Ep. 20 | A Rūmī in the Lands of Shām: Life, Poetry, and Legacy of a Janissary-Turned-Poet Māmayya al-Rūmī | Dr. Hacı Osman Gündüz

Episode 20

Release date: 

Hosts: Harry Bastermajian and Meryum Kazmi

Recording location: Media Production Center, Harvard University

Sound engineer: Jeffrey Valade

Audio editing: Meryum Kazmi

Audio elements: Muwashshah: "Zabi min al-turk," unknown author, Mohamed Jebali (10:35-12:28)

Photo: Takhmīs al-burda by Māmayya al-Rūmī, Kind Saud University MS 60

Transcription: Otter (modified for readability)

Meryum Kazmi  00:10

Welcome to the Harvard Islamica Podcast. I'm Meryum Kazmi,

Harry Bastermajian  00:14

and I'm Harry Bastermajian. We're excited to have with us today Dr. Haci Osman Gunduz, also known as Ozzy, winner of the 2025 Alwaleed Bin Talal Dissertation Prize in Islamic Studies. Ozzy earned his PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard, and is now assistant professor of Arabic language and literature at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Welcome, Ozzy.

Ozzy  00:40

Thank you.

Harry Bastermajian  00:41

It's great to have you here.

Ozzy  00:42

Thank you so much for this opportunity.

Harry Bastermajian  00:44

Of course.

Meryum Kazmi  00:45

We're excited to talk to you about your work. So, Ozzy, if you can, please start by telling us about your background and how you came to the study of Ottoman-era Arabic literature.

Ozzy  00:56

Thank you so much. So, I am an Arabist and literary historian. I've taught Arabic since 2009 and before starting my PhD at Harvard many years ago, I taught Arabic at Tufts University for six years, and when I started my PhD, my initial research interests were actually closer to Arabic pedagogy and Ottoman scholarly commentary traditions. I was interested in how Ottoman scholars studied and taught Arabic grammar, rhetoric, and philology, and the marginal commentaries they wrote, but I changed my interest, but the interest never really disappeared. Instead of marginal commentaries on Arabic pedagogical texts, I became interested in marginalized periods and literary figures, and I'm still interested in how people learned Arabic, how they claimed authority in Arabic, and how they evaluated eloquence, and how literary prestige circulated in a multilingual empire where Arabic existed alongside Persian and Turkish. And a little bit more about my interest -- this is what eventually led me to Ottoman-era Arabic poetry-- I became fascinated by the question of what Arabic literary production looked like when the main political center of the empire was no longer an Arabic-speaking capital, and what did what did it mean to write Arabic poetry in Ottoman Damascus, Cairo, or even in Istanbul? Who were the audiences, who were the patrons, and what counted as good poetry, and how did poets imagine, how did they imagine their place in a tradition that was already many centuries old? And Mamayya al-Rumi, we'll be talking, I'll be talking about him more throughout the podcast, he dies either in 1577 or 1579 He became the ideal figure for me, through whom to explore all these questions.

Harry Bastermajian  03:09

Gotcha.

Meryum Kazmi  03:09

Awesome.

Harry Bastermajian  03:10

Great. Thank you. So, in your first chapter, you discussed the narrative of the decline of Arabic literature. So, what is the decline narrative? Where does it come from, and what has been lost by treating these centuries as a period of decline?

Ozzy  03:28

Great question. Thank you so much. So, the decline narrative, or inhitat in Arabic, is the idea that Arabic literature, and often also Islamic intellectual life, more broadly, entered a long period of stagnation after the classical age. In literary history, the symbolic date is often 1258 that's when the Mongol conquest of Baghdad, but some scholars would place the beginning of decline earlier or later, so the year 15-- sorry-- 1258 is crucial. This is when the Abbasid Empire collapsed following the Mongol invasion of Baghdad. The basic story is familiar. Arabic literature flourishes in the pre-Islamic, early Islamic Umayyad, and especially the early Abbasid periods. Then, after that, it supposedly becomes overly imitative, ornate, artificial, and lacking in creativity until the 19th century nahda, Nahda in Arabic means, the closest equivalent in English would be Renaissance. This narrative comes from several places. It was shaped by late 19th and early 20th century Orientalist scholarship, and this scholarship often imagined Islamic civilization through the paradigm of rise, peak, birth, rise, peak, and decline model, but it was also taken up by many Arab intellectuals and literary historians during and after the Nahda. For them, the idea of decline helped explain why a modern Arab Renaissance was needed, so the narrative became powerful, not only in Western scholarship, but also in modern Arabic literary historiography, and even in school curricula. The problem is not simply that the word decline is negative, the deeper problem is-- and this is what I argue in my dissertation-- I believe that the deeper problem is that it tells us in advance what we are supposed to find, right? If we were, if we approach six or seven centuries of literature, already assuming that it's derivative and decadent, we stop asking good questions. So, just a reminder, so we're talking about 13th century to the 18th century. When we stop asking good questions, then we stop reading carefully, we stop editing texts, we stop teaching them, and we stop seeing them as part of the living history of Arabic literature, and in the process, what gets lost is enormous. We lose sight of manuscript cultures, local literary circles, multilingual authors, Ottoman-era anthologies, coffee house poetry. We'll be talking about coffee more later on, religious verse, panegyrics, praise poetry, satire, chronograms, macaronic poems, and all kinds of social uses of poetry. We also lose sight of how people in those periods understood literary value. What modern readers might, what we as modern readers might dismiss as ornamentation or repetition may have functioned in its own context as skill, wit, memory, technical mastery, and creative engagement with the tradition.

