TY - JOUR T1 - Wandering Metaphors, Woven Worlds: Icons, Buddha-Idols and Demon-Deities from Inner Asia and India to Ottoman Europe TT - Dolaşan Metaforlar, Dokunan Dünyalar: İç Asya ve Hindistan’dan Osmanlı Avrupa’sına İkonlar, Buda Putları ve Demon-İlahlar AU - Gul, Zakir Hussein PY - 2025 DA - October Y2 - 2025 DO - 10.64957/nesir.1803866 JF - Nesir: Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi JO - Nesir PB - Association for Thought and Literary Studies WT - DergiPark SN - 2757-9999 SP - 61 EP - 114 IS - 9 LA - en AB - 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. KW - Persianate poetics KW - adab KW - iconography KW - Ottoman literary culture KW - Indo-Persian encounters N2 - Bu makale, İslam dünyası boyunca gezinen temel metaforların ve Wanderwörter’nın [seyyah kelimeler] göçünü izlemekte; Budist, Maniheist ve Brahmanik yaşam dünyalarına kök salmış terimlerin, Persianate poetikada ve onun Osmanlı’daki devamında nasıl yeniden tahayyül edildiğinin izini sürmektedir. Çin Buda-putu, Sanskritçe maṇḍala ve Farsça dīv gibi figürler, daha geniş bir örgüyü gözler önüne serer: İç Asya ve Hindistan’dan gelen somut göndergeler, orijinal dinî-felsefî bağlamlarından soyutlanarak İslami edebî çerçeveye yeniden yerleştirilmiş; kimi zaman değer bakımından tersyüz edilmiş, kimi zaman da yeni semantik katmanlarla zenginleştirilmiştir. Bu çalışmanın merkezinde, İslam öncesi kökenlerinden, başlayarak Türk-Fars şiirinde “Çin’in ikon galerisi” olarak yeniden doğuşuna ve nihayet yirminci yüzyıl Osmanlı İstanbul’unda felsefî tasavvuf diline dâhil oluşuna kadar izlenen Farsça nigâr (ikon) kavramı bulunmaktadır. Bu makale, hareket halindeki bu tür metaforların izini sürerek, pasif bir senkretizm değil aktif bir temellük süreci olarak işleyen, şairler ve sûfîlerin yabancı imgeleri yeni estetik, metafizik ve siyasî amaçlara uyarladığı, böylece Persianate poetikayı tanımlayan uyarlanabilirlik ve çok yönlülüğün altını çizen bütünleşik bir edebî dünyayı açığa çıkarmaktadır. CR - Amin, Shahid. Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922–1992. University of California Press, 1995. CR - Asadī Ṭūsī. Lughat-i Furs. Edited by Muḥammad Dabīristānī. Kitābkhāna-yi Ẓuhūrī, 1977. CR - Avnî [Fatih Sultan Mehmed]. Dîvân. Edited by Muhammed Nur Doğan. Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı, n.d. CR - ʿAṭṭār, Farīd al-Dīn. Asrār-nāma. 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