"A Means of Salvation"

We said that if there is a distinguishing feature of Islamic life and understanding in Türkiye, it can be found in the way the Turks, especially in comparison with the Arabs, express their love of the Prophet. Indeed, it can be readily observed that among the Turks, compared with the Arabs, the personality of the Prophet comes more to the fore in place of the Qur'an. As to why this is so, one can dwell on the fact that knowledge of Arabic can be an obstacle to reaching the Qur'an. Yet the Prophet, after all, lived with the Qur'an, conveyed the Qur'an, and therefore spoke Arabic.

However, among the Turks, the verse literature that describes the personality of the Prophet has played, in a sense, a very powerful role in conveying Islam to the people by translating it into Turkish. At the head of this literature is, without doubt, Süleyman Çelebi's verse work Vesiletu'n-Necat (VN), known as the Mevlid-i Şerif.

So to speak, as a text that conveyed Tawhid, the Hereafter and the Prophet to the Turks in the Turks' own language, it has for centuries performed a function on Anatolian soil in its own ways, forming a tradition, indeed traditions. Without doubt, before it too there were works, from Yunus Emre to Ahmet Yesevi and Hacı Bektaş, that explained the fundamentals of Islam to people in Turkish. But what distinguishes VN is that it is a verse work that rolls easily off the tongue and, more important than that, that after a time it turned into a ritual and became subject to a routine recitation that constantly repeats itself.

A text that is constantly repeated in a ritual way and becomes memorized by people inevitably acquires a sanctity, and its content reaches the level of a serious mind-forming habitus. Habitus are habits that, repeated within a certain routine, mold certain states of thought and feeling as they are repeated. Religious acts of worship, even when their meaning is not fully known, form these molds and put people's mentality and emotional world into a format.

Perhaps the masses who, because of the language barrier, could not form a direct bond with the Qur'an, or even with the hadiths, nourished their Islamic beliefs and moral maxims with such a text, whose content was adorned with translations of verses and hadiths. For VN not only recounts the birth and biography of the Prophet but also recounts the belief and the moral principles and values that a Muslim must follow, fills the tongue with them, and engraves them in minds.

The Mevlid tradition is not much present in mainstream Islamic traditions. In fact, the birth of the Prophet is an event of very secondary importance in Islamic history. The starting point of Islamic history, unlike Christianity, is not the birth of the Prophet, nor even his first receiving of revelation, but his Hijra with his companions to Medina. For this reason, even in places where the Mevlit tradition is adopted, it is understood more as a sira and a moral sermon than as the birth of the Prophet. S. Çelebi's Mevlid, however, was not confined to Turkish and was read and practiced, if only partially, among the Arabs as well. This can be recorded in favor of the Turkish-Ottoman influence on the Arabs.

The "Symposium on Süleyman Çelebi and the Mevlit Tradition," organized in Bursa in cooperation with TÜBA, the TDK, the Metropolitan Municipality and Uludağ University, took place with presentations, each more interesting than the last, on how the Mevlit tradition became a culture in Türkiye, Bosnia, Albania, the Balkans in general and the different geographies of the Ottoman realm. The Mevlit is an interesting religious-cultural and social event that developed and took shape over time starting from S. Çelebi's famous poem, and took different forms according to cultures. From whatever angle one looks, it is an event that should have drawn the attention of sociologists and anthropologists.

When the famous anthropologists Nancy and Richard Tapper began a field study in Türkiye in the early eighties on the Mevlit tradition and its differentiating practices, the first important piece of information they recorded was that no study had been done on such an event until then.

The Tappers began their work astonished that a tradition so influential in the formation of the religious and spiritual world of Turkish society had attracted the attention of neither sociologists nor anthropologists until then. Yet this tradition also opens space for women in society in a very important and distinctive way, and has a cohesive effect, increasing networks of solidarity, arising from a participation that is quite egalitarian compared with other social activities in a stratified society. On the other hand, according to the Tappers, these mevlits can be seen as a field in which male and female roles are reflected and in which male and female roles are redistributed in terms of power and influence.

Starting from this point, in their work on the Mevlit they drew interesting inferences about the serious differences they identified between women's Mevlits and men's Mevlits. The Mevlit recited among women is much longer than the general Mevlid and largely centers on the birth of the Prophet, and therefore concentrates on Amina as the mother there.

The relationship women establish with the Prophet through the Mevlit is in fact explained simply by a maternal empathy. The Prophet is born of a mother who has just been widowed. While that moment of birth is necessarily combined with certain miraculous events, it moves away from the Prophet narrative of the bookish tradition and in a sense approaches an alternative nativity event to Jesus. The miraculous birth of Jesus, his fatherlessness and his bearing witness for his mother by speaking in the cradle, is in the Mevlit repeated, as it were, through Muhammad in a different but similar story (Nancy Lindisfarne, Elhamdulillah Laikiz, İstanbul: İletişim, 2002).

Yet the event that prompted Çelebi to write VN is a debate that began when a preacher in the Ulucami, while interpreting verse 285 of Surat al-Baqara, said that there is no difference among the prophets, and that the Prophet and Jesus or the other prophets have no superiority over one another. Çelebi, on the contrary, tries to show Muhammad's superiority over the others in merit and that he is the last prophet to be followed.

But on the whole, it is also quite clear that VN emerged from the midst of a dialogue, an interaction and a debate with the dominant Christian traditions in Anatolia.

Perhaps it can be said that this dialogical effect also played a very important role in the Islamization of Christians in Anatolia or in the rapid adaptation of Islamized Christians to Islamic traditions.

Of course VN is very important both for its poetic and cognitive content, its manner of expressing Islamic knowledge and discourse, and for its function, as the traditionalized Mevlid-i Şerif, in the Islamization of society. But without doubt it also deserves to be addressed separately for S. Çelebi's neglected scholarly and spiritual personality.