Harry Bastermajian  07:14

So scholarship becomes prescribed, essentially. I mean, it's sort of-- 

Ozzy  07:20

Yes, so in this, I should also add that my goal is not simply to say there was no decline, everything was wonderful, that would just replace one simplistic story with another one, right? But my goal is to ask questions like, what did poets think they were doing what did their audiences value, what did poetry, how did poetry circulate, what were the social conditions of literary production? These are the questions I pose.

Meryum Kazmi  07:53

I just have one follow-up question. So I know that you looked at Arabic and Turkish secondary scholarship as well, right? Did Turkish sources, or does Turkish scholarship also see this as a period of decline? I'm guessing there would be a different perspective.

Ozzy  08:12

Not, no, in Turkish scholarship what I've noticed is that there is - some Turkish scholars tend to be revisionist, especially nationally, moved with nationalistic motives, because calling the Ottoman period the nadir of the decline is problematic for certain nationalistic sentiments, but they approach it from a very revisionist. It was, I mean, we're talking about four centuries of Ottoman rule, and, to a great extent, it was foreign rule, right? So there is increasing interest in rewriting the literary history, but I find that some scholars just go to great extents to say that every, you know, Ottoman Empire was great, Pax Ottomanica, or I forgot the exact term. There are a lot of recently there have been a lot of monographs about individual authors, which I've been following.

Meryum Kazmi  09:27

Interesting. Thank you. Okay, so in chapter two you introduce us to your poet, who was Mamayya al-Rumi, and what drew you to write a micro history based on his life and works? Also, sorry, just some more questions. Where did he come from? How did he come to Damascus? How did he become a prominent Arabic poet? And what genres of poetry do we find in his diwan? So, a bunch of questions.

Ozzy  09:46

Thank you so much. So Mamayya al-Rumi, or with his full name, Muhammed bin Ahmed bin Abdullah, we're not quite sure when he was born, he was probably he was born around 1520 or so, and he died around 1579 or 80, and he was a 16th century Arabic poet who lived in Ottoman Damascus. His, this is a, he's a fascinating figure, because he is, he was an "Arabic poet," in quotation marks, but he was not Arab by origin. He was a Rumi, a term that in this context points to someone from the Ottoman, mainly Turkish-speaking world, Ottoman Turkish-speaking realms, broadly speaking, Anatolia, and the Balkans. So throughout history, Rumi pretty much means somebody from modern day Anatolia, and the Balkans, and I'm, we all know the Rumi, right, the famous poet who, who lived in modern day Turkey and mostly wrote in Persian. He was associated with the Janissary Corps, and later left his military service. So, the Janissaries were an elite Ottoman part of the Ottoman military, and the members of the Janissary Corps were selected from a system called Devshirme. In that system, Christian boys were taken from their families, mainly in the Balkans, and they would be, they would be sent to Muslim Turkish villages, where they were converted to Islam, they learned Turkish, and then, depending on their aptitude, you know, mental, physical, they would be either trained as elite soldiers, or they would be trained as administrators, so we're not quite sure if he, he was a Janissary himself or his father was, and he kind of carried the title Janissary later on. So in Arabic, the word for Janissary is inkishari, and in biographical dictionaries we see that epithet used for him, and he worked, so he quits the Janissary Corps, and he works as a dragoman, or tarjuman, and dragoman means an interpreter, so he was, he worked in courthouses, mahkama, and he was an interpreter from Turkish to Arabic, Arabic to Turkish. So Turkish was still an administrative-- Turkish was the language used in courthouses, so they needed interpreters, and then he worked in different courts. But ultimately he became a prominent poet, and his reputation wasn't restricted to Damascus, it reached beyond Damascus, places like Egypt, and even the Hijaz. So a few things about what drew me to him. So, first off, he's non-Arab, right? We don't, of course, it's hard to-- we can't use the word Turk at this time. He was a Turkish speaker, but he was a Janissary, so, and he doesn't refer to himself as Turk, people did not use that to in reference to themselves, they were mainly Rumi.

Meryum Kazmi  13:44

So we just don't know his ethnic origin? 

Ozzy  13:46

Yes, we don't, we don't know his ethnicity.

Harry Bastermajian  13:50

There's no indication if he was from the Balkans or from Anatolia, it's still kind of up in the air?

Ozzy  13:59

Yes, there is one indication in one of the biographical dictionaries by Shihab al-Din al-Khafaji. I think it's this entry is in his biographical dictionary titled Rayhanat al-alibba'. So Shihab al-Din al-Khafaji introduces him as a good poet, despite the fact that he was not an Arab, despite the fact that he didn't grow, he didn't grow up drinking camel milk and taking in the desert air. And he refers to him as somebody who belongs to Banu al-asfar, so literally, sons of the yellow or blonde one. That term, this word is attested in hadith literature, mostly this reference to the Byzantines, so whatever that means, whatever the Byzantines are, so this is really hard to, it's really hard to pinpoint when it comes to his ethnicity.

