The directory «Plots»

Fużūlī (فضولی)
(1494—1556)

Fużūlī was the pen name of the poet Muhammad bin Suleyman. Often considered one of the greatest contributors to the Dîvân tradition of Turkish literature, Fuzûlî in fact wrote his collected poems (dîvân) in three different languages: Azerbaijani Turkish, Persian, and Arabic. Although his Turkish works are written in Azerbaijani, he was well-versed in both the Ottoman and the Chagatai Turkish literary traditions as well. He was also well versed in mathematics and astronomy.

Fuzûlî is generally believed to have been born around 1483 in what is now Iraq, when the area was under Ak Koyunlu Turkmen rule; he was probably born in either Karbalā’ or an-Najaf. His family was a part of the Bayat tribe, one of the Turkic Oghuz tribes who were related to the Ottoman Kayı clan and were scattered throughout the Middle East, Anatolia, and the Caucasus at the time. Though Fuzûlî's ancestors had been of nomadic origin, the family had long since settled in towns.

Fuzûlî appears to have received a good education, first under his father—who was a mufti in the city of Al Hillah—and then under a teacher named Rahmetullah. It was during this time that he learned the Persian and Arabic languages in addition to his native Azerbaijani. Fuzûlî showed poetic promise early in life, composing sometime around his twentieth year the important mesnevî entitled «Beng ü Bâde» ("Hashish and Wine"), in which he compared the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II to hashish and the Safavid shah Ismail I to wine, much to the advantage of the latter.

One of the few things that is known of Fuzûlî's life during this time is how he arrived at his pen name. In the introduction to his collected Persian poems, he says: "In the early days when I was just beginning to write poetry, every few days I would set my heart on a particular pen name and then after a time change it for another because someone showed up who shared the same name". Eventually, he decided upon the Arabic word fuzûlî—which literally means "impertinent, improper, unnecessary"—because he "knew that this title would not be acceptable to anyone else".

In 1534, the Ottoman sultan Süleymân I conquered the region of Baghdad, where Fuzûlî lived, from the Safavid Empire. Fuzûlî now had the chance to become a court poet under the Ottoman patronage system, and he composed a number of kasîdes, or panegyric poems, in praise of the sultan and members of his retinue, and as a result, he was granted a stipend. However, owing to the complexities of the Ottoman bureaucracy, this stipend never materialized.

Though his poetry flourished during his time among the Ottomans, the loss of his stipend meant that, materially speaking, Fuzûlî never became secure. In fact, most of his life was spent attending upon the Shi`ite Tomb of `Alî in the city of an-Najaf, south of Baghdad. He died during a plague outbreak in 1556, in Karbalā’, either of the plague itself or of cholera.
Fuzûlî has always been known, first and foremost, as a poet of love. Fuzûlî's notion of love, however, has more in common with the Sufi idea of love as a projection of the essence of God—though Fuzûlî himself seems to have belonged to no particular Sufi order—than it does with the Western idea of romantic love.

The first of these lines, especially, relates to the idea of wahdat al-wujūd, or "unity of being", which was first formulated by Ibn al-‘Arabī and which states that nothing apart from various manifestations of God exists. Here, Fuzûlî uses the word "love" rather than God in the formula, but the effect is the same.

In Fuzûlî's œuvre, his most extended treatment of this idea of love is in the long poem «Dâstân-ı Leylî vü Mecnun», a mesnevî which takes as its subject the classical Middle Eastern love story of Layla and Majnun. In his version of the story, Fuzûlî concentrates upon the pain of the mad lover Majnun's separation from his beloved Layla, and comes to see this pain as being of the essence of love.

The ultimate value of the suffering of love, in Fuzûlî's work, lies in that it helps one to approach closer to "the Real", which is one of the 99 names of God in Islamic tradition.

Azerbaijan, 2012, Museum of Literature

Turkey, 1957, Fuzuli

USSR, 1958, Mukhammed Fuzuli

USSR, 1978.11.02, Museum of Azerbaijan literature in Baku

USSR, 1983.06.02, Fizuli monument in Baku