Babur vs. Muhammad Shaybani: Literary Struggles in Early 16th-Century Central Asia

babur and muḥammad shaybani: Fighting for  Literary Pre-eminence in Early 16th-Century  Central Asia

Benedek Péri1/ Eötvös Loránd University/peribenedek@gmail.com

Journal of Central Asian History

Abstract

Rival rulers of the Persianate Turkic cosmopolis often clashed not only on the battle field in the late 15th–early 16th centuries, but also competed with each other in the  virtual space of literary accomplishments. Two outstanding Central Asian charac ters of the period, namely Ẓahīr ad-Dīn Muḥammad Bābur (d. 1530) and his nemesis,  Muḥammad Šaybānī Ḫān (d. 1510) also fought each other both in bloody battles and on  the literary sphere. As is well known, their political rivalry ended with Bābur’s defeat  on the battlefield. It is less known, however, how these two individuals fared against  each other on the literary scene. The present article seeks to offer a comparative analy sis of the two statesmen’s poetic accomplishments with the hope of showing how close  attention to these two figure’s imitation ghazals can contribute to a better understand ing of their respective literary personalities.

Keywords

Bābur – Muḥammad Šaybānī – classical poetry – Chagatayliterature – ghazals Nowadays Turks are everywhere and it’s not wrong,

When you let everyone hear your loud Turkish song.

Compose melodies in the rāst and the hijāz scale,

Prepare your yatuġan and šudurġan and don’t fail.

Play the Turkish songs, well-composed and full of bliss,

Pluck the strings of the qopuz, you should never miss.2

These lines by Ḫaydar Ḫvārizmī (fl. early 15th c.) a court poet working under the  Timurid prince, Sulṭān Iskandar Mīrzā (d. 1415), attests to the emergence of an  audience of Turkic origin receptive to classical art transmitted to them in a way  that appealed to them. He speaks of Turkic consumers of music who wish to  listen to classical melodies especially if they are played on Turkic instruments.  Since these lines appear in an introductory chapter of a narrative poem com posed in Turkic and describes the poetic scene and the author’s own accom plishments, perhaps it is not far-fetched to suggest that the notion of classical  music played on Turkic instruments can be interpreted also as a metaphor for  the burgeoning classical literature in Turkic.

Texts in classical Islamic literary genres had been written in Turkic in Central  Asia since the late 11th century,3 but as Mīr ʿAlī-šīr Navāyī (d. 1501) noted in  the following comments about Turkic literary works, the accession to power  in Iran and Central Asia of Timurid dynasts signalled the beginning of a whole  new era:

From the time of Hulagu khan until the reign of Temür Küregen, the  Lord of Auspicious Conjunctions, not a single poet appeared who was  able to produce a text in Turkish that was worth describing or at least  being recorded and no ruler authored anything that would be worth  mentioning. However, from the time of Temür Küregen, the Lord of  Auspicious Conjunctions, until the last years of his son and successor,  Šāh-ruḫ Sulṭān, poets writing in Turkish appeared on the scene such as  Saqqāqī, Ḥaydar Ḫvārizmī, ʿAṭāyī, Muqīmī, Yaqīnī, Amīrī and Gadāyī, and  [a number of] descendants of his Majesty blessed with poetical talent  were born. [Nevertheless] compared to the Persian poets mentioned ear lier there is only one Mavlānā Luṭfī and even he has only a few opening  couplets (maṭlaʿs) that can be recited in front of experts on poetry.4

Navāyī’s observations indicate several new developments on a literary scene  that was previously dominated by professional litterateurs and other educated  intellectuals who produced texts mainly in Persian. First of all, literary produc tion started being not only sponsored by the social élite,5 but its members also  started to actively participate in the production of literary texts. Navāyī devoted  the fifth and seventh chapters of his biographical anthology titled Macālis  an-Nafāʾis (‘Congregations of Refined People’) to “noblemen and freemen of  Khurasan and other places” and “great kings and their esteemed descendants”  who distinguished themselves with poetical accomplishments.6 Turkic mem bers of the Timurid aristocracy, most of whom had semi nomadic traditions  and were classified as belonging to the ahl-i shamshīr, or the ‘people of the  sword’ in Nasīr ad-Dīn Ṭūsī’s (d. 1274) division of Islamic societies,7 started to  aspire to compose poetry perhaps as a display of their cultured status. Their  aim here may have been to demonstrate that they have something in com mon with the sedentary Persianate society, especially with the learned and  educated members of the ahl-i qalam, or ‘the people of the pen’ and they were  to be distinguished from the uneducated and boorish Turkic semi-nomads the  atrāk-i bī-idrāk, or ‘empty-headed Turks’ who were sneered at from the Seljuk  period onwards,8 even as late as in the early 16th-century in Ottoman sources.9