Harry Bastermajian  15:09

Maybe he was Circassian. 

Ozzy  15:11

He knew Turkish. Maybe-- yeah. 

Harry Bastermajian  15:14

This is one of the neat things about the origins of those who were brought into the Devshirme, we really don't know. 

Ozzy  15:26

There weren't Armenians, right?

Harry Bastermajian  15:28

Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

Ozzy  15:29

There were Armenian Janissaries?

Harry Bastermajian  15:31

Yeah, they were brought into the Janissary Corps. 

Ozzy  15:37

I see. So he wrote in Arabic, and he did also compose some macaronic poetry. Macaronic poems are poems written in two languages with lines shifting between, say, Arabic, Persian, or Arabic, Turkish, but he mainly wrote in Arabic, and he boasted of his poetic talent, despite being a non-Arab, and he actively participated in the literary life of Damascus. And his diwan, diwan is a collection of poetry, and his diwan survives in many manuscript copies, at least 24, the earliest completed in 1563 three, and the latest in 1859. These manuscripts are now housed in places like Damascus, London, Berlin, Prague, and Princeton. That tells us that Arabic literary culture in Ottoman Damascus was not dead or stagnant. It was competitive, socially embedded, and open in interesting ways. So, out of these 24 manuscripts for my dissertation, I was able to consult 20, and so it was fun to go to different places. When I was in Prague, actually, I was there on vacation, and then I realized that I had a note in my dissertation diary that there is a manuscript copy in Prague. So I went to the manuscript library, and I was able to examine and photograph the manuscript that they held. 

Harry Bastermajian  17:14

A scholar is never really on vacation, you're always working, huh? 

Ozzy  17:22

Yeah. A few words about his poetry. His poetry is remarkably diverse. This is not unique. All good poets-- we will talk about this-- what made a good poet in 16th century Damascus? This diversity in their poetry. He wrote panegyrics, praise poetry, madih in Arabic, elegies for Ottoman sultans and other powerful figures, and he wrote occasional poetry, chronograms, poems in classical meters, colloquial or vernacular forms such as zajal, as I just mentioned, macaronic poetry in Arabic and Turkish, and he wrote a lot of bawdy poems about sex, stimulants, coffee, and urban pleasures.

Harry Bastermajian  18:23

So in your dissertation, you make a concerted effort to allow Mamayya al-Rumi's poetry to speak for itself. Why do you think that's important to let the poet's work speak for itself?

Ozzy  18:42

It is important because, as one scholar puts it, whenever we are studying any figure, we should not say, let's say a Mamluk-era figure or Ottoman-era figure, we should not study their work with standards of the ninth century aesthetics or 19th century aesthetics, but we should study them in their own contexts, and this is why I think it's-- this is why I chose a micro-historical approach, because broad literary histories often flatten the Ottoman period. Such literary histories make claims about the age or the decline or post-classical literature without spending enough time with individual figures and local contexts, and a micro-history lets us slow down. So through Mamayya al-Rumi, you know, I believe that we can reconstruct the literary world of 16th century Damascus, and then see who wrote poetry, who listened to it, who rewarded it, what kinds of poems circulated, and what kinds of anxieties poets had about their, about their status. And I think it's important to let his poetry speak for itself because he was also a very self-conscious poet. He tells us a great deal about how he wanted to be seen. He boasts, complains, flatters, jokes, and provokes. If we only read him through modern categories, such as decline, decadence or imitation, we miss the way he understood his own literary project. Interestingly enough, he complains about Turks not appreciating Arabic poetry, but then you see that this is a trope, you know. When you, one of my favorite poets from the Mamluk period, Ibn al-Wardi, the 14th century, also complains about the Turks, so I believe they, in his context, he refers to the Mamluks, who they may not have been ethnically Turkish, but Turkish was used as the lingua franca of the military class, and it was used, they may not have appreciated Arabic poetry, the way the poet wanted them to. 

Harry Bastermajian  21:09

Fascinating. Thank you. So, in your third chapter, you, you interrogate what was considered “good poetry” in 16th century Damascus. What was considered good poetry in his context, and how did his poetry meet those criteria?

