::::::BİLYAY

YUNUS EMRE, The Great Turkish Humanist
Compiled by Selman Gerçeksever

Yunus Emre was the most significant literary figure of Turkish Anatolia to
assimilate the philosophy of Islam. His verse stressed the importance of human
worth, and viewed all spiritual teachings not in terms of rigid formulas but
in terms of freedom of conscience and fundamental ethos.
Yunus Emre (born circa AD 1320) best represents the humanistic mysticism
of Anatolia in the late 13th century. His philosophy is akin to Socratic humanism,
which supposes that truth is immanent in human subjectivity and that the divine
is imbedded in the human individual.
Naturalistic and ecumenical visions form an integral part of Yunus Emre's
theology:

With the mountains and rocks
I call you out, my God,
With the birds as day breaks
I call you out, my God.

With Jesus in the sky,
Moses on Mount Sinai,
Raising my scepter high,
I call you out, my God.

His poems frequently refer to his full acceptance of the ''four holy books''
rather than a strict adherence to the Koran, and occasionally invoke pre-Islamic
religious names.

I am Job; I have found all this patience.
I am St. George; I died a thousand times.
If you kill me seventy times,
Like St. George,
Then seventy times,
I'll keep on returning,
Struggling to reach You,
Nothing could daunt me.

Yunus Emre found in love a Spiritual force that transcends the narrow confines
into which the human individual is forced:

The man who feels the marvels of true love,
Abandons his religion and nation.

For seven centuries, his verses were memorized, recited, and celebrated in
the heartland of Anatolia. His fame has become so widespread that about a
dozen towns claim to have his tomb.
Among his stylistic virtues were distilled statements, simple images and
metaphors, and the avoidance of prolixity. He explicitly cautioned against
eloquence and bloated language:

Too many words are fit for a beast of burden.

Like the medieval authors and thinkers in Europe who set aside their national
languages in favor of Latin, Rumi chose Persian as his vehicle of expression.
But Yunus Emre, like Dante, preferred the vernacular of his own people. Even
today, since his death, in the seventh century, most Turks can read and appreciate
Yunus Emre without consulting a dictionary too frequently.
He spurned book learning if it did not have humanistic relevance, because
he believed in the human individual's Godliness:

Knowing should mean a full grasp of knowledge,
Knowledge means to know yourself,
If you have failed to understand yourself,
Then all of your learning has failed its call.
If you don't identify the human individual as God,
All your learning is of no use at all.

Similar to Dante's work, Yunus Emre's poetry symbolized the ethical patterns
of moral life while depicting the higher values of immortal beings. He was
content to utilize the available corpus of mystic thought and literature with
elements of Buddhism, the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus, Indian thinking as well
as that of Christian mystic sects, and of Moslem thinkers like Mansur al-Hallaj,
Ibn Arabi, Al-Ghazali, Attar, Ahmet Yesevi, Rumi, etc.
The mystic has no fear of death, because he believes in immortality by virtue
of God's love.
As Yunus expresses it:

Death should give you no fear at all,
Fear not, your life is eternal.

Mystic poetry is full of references to the fallacy of the orthodox concept
of the ''duality'', which posits God and human beings as completely separate.
However, the central doctrine of Sufism is ''vahdet-i vücut'' (the unity of
existence). Yunus Emre explicitly stated this fundamental tenet:

The universe is the oneness of Deity,
The true human individual is he who knows this unity.
You better seek Him in yourself.
He is God Himself, human are His images.
See for yourself : God is the human individual,
That is what He is.

It is a duty for the human individual to love God, and to become, through
love, perfect.
This requires the achievement of ''Self Knowledge''. As Yunus stated it:
''True science is self-knowledge.'' Lack of self-knowledge, in his
view, signifies a lowly existence:

One should aim to acquire knowledge to know oneself,
If you don't know yourself, you are worse than a beast.

Who was Yunus Emre?
This man who called himself ''Yunus, the lover'', ''Yunus, the dervish'',
was he a ''perfect man''? What manner of man was he? What was the life he
led?
About his life we know precious little. What we do know tends to be legend
rather than ascertainable fact. Internal references in his poems clarify very
little in autobiographical terms; besides, some of them are misleading, some
full of contradictions. They are mostly expressions of mystical views or poetic
depictions of psychic vicissitudes.
No scholar has been able to determine Yunus Emre's date of birth. Speculations
range from the years 1310 to 1350. Most reliable scholarly studies place the
year as 1320 or 1321.
It has also been speculated that this eloquent poet was illiterate for the
greater part of his life, or perhaps throughout his life. His poems however
display erudition and a richness of allusions that can hardly be expected
from an illiterate. The debate on this topic is ongoing. There are lines in
Yunus Emre's poems that specifically refer to his 'illiteracy'. This could
be a statement of fact, but then it is just as conceivable that the mystic
was referring to his 'ignorance' before he adopted the mystic faith, before
he became enlightened about God. The claim to 'illiteracy' is also refuted
by explicit references to his having read the 'four holy books' and many other
instances of education. We regard the controversy as an exercise in futility.
Perhaps it does not matter - except as a matter of biographical curiosity
- if Yunus Emre was an illiterate or an erudite scholar. The poems matter;
they speak for themselves, and some of them are magnificent.

The controversy on the authenticity of some of the poems attributed to Yunus
Emre is, by the same token, fruitless. In many cases, it is impossible to
prove that the poems belong to any other specific poet. Furthermore, the verses
held to be of dubious authenticity bear a striking resemblance, in content
and style, to Yunus Emre's authenticated poems. We tend to accept all the
poems attributed to him, even if this means the acknowledgment of Yunus Emre
as a collective poetic entity rather than a single individual poet. For us,
Yunus Emre is the poetic embodiment of Anatolian Turkish Islamic humanism
in the late 13th - early - 14th centuries.
Tradition and legend depict Yunus Emre as a poor peasant. At a time of famine,
he took to the road in search of seeds in return for the wild pears he picked
on the Anatolian steppes. While travelling in the hope of bartering his wild
pear for grains and seeds, he happened to come to the 'tekke' (congregation
place) of Hadji Bektaş, the founder of the most latitudinarian sect of Anatolian
Islam. Hadji Bektaş, a grand old man and a poet in his own right, asked Yunus
Emre if he would accept a 'nefes' (a breath of blessing) in exchange for each handful
of wild pears. Yunus refused. Hadji Bektaş increased his offer: ''We shall
give you ten breaths of blessing for each handful.'' Yunus refused again.
Thereupon, Hadji Bektaş gave Yunus a sack full of grain.

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