Abstract
The Wind blowing from Medina to Bosphorus: The Commentary (Sharh) of Üsküdari Ahmed Efendi on Qasidat al-Burdah
One of the Mukhadram poets, Ka‘b b. Zuhayr came to the Prophet in the ninth year of the hegira and recites an eulogy (qasida) in order to apologize to him. This eulogy, later known as Qasidat al-Burdah, is among the most annotated texts in the Islamic literatures. While the eulogy was annotated in its original language, Arabic, as of the early period, the work was able to create a rich multilingual literature with Muslim authors giving examples of competent commentaries in other languages.
The eulogy of Burdah, by being a supplementary to the Khirka-i Sa‘ada, which is one of the most distinguished examples of Sacred Relics of the Prophet, was greeted with great interest in the Ottoman period, as it was in the previous Islamic states. Ottoman authors started to annotate the verse after the sixteenth century when the competent examples of Turkish commentary literature were written. Moreover, the commentaries of the eulogy continued to be produced with an ever-increasing interest until the last century. Üsküdari Ahmed Efendi, one of
seventeenth-century commentators, also contributed to
this literature by commentating the eulogy in Turkish for
the first time –according to our determinatons-. His
commentary was either presented to Köprülü Mehmed
Pasha according to one copy, or to Sultan Mehmed IV,
according to others. The commentary’s most prominent
feature is that it successfully attempts to localize the
aforementioned eulogy, which contains all characteristics
of ancient Arabic poetry, by commentating it with the
distinguished couplets of the leading poets of Ottoman
poetry. Within the scope of this study, the uncertainty
around the commentator’s identity was clarified and the
text was subjected to various evaluations in terms of
annotation method.
Keywords
Qasidat al-Burdah, Ka‘b b. Zuhayr, Üsküdari Ahmed Efendi, localization.