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Nesîmî (Nəsimi) Seyyid Ali Imaduddin
(1369—1417)

Seyyid Ali Imaduddin Nesîmî was a 14th-century Turkic Hurufi poet. Known mostly by his pen name (or takhallus) of Nesîmî, he composed one Divan in Azerbaijani Turkic, one in Persian, and a number of poems in Arabic. He is considered one of the greatest Turkic mystical poets of the late 14th and early 15th centuries and one of the most prominent early Divan masters in Turkic literary history. Some consider him as the father of the classic Turkish literature.

Very little is known for certain about Nesîmî's life, including his real name. Most sources indicate that his name was `İmâd-üddîn, but it is also claimed that his name may have been `Alî or Ömer. It is also possible that he was descended from the Prophet Muhammad, since he has sometimes been accorded the title of seyyid that is reserved for people claimed to be in Muhammad's line of descent. Nesîmî's birthplace, like his real name, is wrapped in mystery: some claim that he was born in a province called Nesîm — hence the pen name — located either near Aleppo in modern-day Syria, or near Baghdad in modern-day Iraq, but no such province has been found to exist. There are also claims that he was born in Shamakhi or Bursa, as well as Tabriz, Shiraz, or Diyarbakır.

From his poetry, it's evident that Nesîmî was an adherent of the Sufi Hurûfî movement, which was founded by Nesîmî's teacher Fazlullah Nâimî of Astarabad, who was condemned for heresy and executed in Alinja near Nakhchivan. The center of Fazlullah Nâimî's influence was Baku and most of his followers came from Shirvan.

Nesîmî was, in fact, to become one of the most influential advocates of Hurûfî doctrine, and the movement's ideas were spread to a large extent through his poetry. While Fazlullah believed that he himself was the manifestation of God, for Nesîmî at the center of Creation there was God, who bestowed His Light on man. Through sacrifice and self perfection, man can become one with God. Some time around the year 1417 (or possibly 1404), as a direct result of his beliefs — which were considered blasphemous by the contemporary ulema, or religious authorities — Nesîmî was seized and, according to most accounts, skinned alive in Aleppo.

A number of legends later grew up around his execution, such as the story that he mocked his executioners with improvised verse and, after the execution, draped his flayed skin around his shoulders and departed. A rare historical account of the event — the Tarih-i Heleb of Akhmad ibn Ibrahim al-Halabi — relates that the court, which was of the Maliki school of religious law, was unwilling to convict Nesîmî of apostasy, and that the order of execution instead came from the secular power of the emir of Aleppo, who was hoping to avoid open rebellion.

Nesîmî's tomb in Aleppo remains an important place of pilgrimage to this day.
Nesîmî's collected poems, or dîvân, number about 300, and include ghazals, qasidas (“lyrics”), and rubâ'îs (“quatrains”) in Azerbaijani Turkic, Persian, and Arabic. His Turkish Divan is considered his most important work, contains 250–300 ghazals and more than 150 rubâ'îs. A large body of Bektashi and Alevi poetry is also attributed to Nesîmî, largely as a result of Hurûfî ideas' influence upon those two groups. Shah Ismail I, the founder of Safavid dynasty in Iran, who himself composed a divan in Azerbaijani Turkic under the pen name of Khatai, praised Nesimi in his poems.

The poem serves as an excellent example of Nesîmî's poetic brand of Hurufism in its mystical form. There is a contrast made between the physical and the spiritual worlds, which are seen to be ultimately united in the human being. As such, the human being is seen to partake of the same spiritual essence as God: the phrase lâ-mekân, or «the placeless», in the second line is a Sufi term used for God. The same term, however, can be taken literally as meaning «without a place», and so Nesîmî is also using the term to refer to human physicality. In his poem, Nesîmî stresses that understanding God is ultimately not possible in this world, though it is nonetheless the duty of human beings to strive for such an understanding. Moreover, as the poem's constant play with the ideas of the physical and the spiritual underlines, Nesîmî calls for this search for understanding to be carried out by people within their own selves.

In the quatrain's last line, «Fâ», «Zâd», and «Lâm» are the names of the Arabic letters that together spell out the first name of the founder of Hurufism, Fazl-ullah. As such, Nesîmî is praising his shaykh, or spiritual teacher, and in fact comparing him to God, who is also given the name «Truth». Moreover, using the Perso-Arabic letters in the poem in such a manner is a direct manifestation of Hurûfî beliefs insofar as the group expounds a vast and complex letter symbolism in which each letter represents an aspect of the human character, and all the letters together can be seen to represent God.

Nesîmî is also considered a superb love poet, and his poems express the idea of love on both the personal and the spiritual plane.

USSR, 1973, Imaduddin Nesîmî

USSR, 1973.09.13, Baku. 600th Birth anniv of Nesîmî

USSR, 1973, Nesîmî

USSR, 1983, Nesîmî monument in Baku