Ozzy  21:30

Yeah, as I mentioned, we cannot assume that 16th century Damascene readers and listeners valued exactly what we, as modern readers value. Today, we often prize originality, sincerity, simplicity, or the idea of a poet expressing an inner self, whatever this means. These are not irrelevant, but they are not always the right starting point for pre-modern Arabic poetry, or pretty much not only Arabic or Middle Eastern literatures, for medieval or pre-romantic European poetry as well, and the scholars of European poetry, they have also talked about this approaching literature in its own terms, historical contexts. So, in Mamayya al-Rumi's context, good poetry, and this is all based on my readings of biographical dictionaries, which also function as anthologies, and in his context, good poetry was deeply connected to mastery. A poet had to show command of the Arabic poetic tradition, same thing throughout centuries, command of meter and rhyme, command of Arabic prosody, command of rhetorical devices, and command of inherited themes. But this did not mean simply copying the past, it meant being able to work creatively within a shared system. A good poet could take familiar images or forms, and make them feel fresh through wit, technical skill, wordplay, or unexpected turns. So this is why features that modern readers might find overly ornate were often signs of sophistication, formal virtuosity, intertextuality, rhetorical play and clever reworking of inherited motives. These were not necessarily symptoms of decline. They were part of the aesthetic logic, so to speak, of this period. What may look to modern readers like excessive ornamentation or imitation often functioned as markers of sophistication and creativity. So I could give you an example, so for instance, many poets wrote poetry, so as you know, Arabic poetry, one line consists of two hemistiches, so half lines (misra’). So they would write one line consisting of dotted letters and one line consisted of fully undotted letters throughout the poem, while maintaining the same rhyme. They would write poems in one line, you could, you know, replace the words in so many different ways for 1000s of times, it's still the same meaning, and you, you, you calculate that by taking the factorial of the number of letters (words*), so you end up with 1000s of potential lines with the same meaning, when even if you were to switch the places of the of the words in a given line. So Mamayya al-Rumi, in his poetry, he is very proud of the fact that he is a master of all forms and genres, and doing that despite the fact that he's a non-Arab, and for him this is a source of pride. Look at me as a Rumi again, not as a Turk or any ethnicity, but as a Rumi, I'm here out-poeting, so to speak, real Arabs. So he writes in classical forms, but he also wrote a lot with, experimented a lot with chronograms. So chronograms-- this is another very interesting type of poetry. So, as you know, like Hebrew characters, Arabic characters, the Arabic abjad, each character has a numerical value. So you can record an important date by writing a poem, so for example, say as a poet, Meryum, you could be hired by Harry Pasha, because Harry Pasha just got a mosque built or a fountain built, and he gives you some gold coins for you to compose a poem. So you talk about how great Harry Pasha is, and then you, the last line after the catch word of tarikh, the history, or derivation of that root, a-r-kh, you say something meaningful, fitting the meter and the rhyme, but when you add up the numerical values of those letters, they add up to the date when that the fountain was built. This is a chronogram. And this tradition is quite prevalent in Ottoman literature, Persian literature, and Arabic literature. Incidentally, recently a well-known Turkish historian, Ilber Ortayli, passed away, and then in his funeral somebody wrote a poem, a chronogram recording the date of his passing, so there was in, and then a calligrapher wrote it, so you know that was brought to the funeral. There is also, I should mention this. There's also a performative dimension to poetry, so you know you're very, virtuosity is very important. You're not only mastering the classical themes and genres, but you can, you can write colloquial poetry in zajal, right? It's not only in classical Arabic, that was quite important. And Mamayya al-Rumi composed a lot of zajal and muwashshahat, and if we have time, I'd like to recite a muwashshah or macaronic poem, actually, that Mamayya al-Rumi wrote, composed. Also poetry was not only a written object, it was recited, heard, evaluated, praised, criticized, and exchanged in social settings. So a successful poem had to work in, in all these settings. It had to impress an audience, secure recognition, and sometimes produce material rewards. So, Meryum is, if your chronogram is good, maybe Harry will give you more golden coins. And then you can go to a coffee house at Harvard Square, and then share your chronogram with other men and women of poetry.

Harry Bastermajian  29:23

Fascinating. Just have a quick follow up here, you know, given that he, you said he died in 1577 or 79. This is a fascinating time in Ottoman history he was living in, and given that he wrote good poetry, good Arabic poetry, did, did knowledge of-- I guess what I'm trying to ask is the circulation of his poetry. How far did it reach? Did it reach Constantinople? Did it reach the court? Were people in the capital aware of his poetry or knowledge of him, at least?

Ozzy  30:14

Great, great question. I haven't, I wasn't able to find anything to that end. So, there is no record of him going to Istanbul. We have a lot of, there were a lot of poet-scholars who make the journey and travel to Istanbul to find favors with the political elites there, and then we also have records of poets going to the Sublime Port and then trying to make their way into the court or an audience with either the Sultan or other important political figures. And some of these poets were awarded for their poetry. We don't know-- there is no record of that in the case of Mamayya al-Rumi, though he is featured a lot in anthologies. So we see his name a lot in 17th, 18th century anthologies, including 19th century anthology, and I am hoping to share a poem from an anthology composed in the late 19th century that features poetry by Mamayya al-Rumi. But I wasn't-- also, I did some digging into Ottoman documents to see if he is mentioned as a Janissary or his father, I wasn't able to find anything.

Harry Bastermajian  31:48

Okay, interesting.

Meryum Kazmi  31:51

So, in chapter four, you discuss the relationship between the 'ulama, or the scholarly class, and praise poetry. For whom did poets like Mamayya al-Rumi write panegyrics in the so-called post-inhitat period, and what was the role of the 'ulama in particular?

