Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
34. Deutscher Orientalistentag 12.-17.09.2022 Freie Universität Berlin 100 Jahre DOT, Berlin, Almanya, 12 - 17 Eylül 2022
DIVAN POETRY AS A TOOL OF LEGTIMACY OF OTTOMAN POWER
Ali Cançelik (University of Kocaeli Faculty of Theology, Turkey)
Governments use many tools to ensure their own legitimacy. These can be through politics as well as education and art. Literature has been an important tool to establish legitimacy not only in their own borders but also in the other communities under their rule. Poetry allows us to see the events from the eyes of the society to which they belong, without ignoring the scientific understanding of history. History, which is pointed out by some scholars to be fiction or design, is reinterpreted by the poet from a point of view unique to the state and society to which he belongs. For this reason, poets have also been accepted as historians.
In Divan poetry, the personal characteristics of the Ottoman sultan and the characteristics of his reign were interpreted from a religious point of view. The holiness seen in the person of the sultan is expressed with some concepts, which is one of them. The aim of our article is to determine the characteristics of Suleiman the Magnificent, one of the Ottoman sultans, in the divans of the period and to examine them in terms of legitimacy; The aim is to reveal the role of poetry in this issue, as it is the most widespread tool among the society. The scope of our study consists of 16th century divans. The poems were analyzed by taking into account the political and religious discourses of the period and the borders they pointed out.