Dolaşan Metaforlar, Dokunan Dünyalar: İç Asya ve Hindistan’dan Osmanlı Avrupa’sına İkonlar, Buda Putları ve Demon-İlahlar

Year 2025, Issue: 9, 61 - 114, 23.10.2025

Zakir Hussein Gul

https://doi.org/10.64957/nesir.1803866

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Persianate poetika , adab , ikonografi , Osmanlı edebî kültürü , Hint-Fars karşılaşmaları

Wandering Metaphors, Woven Worlds: Icons, Buddha-Idols and Demon-Deities from Inner Asia and India to Ottoman Europe

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.

Keywords

Persianate poetics , adab , iconography , Ottoman literary culture , Indo-Persian encounters

Supporting Institution

The author declares that no specific funding was received for this research.

Thanks

In this study, artificial intelligence-supported tools were used to a limited extent within the acceptable boundaries defined in Nesir: Journal of Literary Studies’ Artificial Intelligence Use Policy; all content has been reviewed and approved in its final form by the author.

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