Neyzen Tevfik was a Turkish poet, satirist, and neyzen (a “ney performer” in Turkish). He was born in Bodrum on March 24, 1879, and died in Istanbul on January 28, 1953. Tevfik learned Persian as a young man, and became a Mevlevi in İzmir. He then moved to Istanbul and continued his Mevlevi practice in …
Muslim theologian, and a scholar of Islamic jurisprudence and Qur’anic exegesis. Al Maturidi is one of the pioneers of Islamic Jurisprudence scholars and his two works are considered to be authoritative on the subject When al-Maturidi was growing up there was an emerging reaction against some schools within Islam, notably Mu’tazilis, Qarmati, and Shi’a. The Sunni scholars …
Haci Bektasi Veli was an Islamic mystic, humanist and philosopher from Khorasan. Bektashism spread from Anatolia through the Ottomans primarily into the Balkans, where its leaders (known as dedes or babas) helped convert many to Islam. The Bektashi Sufi order became the official order of the elite Janissary corps after their establishment. The Bektashi Order …
Ahmet Yesevi (1093-1166) was born in the town of Sayram in western Turkistan and educated and lived in the towns of Yesi and Bukhara. It may be argued that the “first Turkish Sufism line” is in fact a moral and scientific philosophy, which was present among Turkish people before Islam, which later reconciled the collective …
Abu Nasr Mohammad Ibn al-Farakh al-Farabi was born in a small village Wasij, near Farab in Turkistan in 259 A.H. (870 A.D.). His parents were originally of Persian descent, but his ancestors had migrated to Turkistan. As a philosopher and scientist, he acquired great proficiency in various branches of learning and is reported to have …
Omer Hayyam was a poet, mathematician, philosopher and astronomer who lived in Persia. Omar Khayyam was famous during his times as a mathematician. He wrote the influential Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra (1070), which laid down the principles of algebra, part of the body of Arabic Mathematics that was eventually transmitted to Europe. …
Yunus Emre was a Turkish poet and Sufi mystic. He has exercised immense influence on Turkish literature, from his own day until the present. Because Yunus Emre is, after Ahmet Yesevi and Sultan Veled, one of the first known Turkish poets to have composed works in the spoken Turkish of his own age and region …
Mevlana Celalettin Rumi is a 13th century philosopher and mystic of Islam who is known throughout the world for his exquisite poems and words of wisdom. The name Mevlana connotes to “our master” while Rumi relates to “the land of Rum”, or Anatolia, which is where he lived. Mevlana was a Muslim, but not a …
The history of Turkic literature spans a period of nearly 1,500 years. The oldest extant records of written Turkic are the Orhon inscriptions, found in the Orhon River valley in central Mongolia and dating to the 8th century. Subsequent to this period, between the 9th and 11th centuries, there arose among the nomadic Turkic peoples …
Turkey is an open-air museum of the world’s great architecture: Hellenic, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk, Ottoman. Seljuk Turkish Architecture The Seljuk Turks (1071-c. 1300) settled in Anatolia before the Ottomans. They arrived from Central Asia by way of Iran where they absorbed the great tradition of Persian architecture. They blended this with the Byzantine tradition …