Abstract
THE LIFE AND WORKS OF THE CHAGATAI POET MUHAMMAD B. ABDULLAH KHARABATI
Muhammad b. Abdullah Kharabati was born in 1638. We do not have precise information on when he died and where he was from. However, it can be said that he died between 1730 - 1735 based on his mathnawi. There are two different opinions about the place where he was born and where he lived. The first one is that he was born in Uzbekistan near Tashkent city, studied in various cities of Uzbekistan and passed away near Tashkent. For this reason, he still has a shrine belonging to him in the place where he passed away and a guardian of that shrine who passed from father to son. A work published in Uzbek called Mavlono Kharobotii Kulliet, in which this information is given along with the genealogy of Kharabati, also includes an incompatibility between the genealogy of sufi and the writing dates of his works. The second opinion is that he was born in Aksu, which is located in the territory of East Turkistan today, after receiving his first education there, after receiving education in the science centers of the period such as Bukhara and Samarkand, he returned to his own town and raised students there and died there. We think this second view is more likely to be correct.
Apart from the issues such as where he is from and how many years he lived, there are also different opinions about Kharabati's works. Sufi has a known fakr-nama and two mathnawi. We have seen in our research that these two mathnawi have many manuscripts, lithographs and printed editions in East Turkistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. In addition, one of these mesnevi is also in G. Jarring's collection. Upon these two mathnawis mixed with each other in Turkey held a master's thesis. Therefore, this study shed light on the life of Kharabati and revealed the differences of these two mathnawis that were confused with each other.
Keywords
The life of Kharabati, Chagatai poet, Fakr-nâme, Ferzend-i Mevlânâ, Mesnevi