An Elifnāme Whose Couplets Have the Same Initial and Rhyme Letters

Rāġıb’s Elifnāme

Abstract

In Islamic culture, systems such as abjad, cafr, wafq, and biblomancy—created using letters, which are the basic tools of the field called the science of letters—are the result of efforts to give meaning to life and humanity. In Hurufism and Islamic Sufism, beliefs about letters have been evaluated as a source for poets over time. In their poems, poets have mostly used letters as verbal skills based on shape, in terms of being dotted or undotted or contiguous or non-contiguous letters. In addition, the frequent use of letters as a means of expression for the symbolic and mystical symbols they represent and indicate has paved the way for the emergence of new types of verse. When it comes to a kind of verse based on letters, the first thing that comes to mind is elifnāmes. Elifnāmes are written in various verse forms such as ġazel, ḳasīde, müseddes, mes̱nevī, koşma, destan, semā‘ī, and dīvān. This genre, which is a common feature of classical Turkish literature and folk literature, is generally written on religious, mystical, and didactic subjects such as the names and attributes of Allah, supplication to Allah, praise of the Prophet Mohammad and religious figures, the importance of worship, the relationship between the order and the sheik, the essence and meaning of creation, and the relationship between unity and abundance. Diverse in terms of their arrangement, elifnāmes have been classified as reverse, straight, straight-reverse, ebcednāme, and nested elifnāmes based on the location of the letters and the unit of verse. When the studies conducted were examined, it was not possible to identify an elifnāme in which the beginning of the couplets and the rhyme letter regularly were the same. In this respect, the elifnāme written by Rāġıb in the 19th century in the mes̱nevī verse form, which is the subject of our study, is interesting in that both the first letter of the word in the first lines of the couplets and the rhyme letters are alphabetical and the same. In our study, the existence of this Elifnāme, which has not been mentioned before in the sources, will be noted and the poem will be examined in terms of its content and form. At the end of the paper, the transcribed text and intralingual translation of Elifnāme is included.