A Rūmī in the Lands of Shām: Life, Poetry, and Legacy of a Janissary-Turned-Poet Māmayya al-Rūmī (d. 985–7/1577–9)

Abstract

Until relatively recently, literary historians paid little attention to Ottoman-era Arabic literature (1516-1800). The reason for this lack of interest was undoubtedly due to the long-held view that post-1258 (post-Mongol) literary, intellectual, and cultural life suffered from ‘decadence’ or ‘decline’ (inḥiṭāṭ) until the ‘renaissance’ (nahḍa) of Arabic letters in the nineteenth century. Recent scholarship has challenged the decline narrative and opened new avenues for the study of the period’s intellectual and cultural life. The prominent critics of the decline thesis, however, have tended to focus on Mamluk poetry. On the other hand, Ottoman-era Arabic poetry remains understudied. It is with this impetus that I conducted my doctoral research, which is a micro-historical study of a janissary-turned-poet, Māmayya al-Rūmī (d. 985–7/1577–9), who settled in Damascus following the Ottoman expansion into Bilād al-Shām (Greater Syria) in the early sixteenth century. After the Ottoman takeover, Damascus remained a commercial and cultural center in addition to maintaining its religious significance. Prior to the Ottoman conquest, Damascus, similar to Cairo, had attracted people from the Turkish-speaking parts of the empire (the Rūmīs) in search of knowledge, and this tradition did not cease even though the center of power was no longer within the Arabic-speaking world. The city also had a lively literary scene as evidenced by a plethora of biographical dictionaries and anthologies. Even though poets could no longer enjoy the legendary patronage of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs, and other Arab rulers of similar prowess such as the Hamdanid rulers of Greater Syria (890–1004) and Ikhshidid rulers of Egypt (935–969), poetry and poets still played an important role in society. In this cultural milieu of sixteenth-century Damascus, a former janissary, Māmayya al-Rūmī, a non-Arab, could establish himself as a successful poet whose reputation reached Egypt and the Hejaz. What makes Māmayya al-Rūmī interesting is that as a non-Arab poet of Arabic literature, he had to negotiate different layers of acceptance in a major cultural and administrative center such as Damascus. While he was aware of his non-Arab Rūmī background, he was still fully entrenched in an Arabic literary milieu celebrating the excellence of Arabic verse over the other two main languages of the empire: Persian (the literary lingua franca) and Turkish (the administrative language). He celebrated military successes of the empire and wrote panegyrics for its rulers and administrators, yet he did not shy away from criticizing them for failing to appreciate Arabic poetry. The presence of such poetry reflects a reality of a certain period during which Arabic poetry did not have major courtly support, but this did not hinder poetic production. To capture a full panorama of the poet’s life and work, I study his biography within a sixteenth-century Damascene context. Rather than back-projecting modern literary sensibilities onto the period, I reconstruct what he and his contemporaries thought was good poetry based on his self-boasts and anthologists’ passing comments on the merits of his poems and the poems of other sixteenth-century poets. Though the secondary literature on Mamluk and Ottoman periods has tended to assert that there was little patronage of Arabic poetry in these centuries by the Turkish-speaking political elite, Māmayya al-Rūmī’s career as a poet shows that panegyrics still played an important role in his time. My dissertation further elucidates this phenomenon by closely examining the poet’s panegyrics. I also study the so-called bawdy poetry dealing with sex, pederasty, coffee, and opium, which features prominently in the poet’s work.