Ozzy  32:08

Thank you. So, before getting to the 'ulama part of your question, a few words about the status of praise poetry, panegyrics, in this time. So, one of the older assumptions about the Mamluk and Ottoman periods-- just a reminder, we're talking about a time span from 1300s till the 1800s-- and this assumption is that Arabic praise poetry, madih, or panegyrics, declined because the great courtly patronage of the Abbasid, or early dynastic periods like the Umayyads or Hamdanids, was no longer available in the same way, the patronage system. And there is some truth to the fact that the patronage landscape changed dramatically because it was the first time since the advent of Islam that the Arabic-speaking realms were governed from outside the Arabic-speaking world, from Istanbul. But the patronage system, the landscape may have changed, but it didn't disappear. So Mamayya al-Rumi, and many other poets wrote panegyrics for a range of figures, Ottoman sultans, rulers, administrators, judges, scholars, and other local men of prestige. His poetry celebrated imperial victories like the conquest of Cyprus and political authority, and he also addressed more local networks of power, like judges, qudat. So the 'ulama, the scholarly class, scholars, are especially important here.  In Ottoman Damascus, scholars were not just religious authorities in a narrow sense. They were central to urban intellectual life. They hosted gatherings, participated in literary exchange, they wrote and transmitted texts, and shaped reputations. They also could function as patrons, audiences, critics, and cultural brokers, so this means that praise poetry was not only about rulers and money, it was also about recognition. A poet like Mamayya al-Rumi needed literary approval from people who mattered, and the 'ulama mattered a great deal. They occupied a world where religious learning, literary skill, social prestige, and bureaucratic authority overlapped. So, I'd like to recite a few lines from panegyric Mamayya al-Rumi composed for an incoming judge, if I may.

Harry Bastermajian  35:02

Yeah, please.

Ozzy  35:03

So, judges, qudat, were appointed by the Sublime Port. By Sublime Port, I mean Istanbul, the seat of power, and they were appointed for 10 years, or one to two years. They were Hanafi judges belonging to the Hanafi school of Hanafi legal school, and so many judges came and passed through Damascus. So when a judge was assigned and came to Damascus, it seems like they all held some sort of a court, and then poets would compose poetry commemorating the welcoming the new judge. So, this poem I examined in my dissertation. It's a long poem. I'll read a few lines. I speculate that this judge was Muhammad ibn Bustan, so in Ottoman sources he's known as Bustanzadeh Mehmet Efendi. Then he came to Damascus in the month of Dhu al-Hijja, when one of the Eids was celebrated, and the poet, and this poem is welcoming the Eid as well as the new judge. And then this judge served in Damascus between 1573 and 1575 and he was a popular judge and well received amongst the locals, so I'll just recite the Arabic 1,2,3,4,5,6 lines, and then read the translation, so I'll be reciting the line six to 11. 

And the translation is, "Your house to those in need is a ka'ba for the circumambulating pilgrim. Whoever once turns toward it finds goodness, hastening to meet him. Your rank rises higher than the sun and the moon together, al-nayyirayn. And when the eagle falls-- even the eagle falls short of your soaring resolve. You are the rarest wonder in all creation. Time and fate have never bestowed your like upon the world. Compassion, forbearance, and generosity are your very nature. At your door abide hope, goodness, and restoration. From the moment your face appeared beyond the mountain passes, even the lips of Sirius broke into a smile. The branches swayed in rapture through the groves, while the garden nightingale sang, and the river clapped it hence." So this is-- this imagery, these images are quite common, especially the image of the judge's house being the ka'ba, I've seen this in other poems, and also the there are a lot of religious references, ka'ba being one, and sa'i, 

Sa'a in Arabic means to rush to something or to strive for something, but it's also one of the rituals one performs as a pilgrimage to Mecca, so rapid walking between the two hills, Safa and Marwa. So this gives you an idea of a panegyric written for an 'alim, in this case, a judge. But I wanted to add something, I mentioned this earlier, at the same time, Mamayya's poetry, reveals frustration. He wasn't always happy, you know, he praises patrons, but he also complains about the lack of appreciation for poets. As I just mentioned, he refers to, he complains that the Turks don't know how to appreciate Arabic poetry, but again it seems like it's a trope. So in one of his poems he makes an allusion to saying of Prophet Muhammad apparently said, "Utruk al-turka ma tarakakum," "Leave Turks alone as long as they leave you alone." He inserts that, he inserts that into his poetry, so you know Turks don't know how to appreciate good poetry, so he expresses this frustration using that trope a lot.

Harry Bastermajian  40:34

That’s interesting.

Meryum Kazmi  40:35

Where is that hadith found? I'm curious where that hadith is found.

Ozzy  40:41

This hadith is, it's interesting, I think. What's his name, the Hungarian orientalist? Gosh, what's his name? Goldziher has a short chapter about this, like the image of Turks in Arabic, early Arab Muslim tradition, but it's not a hadith sahih, definitely a da'if or mawdu'. 

Meryum Kazmi  41:13

Yeah, interesting. Okay.

Harry Bastermajian  41:15

Thank you. So, in your fifth chapter, entitled Sex, Drugs, and Coffee: The 16th Century Damascene Underworld, you talk about Mamayya al-Rumi's bawdy poetry that includes the themes of homosexuality, pederasty, drugs, and coffee. What was the nature of this poetry? How does it compare to other poetry in his diwan?

Ozzy  41:41

Thank you. What a title, right? 

Harry Bastermajian  41:44

Yeah.

Meryum Kazmi  41:46

I like the inclusion of coffee.

Ozzy  41:48

So this is the last chapter of my dissertation. I placed it right after the panegyrics chapter, so I positioned it as high literature versus low literature, panegyric poetry being high literature, and then bawdy poetry being the low literature, not because I'm passing any judgment, but you know, panegyric poetry is heightened, so to speak, poetry in the sense that the dedicatees are people of high status, and then the bawdy poetry, mujun poetry, is the well, they don't have dedicatees, but it's, you know, a depiction of what is going on behind closed doors. So Mamayya al-Rumi, he wrote poems about sex, male beauty, coffee, and stimulants, like, like opium and other forms, wine, prostitution, and places of leisure and transgression. And in my dissertation I call it low literature, and then, or the underworld of 16th century Damascene underworld, it's not again, it's not completely hidden, but it-- it's not because it was completely hidden, but because it gives us access to social spaces and pleasures that are often absent from more official sources. A lot of the times, especially Arabic-speaking world, when people edit texts, they usually take out some sexually explicit writing, either prose or poetry. So the nature of this bawdy poetry varies. Some of it is playful, some of it is erotic, some of it is satirical or obscene. Some poems are built around familiar literary conventions of describing beauty, desire, intoxication, or pleasure, and others are more closely tied to new social practices, especially the rise of 16th century coffee and coffee houses. Coffee is particularly interesting because it begins to take on some sort of some of the poetic associations that wine had in earlier Arabic poetry, it becomes the social beverage, a literary object, and sometimes a substitute for older Bacchic imagery. And there is a lot of really neat poetry comparing wine and coffee, so a little-- let's, since I love etymology and philology, like a little philology here. The word coffee in English comes from the Arabic word qahwa, via, most probably, Turkish. The word qahwa in Arabic is one of the names of wine, so you encounter the word qahwa in even pre-Islamic poetry, but obviously they're not talking about Starbucks coffee, right, because qahwa was wine. So there are a lot of words in Arabic for wine, mudam, mudama, qahwa, sahba, and so on. So people refer to coffee as qahwat al-bunn. Bunn in Arabic means coffee bean, but it's also the Amharic word for coffee, so probably the word bunn is a loan word for Amharic, and then Arabs just called it the beverage, the wine of the beverage of the bunn. Yeah, and then wine was called qahwat al-tila’, tila’ is another word for wine, so poets-- when coffee started overtaking or taking the place of [wine], coffee because it became a social beverage-- poets wrote poetry comparing this to social beverages. And may I recite a poem by Mamayyah al-Rumi here?

Harry Bastermajian  46:10

Yes.

Ozzy  46:11

So he says,

 "I heard the tongue of wine, so I heard wine complaining and proclaiming, "Come forth, draw near, and hear the finest tidings. Do they bestow my name upon coffee, qahwat al-bunn?"-- because wine is also called coffee-- "yet never has it mastered the art of my intoxication, so God"-- wa min kidhbiha qad sawwada Allahu wajhaha, "so God blackened its face for its false claim, her coffee being black, then cast it, shamed and humbled it into fire," because you know, you boil coffee, you prepare coffee on fire, so just to give you an idea of coffee poetry and the rivalry between two qahwas, qawat al-tila and qahwat al-bunn. So a few words about bawdy, or what we now might call homoerotic poetry. The poems dealing with male beauty and same-sex desire, they require careful handling. We should not simply map modern identity categories onto pre-modern texts. So, the literary conventions of homoerotic poetry in this period operated within a different conceptual world. At the same time, we should not sanitize the material or pretend it's not about desire. So, there is a lot of poetry about same-sex desire, but sometimes I feel like a people map those modern identity categories onto these pre-modern texts, so I try to be careful in my dissertation, and the challenge is to read this type of poetry historically and philologically, while also being honest about what the poems say. What this material tells us about Damascus is that literary life was not confined to mosques, madrasas, courts, or formal scholarly gatherings. It also intersected with coffee houses, streets, taverns, markets, and other spaces of urban sociability. So poetry gives us a way of seeing pleasure, anxiety, humor, rivalry, and transgression, so, and it also shows us that Ottoman Damascus was not just a city of scholars and administrators, although it was certainly was, right? It was also a city of performance, drinkers, coffee house goers, beautiful youths, barristas, frustrated poets, and people navigating the pleasures and dangers of urban life. And I would like to recite a short poem, if you, if I'm allowed. 

Harry Bastermajian  49:32

Please.

Ozzy  49:33

This is not by Mamayya al-Rumi, but Shihab al-Din al-Khafaji. I believe he dies in 1659, has this really lovely poem. He says, 

Weep not for Hind, nor trouble yourself over Asma. Spend your days instead in pleasure and passing the lights, one day with barsh, another with hashish, and another day with opium, and one day with a goblet of crimson wine." So, these are some of the common stimulants. Barsh seems like some sort of mixed drug. Hashish is, I'm assuming is just weed, and afyon is opium, and this is by a well-known, well-respected scholar.

Meryum Kazmi  50:35

So, Mamayya al-Rumi, he was in the courts of these judges, he recited panegyrics for the 'ulama class. The homoerotic poetry-- was that confined to the coffee houses or can you talk about how that was received by some of the other audiences that he had in Damascus? 

