emre:

I am not here on earth for strife. Love is the mission of my life.

It is poetry that speaks to us through the centuries, expressing the ecstasy of communion with nature and union with God. This theme of union with God frequently appears in his writing as an ideal which is about to be realized, while his humanism includes, in Hegel's words, the "urging of the spirit outward--that desire on the part of man to become acquainted with his world."

Yunus Emre spurned book learing if it did not have a humanistic relevance, because he believed in man's godliness. In this sense he had affinities with Petrarch, also writing in the fourteenth century, and with Erasmus, a century later, who, as part of their classical or Renaissance humanism, shunned the dogmatism imposed on man by scholasticism. Like them, he sought to instil in ordinary people a renewed sense of the importance of life on Earth, but like Dante, he explored the ethical dimension of mortal life while depicting the higher values of immortal being. Yunus Emre's lines are memorable:

Whoever has one drop of love Possesses God's existence.

About Yunus Emre's life we know very little, and what we do know tends to be a matter of legend rather than ascertainable fact. He is said to have been illiterate for most if not all of his life, yet the poems display an erudition and a richness of allusion that could hardly be expected from an illiterate. In any case, it is the poems themselves that count, and some of them are magnificent.

Yunus Emre's poetry is dominated by a unitary vision of man and nature. Through his humanism he seeks to enrich human existence and to ennoble it by liberating man from dogma and by placing him in a relationship of love with God. His view of love is creative and non-exclusive: "In God's world there are a hundred thousand kinds of love", and "When love arrives, all needs and flaws are gone." He was concerned about all people, particularly the deprived, and this is what gives his poetry its intensely moving quality. He was the first poet in Turkish history to create an "aesthetics of ethics", and in this he has never been surpassed. He stressed the ecumenical ideal:

We regard no one's religion as contrary to ours. True love is born when all faiths are united.

Much of his work is a testament to the equality of all human beings. In an age marked by conflict and destruction, Yumus Emre gave voice to an all-embracing love, proclaiming a belief in a universal fellowship that transcends all schisms and sects:

The world is my true ration Its people are my nation.

He was a man of the people and for the people--a spokesman for social justice who spoke out courageously against the oppression of the underprivileged by rulers, landowners, officials and religious leaders. He thus stood in the mainstream of a humanist tradition that has always claimed the moral right to criticize the Establishment and the powers that be. And, in what could be seen as an anticipation of the spirit of the United Nations and UNESCO, he made a poetic plea for world peace and fellowship which is still supremely relevant in today's world, convulsed as it is by violence and war: