Many Ottoman poets from the early modern period are known and celebrated, like Bâkî and Fuzuli, but how about Ottoman women writers? It is exciting to read and discuss Ottoman women poetesses of that period who enjoyed great popularity at that time. This post introduces three Ottoman women poets who were often forgotten, ignored, and little analysed...up until now.

Primary education to read and write is necessary to become a writer and a poet. However, girls of the Ottoman Empire (in today's Türkiye) were not allowed to go to school. It was in the mid-nineteenth century that elementary and middle schools exclusively for girls were established. Literacy in the empire was very uncommon. Approximately 7% of men and 2% of women were able to read and write, consisting of below 10% of the general population, regardless whether they were Muslim or non-Muslim subjects of the Sultan.[1] It was, therefore, almost impossible that women could become writers, and especially successful ones. So, how did Zeynep Hatun (hatun being an Ottoman honorific meaning 'lady'), Mihri Hatun, and Ayse Hubba Hatun achieve to become famous and successful poetesses? 

History and Politics

Mehmed II (1432-1481), known as Mehmed the Conqueror, shaped the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth- and sixteenth centuries. Mehmed II strived to make Constantinople a metropolitan city, for which he called for educated and skilled subjects from the conquered lands to help with the reconstruction and settlement of the city. When the empire reached the peak of its political power, its arts and literature flourished. Many scholars view the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 as the beginning and milestone of the early modern period. Scholars often refer to the first half of the sixteenth century as the ‘Golden Age’ of Ottoman history. The greatest Ottoman music, literature, and poetry emerged in this golden age, with Fuzuli’s love story Leyli and Majnun being one of the most famous poems in the world. This significant change, however, concerned the Ottoman language: Anatolian Turkish, which was spoken before, was transformed into the Ottoman language, a combination of Arabic, Persian and Turkish with different grammar, new vocabulary, and writing style. This shift led to the alienation of the Ottoman language from common Turkish and became difficult to understand for the majority. Hence, the diwan language was merely considered a court language for the elites and the educated.[2]

Diwan Poetry and the Meclis Culture

A poet who compiles and edits all of their poems and writings into a collection has a diwan. This literary style shaped the Ottoman literary culture between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. Poets and guests gathered in a meclis either for social purposes or entertainment. Poets could be amateurs or professionals, and everyone could recite their poems for an audience, regardless of their social class or origin. An official ban for women in a meclis is not known, but scholars often omitted women's inclusion in a meclis. According to the accounts of travel writers and bibliographers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, meclis hosts allowed prostitutes and belly dancers to join these circles, making it impossible for respectable women to visit and perform there.[3]

Tezkire Writers – Sources on Women Writers

In the sixteenth century, with diwan poets' enormous popularity, some writers found it necessary to write memoranda, the so-called tezkire. They intended to note down influential Ottoman writers, so future generations would read and know about them. These texts were written as bibliographical dictionaries, including poems with short biographical accounts of writers. It should be noted that all tezkire writers are male. Thus, these accounts are naturally biased by their masculinity and their limited access to women’s lives.

Sehi Bey (1471-1548) was the first poet to compile a tezkire. He highlighted the popularity of Zeynep and Mihri by writing: ‘In this age, there are two women poets. Because their poems are beautiful, their couplets are matchless, their ghazals are popular, and their fame considerable, they have been included in this biographical collection.’[4] He included an extra chapter titled ‘zikrü´n-nisâ’ – Mention of women. Since these women were minorities in poetic circles, their gender was important for both audience and readership. The following Ottoman women poets are examples of the early modern literary culture with their courageous and honest poetry.

Zeynep Hatun and Mihri Hatun

There is, unfortunately, very little information on the personal lives of both Zeynep Hatun and Mihri Hatun, from their birth dates to when they died and where their tombstones are. It is known that the women's fathers were magistrates, the so-called kadi, who ruled in conformity with Islamic law. Both women were educated in languages, like Arabic and Persian languages and literature, and they also played musical instruments. In addition, both had supportive fathers who encouraged them to compose poems, which was most likely a driving force for their achievements as poets.

Mihri and Zeynep were from Amasya, a capital city in northern Turkey that was a prominent and important city for the Ottomans. Amasya was also called ‘the city of the shehzade’ (the sultan’s son). The boys were sent there at a young age to receive the best education and physical training to become worthy successors to the sultan. It was the cultural and administrative centre for prominent families close to the imperial palace and the sultan, who provided financial support. Poets and artists, in general, needed a patron and financial supporter for their future establishments. Everyone could be a poet, and if poets were lucky, their patron was the sultan himself or the shehzade.

Miniature painting of Amasya from the early nineteenth century.

Bozoklu Osman Şakir, Musavver Iran Sefaretnamesi (Illustrated Book of Embassy: Persia) (1810). Istanbul: Fatih Millet Library, No: 822, fol. 52.

A seventeenth-century map of Türkiye (Asia Minor). Amasia (Amasya) is located in the Black Sea (Pontus Euxinus) region in northern Türkiye.

A close-up:

“Natoliae sive Asia Minor” (1650-1700). In: Virtualní mapová sbírka Chartae-Antiquae.cz. Zdiby: Výzkumný ústav geodetický, topografický a kartografický, v.v.i. November 18, 2022, http://chartae-antiquae.cz/en/maps/85664.

The first recorded Ottoman Muslim woman poet was Zeynep Hatun. However, other than a few lines mentioned in tezkires, her poetry has not survived. She married Ishak Fehmi Efendi and gave up writing poetry after that, perhaps before Mihri entered the literary circles of Amasya.[5] According to the tezkires, Zeynep is the epitome of the perfect Ottoman woman in being virtuous, decent, and educated in both sciences and arts. Tezkire writer Latifi highly praises her in his tezkire as follows: ‘She was talented in the extreme and from this point of view unique in our age; she was highly worthy, sinless, virginal, and a paragon of virtue.’[6] He continues by lauding her ‘inborn intellectual charm’ and comments that her father ‘saw ability in her nature and brilliance in her intellect and educated her in all manner of sciences and all sorts of arts, and also instructed her from the poem collections of the Persians and the odes of the Arabs.’[7]

In her poem, Zeynep protests the constraints and boundaries women face and orders: ‘Cast off thy veil, and heaven and earth in dazzling light array!’[8] Zeynep does not want to wear a veil anymore. Taking “the veil” as a metaphor for boundaries put on women, she wants to become free. Since sources regarding Ottoman women writers are scarce, personal experiences, desires, concerns, and emotions described in self-narratives are exciting and of historical value to get an idea of the lives and thoughts of Ottoman women.

Similarly, Mihri utilizes poetry to express her rebellious desires and proclaim her place among men:

I felt no bit of restraint in my heart

           With all these sins, I turned to you for help

            I am rebellious, you are generous, don’t refuse me.[9]

Ahmed (1465-1513), the son of Sultan Bayezid II (1447-1512), who served for 32 years as governor in Amasya, was known for his jolly nature and festivities. Historian Hüseyin Hüsameddin (1869-1939) from Amasya praises in his notes Mihri's presence in poetic circles and her poems. He writes that during the circumcision feast of shehzade Ahmed’s sons, Mihri was among the most beloved poets of the night and joyfully recited poetry to the public. He states that this was the most extraordinary and unique moment of the night.[10] This passage informs us that Mihri was not only an accomplished writer but also a respected and popular performer, which is fascinating, considering that women were expected to stay in their harem.

Ayşe Hubbi Hatun

Almost a century later, in the sixteenth century, Ayse Hubbi Hatun (born in Amasya and died in 1589 in Istanbul) took over the poetic circles left empty after Mihri Hatun’s death. Similarly, she received a good education at home and was fluent in Arabic, even writing poems in Arabic. Her father and grandfather were respected and prominent sheiks of a Muslim community. It is known that she married Semsi Celebi, the tutor of young Sultan Selim II (15-24-1574). Through this marriage, she became a member of the Ottoman court and a frequent guest at the palace. Her education and communicative skills secured her a position as an intellectually stimulating conversational partner for Sultan Selim II (reign 1566-1574) and later for his son Murad III (reign 1574-1595). In today’s political system, one would call her the minister of arts. Unlike Mihri and Zeynep, she did not recite her poetry in a meclis but performed in the palace for elite and upper-class guests, also having her poetry printed and probably handed out. Apart from some excerpts, her full diwan is missing. However, her grave is known since she was a notable member of the court (Eyüp, Istanbul).[11]

Equally like Mihri and Zeynep, she expresses strength and pride in being a woman:

            Being feminine is no shame to the name of the sun

            Being masculine is no glory to the crescent moon.[12]

Here, she advocates for gender equality and disapproves of calling it “a shame” to be a woman. In a patriarchal society, women did not receive the same opportunities as men. They were not respected and valued unless women married and bore boys, which granted them a more respected position in society and families. In Ottoman myths and diwan poetry, the sun is presented as female and the moon as male, which is why Ayse Hubbi writes that the sun always shines and gives life and should not be ashamed of being feminine. On the other hand, the male crescent moon, regarded as less beautiful than the full moon, should not be prideful.

For a cross-cultural comparison, English women writers of the early modern period show similarities in the importance of social class for the privilege of education and the difficulty in accomplishing a career as a poet. We can see the importance of privilege in producing poetesses in England if we look at the wealthy and educated backgrounds of writers such as Lady Mary Wroth, Anne Dowrich, and Mary Sidney, who were all born into the English gentry. One of the most famous and exceptional English poetesses is Isabella Whitney (born around 1546 – died in the first half of the 1600s). She belonged to the minor gentry, which is why she had access to basic education and had to work for a wealthy family for a moderate income. However, her profession as a poet did not enable her to live a prosperous life. Hence, marriage was inevitable, as she writes in one of her poems:

Had I a husband, or a house

             and all that longs thereto,

Myself could frame about to rouse

             as other women do,

But till some household cares me tie

My books and pen I will apply.[13]

The fragile financial condition of women and society’s pressure for marriage and children forced women like Isabella and Zeynep Hatun into marrying and putting aside their profession as poetesses.

Conclusion:

All aforementioned women writers from the Ottoman Empire and Great Britain came from known and respectable families who educated their daughters. We can assume from the tezkires that being a poet in the Ottoman Empire was a respectable occupation at the time. However, considering the high illiteracy rate, the readership was small and selected. In a meclis, Ottoman women had to be present and recite their poetry in front of a male audience, making it even more exciting to reflect on their courage. Their beauty and poetic craft of the women were celebrated, but dates and personal information on their birth and death seemed unimportant to fellow poets. Taking the tezkire writers as a source for the general male perception regarding the Ottoman poetesses, women were only worth mentioning as long as they were young and beautiful and invited flirtatious encounters. 

Unfortunately, no further women writers are mentioned in tezkires after Zeynep, Mihri, and Ayse. The privilege of having an education was limited, and respectable women were regarded as immoral if they wrote love poems. In recent years, more manuscripts of Ottoman women have been revealed, though tezkires only mention these three women as they are noted to have published a diwan, not just a few poems. The identity of both British and Ottoman women seems intertwined with the status and profession of their fathers and grandfathers. Their mothers or maternal relatives are only mentioned if they come from prominent families or when they worked in the imperial court. 

Author Biography

Ezgi Nisli is a doctoral candidate in English Philology at Heidelberg University, Germany. She read English and American Studies and minored in Berufspädagogik (Vocational Education) at the University of Stuttgart. Subsequently, she spent her semester abroad at the University of Helsinki before earning her master’s degree in English Studies from the University of Stuttgart. Her research interests include 19^th-Century British Literature, Gender Studies, Orientalism, and Women’s Rights in England and the Ottoman Empire.

[1] “Estimates suggest general Muslim literacy rates of about 2-3 percent in the early nineteenth century”. In: Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 1700-1922 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 167.

[2] The English translations of the following discussed poems are quoted from Havlioglu (2017), and Andrews and Kalpakli (2005). For more, see: Walter Andrews, and Mehmet Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2005); see also Didem Havlioglu, Mihrî Hatun Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2017).

[3] There exist Ottoman miniatures from the early seventeenth century that feature both women and men in a place that could be a meclis but often in an indecent way signalling sex and debauchery. For example, in the so-called Terceme-i Miftah Cifrü’l Cami muraqqa, a book featuring Islamic miniatures, the gathering of men and women in the meclis is pictured, sitting side by side, embracing each other and drinking wine accompanied by live music. See Istanbul University Library, NO: T6624.

[4] Andrews and Kalpakli, p. 197.

[5] Havlioglu (2017), pp. 20-21.

[6] Translated in Havlioglu (2017), p. 197.

[7] Translated in Havlioglu (2017), p. 197.

[8] Translated in Elias J. W. Gibb, Ottoman Poems (London: Trubner, 1882), p. 18.

[9] Havlioglu’s translation (2007), p. 370.

[10] Ottoman Turkish: ‘şâyân-ı dikkat’, see Hüsameddin vol. 3, p. 144.

[11] “Hubbi Ayşe Hatun,” September 13, 2022, https://www.eyupsultan.bel.tr/tr/main/pages/hubbi-ayse-hatun/1154.

[12] Andrews and Kalpakli, p. 209.

[13] Marie Loughlin, editors. The Broadview Anthology of Sixteenth-Century Poetry and Prose, (Broadview Press, 2011) p. 387.

Title Image: "Portrait of a Woman," c.1580 (believed to be drawn by Veli Can)