The Multifaceted Identity of Sufi Poet Mehmed Elif and His Poetry as a Mirror of Society

Sufi literature, which developed a verse identity in Anatolian geography from the 13th century to the first quarter of the 20th century, served the effort to establish a connection between “human-society” and “human-transcendent being” with a human-centered approach. One of the last representatives of this tradition is Sheikḫ Maḥmad Elif (d. 1927), the sheikḫ of Sutluce Ḥaṣīrīzādah Tekkah, who nurtured his multifaceted identity field by producing works in fields such as the Qur’ān, hadīth, tafsir, fiqh, kalam, sufism, literature and ḫaṭ (calligraphy). The main purpose of the study is to reveal this multifaceted identity of his and the social structure and content that nourish him in his poems. The author’s emphasis on social themes will be analysed only within the framework of his poems in Dīwān. In addition, it will be brought to attention which agendas of the society, which nurtures its extroverted social roles such as poet, ḫaṭṭat (calligrapher), Mas̠nawiḫān (person who teaches Mas̠nawī), muverriḫ (person who calculates dates with ebced calculation), scribe, madrasa director and Presidency of the Majlis-i Meshāyiḫ, which are outside of its sheikḫdom, are reflected in his poetry. Arabic and Persian proper names and terminologies that have no direct equivalents in English were transferred from their original languages using transcription alphabets. With our study, the multifaceted side of Maḥmad Elif, one of the representatives of the tekkah poetry, and the revealing of the social aspect of his poems will provide important material support to sociologically based fields as well as language and literature disciplines.