Some years ago at home in Fatih, Istanbul, with a dear tanburî friend and a bendir in my hands, we played and sang this beautiful ilâhî together.

I hope you will receive it as a small gift for Eid.

Eid Mubarak!

Eid Greeting Card in the Ottoman Era: İydi saʿîdinizi tebrîk ederim.
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This poem here belongs to a world where the rose is never only a rose.

In the language of Sufi poetry, it becomes the Beloved, the Prophet alayhissalām, the measure of beauty, and the centre around which all longing turns. The nightingale sings not to the flower, but to what it represents. And the heart—restless, searching—finds its voice only in that remembrance.

What follows is a hymn in which everything returns to the rose.

The Rose*

Gül olanın aslı güldür peygamberin nesli güldür
Girdim şâhın bahçesine, cümlesi aşı güldür gül

He who is rose, his root is Rose—
The Prophet’s lineage in the Rose reposes.
I entered the Shah’s hidden close:
All there are lovers of the Rose—O Rose.

Asmasında gül dalları, kovanında gül balları
Ağacında gül hâlleri, servi çınarı güldür gül

Upon His vine, the branches are all Rose,
Within His hive, the honey is Rose.
Upon His tree, each state in Rose is shown—
Cypress and plane alike are Rose—O Rose.

Açıl gel ey gonca gülüm, ağlatma şeydâ bülbülün
Bu inleyen garib dilin, âh-u efgânı güldür gül

Unfold, come forth, my budding Rose,
Do not let the love-struck nightingale weep.
This lonely, sighing heart of mine—
Its cries and its lament are the Rose—O Rose.

Gülden terâzi yaparlar, gül ile gülü tartarlar
Gül alırlar gül satarlar, çarşı pazarı güldür gül

They fashion scales from the Rose alone,
They weigh the Rose against the Rose.
They buy the Rose, they sell the Rose—
The market, the bazaar, is all Rose—O Rose.

Gel hâ gel ey gül Nesîmi, geldi yine gül mevsimi
Bu feryad bülbül sesimi, sesi feryâdı güldür gül

Come, come now—O Nesimi, Rose—
The season of the Rose returns and grows.
This cry, this nightingale-voice of mine—
Its sound, its lament, is the Rose—O Rose.

*Lyrics: Nesîmî | Composer: Özhan Eren

Nesîmî (d. c. 1417) was a Sufi poet of the Hurûfî tradition, known for his bold, ecstatic verse and his martyrdom in Aleppo.

Ahmed Haşim — Dergâh Journal, 16 May 1921

Among the many sieges that have transformed Istanbul and astonished its own inhabitants, the most hidden and perhaps the most effective was the entry of foreign clocks into our lives. By “clock” we do not mean merely the device that measures time, but time itself.

Table clock by Ahmed Eflâkî Dede, 1839.

There was once a time when we had our own ways of living, thinking, dressing, and a taste in life nourished by religion, lineage, and tradition. Just as our lives followed their own rhythm, we also had our own hours and our own days. For the Muslim, the day begins with the first light of dawn and ends with the glow of evening.

The hands of those innocent old clocks, carefully kept beneath sturdy metal covers, moved across enamelled numbers like the tired legs of insects. They followed a reckoning loosely tied to the sun’s path across the sky and informed their owners of time with only approximate precision. Time was an endless garden, and the hours were flowers blooming within it—colourful blossoms turning this way and that with the wandering sun.

Before the siege of the foreign clock, this land did not recognise the twenty-four-hour “day”—that enormous creature stretching from one midnight to the next, black at both ends with the darkness of night, its back streaked with the red, yellow, and indigo fires of passing hours.

Instead, we had a day that began in light and ended in light: a twelve-hour day, short, gentle, and easy to live within. These were the days in which the Muslim found happiness, and the course of those noble days was measured by such hours.

Admittedly, according to astronomical calculation this clock was primitive and inaccurate. Yet it was the sacred clock of lived life.

Turkish clock by Ahmet Gülşen-ül Mevlevi, Topkapı Palace Collection.

The adoption of the noon-based clock in our customs and daily practice, and the retreat of the old ezan-time into the background—left only to mosques, tombs, and the small rooms of the mosque timekeepers—did not occur without profound consequences for the way we lived.

The hours that disappeared were the hours in which our fathers died, our mothers were married, we ourselves were born, caravans departed, and armies entered enemy cities. These hours were broad-hearted companions that allowed life to unfold freely around us.

But the new arrivals reorganised our lives according to an unfamiliar order and rendered them almost unrecognisable to our souls.

The new measure, like an earthquake, shattered the landscape of time around us. It destroyed all the boundaries of the old day, blending night into day and producing a new day—long, dim-coloured, heavy with hardship and poor in happiness.

Ahmed Haşim (1884-1933)

This is no longer the Muslim’s old day of felicity. It is the bitter and endless day of vast civilisations filled with drunkards, the homeless, thieves, and murderers—and countless labourers condemned to work underground as much as possible.

Edirnekapı Mihrimah Sultan Camii, by Mimar Sinan (1563-1566)

Among the forgotten old hours, the one remembered with the deepest longing is the twelfth hour of the evening. It is no longer that trembling and moving moment beneath a pale green sky when the muezzin addresses the Muslims before the first star appears; when the streets are wrapped in a deep blue mist; when lamps are lit, trays of food are set, and bats leave their cellars to take flight.

Separated from the very meaning of evening, appearing sometimes in the heat of noon and sometimes in the darkness of midnight, this hour now marks an uncertain time. In our lives it has become a colourless and bewildered point.

Just as the new clock dispersed the majestic and melancholic moment of the Muslim evening, the new way of life brought by the foreign twenty-four-hour day has also separated us from the realm of dawn.

In other lands, dawn is known only to the naive eyes of those who bring vegetables and fruit from the countryside to the city, and to the red and weary eyes of the suffering that peer out from swollen eyelids. For these unfortunate people, the light of dawn merely illuminates the bloody noose of life that will once again be slipped around their necks.

Yet for the Muslim, the hour of dawn marks the end of a dreamless sleep and the beginning of washing, prayer, joy, and hope.

The Muslim face is among the most beautiful manifestations of dawn—like birdsong and the fragrance of flowers.

Eyes that have never seen domes and minarets at that mottled hour of early light have not truly understood the architecture that gives stone its most divine meaning. Dark mosques, from the moment of dawn, become clothed in celestial gold and heavenly turquoise, and the unfinished works of Islamic masters seem completed in that hour.

Among all places of worship, the mosque receives the first light of the sun. Minarets, with their copper arrows, rise into the sky as if striving to see the sun before all else.

But now, alas, with the passing of the old clock both evening and dawn have vanished.

For many of us, dawn has become night, and the sun finds us caught in the strange fires of a new sleep—hands locked, mouths twisted, legs tangled in crumpled sheets.

We now wake late.

For we know that at the threshold of this new and troubled day crouch the herds of hatred, ambition, desire, and envy, waiting for us with fiery eyes.

And so we have left the dawn to the proud and resentful roosters of our henhouses.

Now the clock in the Muslim home seems to display the hours of another world—showing as day the hours that are night for us, and as night the hours that are day.

Like travellers who have lost their way in the desert, we are now people lost within time itself.

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* Originally published in 1921 in Turkish as “ Müslüman Saati”.

Ahmed Haşim (1884–1933): One of the most influential poets and essayists of modern Turkish literature.