Abstract:
The martyrdom of the mystic Ḥusayn b. Manṣūr, better known as
al-Hallāj (executed in Baghdad in 922 CE), has been a compelling story for Muslim
audiences for centuries. An Ottoman Turkish narrative poem on the subject,
composed sometime in the 15th century, proved to be especially popular. It was
hand-copied repeatedly, into the 19th century, and lithographed at least twice.
Nearly a century ago, Louis Massignon drew attention to what he saw as two distinct,
but related versions of that text. More recently Mustafa Tatci published an
edition of one of them. Neither scholar adequately described the curious history
of this narrative poem. This essay will offer answers to questions prompted by
that history.
Machine summary:
1515/islam-2016-0007 Downloaded from De Gruyter Online at 09/24/2016 08:00:11PM via Freie Universität Berlin already strong, continued for centuries among Ottoman mystics, as the following examination of a key text will show.
In his Recueil de textes inédits concernant l’histoire de la mystique en pays d’Islam, the French scholar identified two recensions of the poem: Dāsitān-i Manṣūr (the shorter of the two) and Manṣūrnāme-i Hallāj (nearly twice as long).
1515/islam-2016-0007 Downloaded from De Gruyter Online at 09/24/2016 08:00:11PM via Freie Universität Berlin ʿAṭṭār s authorship of the Waslatnāma has now also been discredited, but it is clear from Massignon’s synopses that the three texts (one Persian, two Turkish) at least share a common ancestor.
¹⁰ Massignon complicated his discussion of the two Turkish poems, and their authors, by his use of 19th-century lithograph editions of each in which, curi- ously, the name “Niyāzī” appeared as author, replacing “Ahmedī” and “Muridi”.
1515/islam-2016-0007 Downloaded from De Gruyter Online at 09/24/2016 08:00:11PM via Freie Universität Berlin in 1994 Mustafa Tatcı published an edition of the poem which would seem to have fulfilled the French scholar’s desire.
²⁶ Neither Massignon, in his early researches into the “survival” of Hallāj in Turkish-speaking lands, nor Tatcı, in producing an accessible version of the text, was aware of another (partial) copy of the poem, preserved in a manuscript in Paris at the Bibliothèque Nationale.
Circumstantial evidence suggests that yet another copy of the poem (in its longer form and surviving only in a damaged manuscript) was written by the well-known 15th-century Ottoman mystic poet, Eşrefoğlu Rumi (d.