@article{article_1803866, title={Wandering Metaphors, Woven Worlds: Icons, Buddha-Idols and Demon-Deities from Inner Asia and India to Ottoman Europe}, journal={Nesir: Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi}, pages={61–114}, year={2025}, DOI={10.64957/nesir.1803866}, author={Gul, Zakir Hussein}, keywords={Persianate poetics, adab, iconography, Ottoman literary culture, Indo-Persian encounters}, abstract={This article traces the migration of key metaphors and Wanderwörter across the Islamicate world, examining how terms rooted in Buddhist, Manichaean, and Brahmanical lifeworlds were reimagined in Persianate poetics and their Ottoman afterlives. Figures such as the Chinese Buddha-idol, the Sanskrit maṇḍala, and the Persian dīv illustrate a larger pattern: concrete referents from Inner Asia and India were divested of their original religio- philosophical associations and reconfigured within an expansive Islamic literary framework, often inverted in value or enriched with new semantic layers. At the centre of this study is the Persian nigār, or icon, traced from its pre-Islamic origins through its reincarnation in Turco- Persian verse as the “icon gallery of China,” to its subsumption into the language of philosophical Sufism in twentieth-century Ottoman Istanbul. By following such metaphors in motion, this article reveals an integrated literary world not passively syncretic but actively appropriative, in which poets and mystics adapted foreign imagery to new aesthetic, metaphysical, and political ends, underscoring the adaptability and versatility that so came to define Persianate poetics.}, number={9}, publisher={Association for Thought and Literary Studies}, organization={The author declares that no specific funding was received for this research.}