Ozzy  50:59

Probably he wasn't, you know, reciting these in the company of gentle folk, but they're copied in every manuscript, you know, the scribes didn't have any gripes with copying this poetry, and then it also showed how playful a poet could be. So there is a there is a story about how Mamayya al-Rumi and his teacher of adab, literature, they vied with each other inside a mosque by writing poetry with subtle sexual undertones. So that story tells us that it was even inside a mosque; at least, this is what is mentioned in the biographical dictionary, these two poets were trying to show off their skill of how they could insult each other using subtle language. But it's a very good question, as to, you know, where this type of poetry would have been performed. Yeah, maybe coffee houses. Another thing is that this type of, this type of poems are easy to memorize, they're so they are written in simpler language, easy to memorize, and easy to, you know, entertain each other at a more relaxed environment.

Meryum Kazmi  52:32

Was there ever criticism from the 'ulama of poetry, like this, or was it just like, oh, this is what poets do?

Ozzy  52:40

Yes, it's very interesting. Not criticism for writing such poetry, but criticism of acting upon certain urges. So and so is known to be inclined towards entertaining himself with the same sex, but not for writing. And then what's interesting is poets could always say, well, you know, we are not saying what we do, even God says, "La yaf'aluna ma yaqulun." This is from Sura al-Shu'ara, right? Criticism of poets, "They say what they do not." But I haven't really, in this context, 16th century Damascus context, in Mamayya al-Rumi and his milieu, I haven't really come across a scholar criticizing other scholars or poets for writing such poetry.

Harry Bastermajian  53:37

Interesting.

Meryum Kazmi  53:38

So, you also mentioned that he was married a couple times, and he had children, didn't have great marriages, and then he was like, oh, you know, boys are better, he comes to that conclusion. 

Ozzy  53:55

The thing is that, that might be a convention. It's not necessarily that everybody, pretty much every poet, wrote what we now consider homoerotic poetry, but that doesn't mean that they all were gay. You know, there's this Mamluk-era poet I mentioned earlier, Ibn al-Wardi, in his introduction to his collection of poetry, he says that, "I wrote this poetry because, well, this is the convention, it's not because, you know, I'm, I am going after men and or drinking, but this is the convention. I just want to show that I can write such poetry as well." And then they also, Mamayya al-Rumi, as well. He pretty much every poet wrote such poetry, but they also wrote poetry repenting for that, including a well-known name like Abu Nuwas. 

Harry Bastermajian  54:50

Interesting.

Meryum Kazmi  54:52

What does this tell us about life in 16th century Damascus? If you have anything else to add.

Harry Bastermajian  54:58

Yeah, about just, sort of, urbanity.

Ozzy  55:01

Yeah, this tells us that it was a lively environment, especially with following the Ottoman conquest. The Ottomans did invest architecturally as well in cities like Aleppo and Damascus, so it was a lively hub, scholarly hub. It is a hub of scholarship and literature, and it was-- it also attracted a lot of people, and Rumis settled there. And then they were quickly Arabized, so Mamayya al-Rumi, as you mentioned, Meryum was married, had children, at a time he was married to two women at the same time, and he complains about that, and he says that he, he was the Majnun of two Laylas, so Majnun, the Majnun wouldn't understand what it means to be the Majnun of two Laylas, because he had only one Layla, and these-- we have many other Rumis who settled and just became local Damascenes, so it became a very cosmopolitan place.

Harry Bastermajian  56:23

So I have a question about how you would situate your research on Mamayya al-Rumi, just generally in Islamic studies. How do you think your work perhaps provides a model, a new approach to Islamic studies, if you will, one that you know recovers voices and periods that have been perhaps marginalized by inherited narratives of decline, and what does this sort of suggest about where the field of Islamic studies should be directing its attention? You know, I mean, you mentioned his work is discussed, and it's brought back in the Nahda, but even thinking about today, right in the 21st century, thinking about where Islamic studies is going now, how would you situate your work?

Ozzy  57:26

I would say that my work is part of a broader shift in the field towards taking the so-called post-classical and early modern periods seriously on their own terms, intellectual history as well, and Professor El-Rouayheb has done a great service to the field, for example, in terms of historical intellectual history. And for a long time, Islamic studies and Arabic literary studies were shaped by a strong preference for origins and golden ages. Scholars did pay enormous attention to the formative period, the Abbasids, and then the modern period. The centuries in between were often treated as a bridge, or worse, as a long decline. So I hope that I, or I try in my work to resist this structure, and I ask, what happens when we begin not with decline, but with the archive, right? What do the manuscripts, anthologies, biographical dictionaries, and poems actually show us? In the case of Mamayya al-Rumi, they show us a literary world that was multilingual, mobile, socially complex, and aesthetically self-aware, and methodologically, I think the key is combining philology with cultural history. We need close reading, we need manuscripts, we need attention to textual variants and literary form, but we also need to ask social questions, like where was poetry performed-- in my field, I mean in the field of literary history. Where was poetry performed? Who heard it? Who paid for it? What kinds of people became poets? How did poets negotiate status, their identities, and patronage? This approach also expands what counts as important. Instead of only studying the most canonical figures, we can study poets who were famous in their own time, but later forgotten. Instead of only reading polished court poetry, we can read bawdy verse, chronograms, occasional poems, and anthological fragments. Instead of treating Arabic literature as separate from Ottoman history, we can place it within the multilingual imperial world where Arabic, Persian, and Turkish interacted with each other constantly. In terms of where the field should go next, I think we need to, we need more studies of individual authors, more editions of texts, more work on anthologies, and more attention to Arabic literature in the Ottoman imperial context, and there is still much, so much material that has not been edited, translated, studied carefully, or described, even described properly. I mean, the field does not need another sweeping statement about decline, but I believe that it now needs more patient work with the available sources, most of which, most of the sources are still in manuscript libraries throughout the world, including Prague.

