"THE FEMALE IDEAL IN MEDIEVAL SUFI LITERATURE (ON THE BASIS OF YASAWI HIKMETS)"

Abstract

"Attitudes towards women define the moral side of all literature. In medieval Sufi literature, female protagonists always had female characters as its main characters. In our society, it is a common opinion that medieval works depict women as voiceless and repressed by religious prejudice and beliefs. Images of Muslim women have entered Sufi literature in line with religious beliefs and spiritual aspirations. They were the bearers of certain characteristic qualities of a socially significant woman, served as role models, and were not religiously repressive. On the contrary, their active life stance played an important role in the establishment of new social relations and new morals and manners. Apparently, literature was striving to solve the issues arising in the society in favor of establishing new morals. Sufi poets played an important role in this process. Their poetry portrays a woman as a morally stable and spiritually pure Muslim. The purpose of this paper is to examine the image of woman through Yasawi hikmets and to identify the feminine ideal in medieval Sufi literature. In order to achieve this research objective, a comprehensive analysis of Yasawi’s hikmets will be conducted and thus we will try to determine that the female ideal images were more vital, more earthly and rational in Sufi literature. Sufi traditions have so far been studied at different levels by philologists, musicologists and folklorists. However, among the available studies, the paucity of special papers on women image determines the relevance of scientific work. The hermeneutical, historical comparative analysis; literary-cognitive methods were used to address the research problem. According to the results of the study, it can be concluded that the ideal image of a woman in Sufi literature is a combination of the Islamic religion principles characteristic and the Turkic people female images characteristic, praised in Yasawi Hikmets. Keywords: Woman, Turkic literature, Diwani Hikmet, Sufi literature, Islam, Yasawi teaching, zykyr, female nature. "