Abstract
THE FORTUNE-TELLING WORK BY IMAM SÜHREVERDİ AND ITS TRANSLATION
Fortune-telling has been an attraction for mankind since ancient times and it is shaped on the beliefs and customs of societies. Being fortunate, optimistic, and hopeful has been named as “tefeül” while being unfortunate, pessimistic, and hopeless has been called “teşeüm”. Both are evidenced in fortune-telling. As Islam forbids to view things as bad-omen, fortune telling is not welcome. On the other hand, Islam advices people to look for the good even in evil, therefore “tefeül” is tolerated as it is based on being optimistic. Tefeül also means to tell fortunes. Common types of fortune telling may be categorized as fortune telling from Quran, fortunes based on the names of prophets, and fortune telling from books. The collections (dewans) by various poets such as Masnavi by Rumi and Dewan were used for fortune telling. People used the works by prominent mystics such as Hazrat Ali, Cafer es-Sadik, Ibnü’l-Arabi, and Sühreverdi to tell fortunes. It is a remote possibility that such religious authorities would compose works for fortune telling, therefore others may have attributed their works to them.
There are examples of tefeülnama, works for fortune-telling in libraries for rare Works, and one of them is by Sühreverdi. It consists of Arabic sayings only or Arabic sayings with their Turkish translations. The aforementioned fortune-telling work is inscribed on the margins of manuscripts. Each saying is written on one separate manuscript page.
The present work studies the largest fortune-telling work in terms of the number of sayings among those attributed to Sühreverdi. The analysis and translation of the fortune-telling is provided in this study. Tefeülnama, a very rare type of fortune-telling in Classical Turkish Literature is therefore presented to literature.
Keywords
Classical Turkish Literature, literary genre, tefeül, fortune-telling, Suhreverdi