Harry Bastermajian  1:00:45

You need to go to Prague, Meryum. 

Ozzy  1:00:49

Field trip! Can I come too? 

Meryum Kazmi  1:00:52

I will just say that traveling with Ozzy is great. We went to Tunisia with CMES, and Ozzy impressed everyone by reciting, well, speaking to everyone in Fusha, of course, and then reciting poetry to everyone we met. 

Ozzy  1:01:09

That was fun. 

Meryum Kazmi  1:01:10

It was great. Okay, do you have any other favorite lines of poetry you'd like to share with us? 

Ozzy  1:01:19

Yes, I would like to. So, I this is this handsome volume. This work is called Hadqat al-afrah li izahat al-atrah by Ahmed bin Mohammed bin Ali al-Ansari al-Sharwani al-Yemeni. He was a Yemenite scholar who taught Arabic in India, and he wrote works, pedagogical compilations to teach Arabic to British officials. So he has this anthology. Yeah, so I really like this poem. It's a few lines. I'll recite it in Arabic, and then share with you my translation. 

And translation, "Torment me as you will, torment me still, even torment tastes sweet when it comes from you. Your pleasure is the only thing I seek. The rest I care not whether they are pleased or angered. The reproachers claim that I have forgotten you. By God, behold at the lie they told. How could I forget you when you are my soul's desire? And it is through you that I claim whatever honor I have. How should I not reel intoxicated by you when all mankind went mad, and they never even drank? Were you to unveil yourself before the wretched, they would be stripped of the misery that possessed them. If the reproachers saw the state I'm in, they would pardon me. If my enemies beheld what I endure, they would stand in wonder." Well, the Arabic original sounds much better.

Harry Bastermajian  1:03:50

Thank you. 

Ozzy  1:03:51

And then I would like to-- there's a short poem, just to give an example of macaronic poetry, the first three lines of this-- I'll recite the first three lines of this poem, and then the hemistiches alternate in the following fashion: Arabic, Turkish, Turkish, Arabic, Arabic, Turkish. 

Translation: "Handsome boy Melih, whose stature is that of a fresh branch. My heart has gone crazy for your love locks. Come and grant union to this wretched soul. My heart has not forgotten your beauty at all. You are my soul. You're my vision, my lord. My heart would never say yes to being separated from you." I really like macaronic poetry, and there is an example. This is, you find macaronic poetry in Europe a lot too, usually Latin and Latinate Romance languages, English as well,

Harry Bastermajian  1:05:16

Very nice. So to sort of wrap us up here, just a question about how your research has shaped your teaching, and maybe how it's got you thinking about what's next in your research as well, the next stage. 

Ozzy  1:05:37

Great, great question. Thank you. So, my research has shaped my teaching in a, I believe a very direct way, because it made me much more attentive to how literary history is constructed. When we teach Arabic literature, we're not simply presenting a neutral sequence of texts, right? We are also reproducing certain ideas about what matters, which periods count, which genres deserve attention, and which voices belong in the classroom. So, in my teaching, so I teach, I'm an assistant professor of Arabic language and literature at Macalester College, I just finished my first year here, and the grades are due tomorrow. 

Harry Bastermajian  1:06:22

Mabruk. 

Ozzy  1:06:23

Allah yabarik fik. So I try to help students see that canons are made, periodization is made, labels like classical, post-classical, decline, Renaissance, Nahda, popular, elite, religious, secular - all of these categories, they're useful, but they can also distort the material, the material we treat, that we, that we read. I want students to ask, you know, who is telling this story, what gets included, what gets left out, what happens when we read texts that do not fit the standard narrative, and this affects both my literature courses and my language teaching as well. So, in when I teach an advanced level Arabic, I include works by women, by minority, minority voices in the Arabic-speaking world, and in literature courses, I like to bring in texts that complicate easy assumptions about the Middle East, and because I teach comparative Middle Eastern literatures as well, and also Arabic literary history. As for what is next, well, the immediate project is turning the dissertation into a book, inshaAllah. You know that's the dream. Yeah, and you know, I would like to expand on the, on the, on my dissertation, but I think I will still center it on Mamayya al-Rumi and his literary milieu, and but I also want to continue working on multilingual literary production in the Ottoman world, especially macaronic poetry involving Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, and I'm increasingly interested in anthologies, you know, how they preserve literary memory, how they shape taste, and how they determine which poets remain visible to later generations.