As a result of the emergence of a new Turkic audience and a cadre of  authors of Turkic origin that included many amateur poets of high status, who  produced a growing number of classical texts in Turkic, Central Asian Turkic  emerged as a potential rival of Persian in the literary marketplace where classi cal texts in Turkic had previously appeared only sporadically. All these changes  led to an increasing demand of sophisticated classical poems in Turkic that  met the expectations of literary critics and were the equal of works written in  Persian. Writing artistically refined and elegant poetry had become an essen tial part of the Timurid cultural ethos and an integral part of a ruler’s skillset  by the second half of the 15th century. This development can be best illustrated  by Navāyī’s detailed analyses of Ḥusayn Bayqara’s poems in which he seeks to  make clear to the reader that the king of Herat was an exceptionally talented  and highly skilful poet.10

The Timurid cultural model exerted a great influence on other Turkic  dynasties including the Ottomans, Aq Qoyunlus, Qara Qoyunlus, Safavids and  Shaybanids, and quite a few rulers and princes went to great lengths to show  that they met the expectations set for an ideal king who was expected to be  both a successful military leader – that is a ‘man of the sword’ – and a seden tarized and civilized, Persianized adīb.11 Thus, by the late 15th or early 16th century classical poetry also became an important part of the repertoire of  royal propaganda seeking to project a favourable image of a sovereign. It also  became a potential virtual battlefield where rival rulers could fight battles of  words, as the propaganda war fought by the first Safavid shah, Shāh Ismāʿīl (d.  1524), who wanted to gain the support of Anatolian nomads with his poems  written in Türkī-yi ʿAjamī and the Ottoman sultan, Selīm I (d. 1520), who  targeted Persian intellectuals with his poems composed in Persian, clearly  indicates.12

In the Eastern part of the Persianate Turkic cosmopolis two contempo raries of Shāh Ismāʿīl and Selīm I had a very similar rivalry. The Timurid prince  Ẓahīr ad-Dīn Muḥammad Bābur, who later laid the foundations of the Mughal  Empire, and Muḥammad Šaybānī, the leader of the Uzbek confederation and  the founder of the Shaybanid state, similarly competed for superiority not only  on the battlefield but also in the poetic arena.

Bābur had a disdainful opinion of Muḥammad Šaybānī, whom he viewed  as uneducated, boorish and arrogant. In his memoires he contemptuously  relates that after occupying Herat, a major cultural centre in May 1507, Šaybānī  sought to impress locals and show off with his expertise in various art forms  by correcting the handwriting of Ṣulṭān ʿAlī Mashhadī (d. 1520), an acknowl edged master calligrapher, and the drawings of Kamāl ad-Dīn Bihzād (d. ca.  1535) a celebrated painter of his age. He also made a public display of his skills  as a poet and “every few days when he composed some tasteless couplets he  would have them read from the pulpit, hung in the Châr-su, and for it accept  the donations of the townspeople!”.13

Before seeing whether Bābur was right in asserting that Muḥammad Šaybānī  was a self-conceited bragger who produced only bad poetry and whether  Bābur fared much better on this field, a few words should be said of the objec tive criteria for identifying good poetry. As the main verse form and genre of  this period was the ghazal, a short poem made up of 5–11 couplets relying on  a distinct rhyme scheme and composed in quantitative verse, couplets from  ghazals written by Bābur and Muḥammad Šaybānī will be analysed here.

The picture pieced together from scattered data found in biographical  anthologies (Pers., Chag. taẕkira, Osm. teẕkire), which were the main forum of  literary criticism, suggests that the essential ingredients of a good ghazal were  deemed to be unique poetic ‘ideas’ (Pers., Chag., Osm. maʿnā), colourful ‘word ing’ (Pers., Chag. adā or alfāẓ, Osm. edā or elfāẓ) and the skilful use of ‘rhetoric  figures’ (Pers., Chag., Osm. ṣanāyīʿ).14 During the late Timurid period the focus  shifted to technical refinery and success was perhaps measured by how creatively poets were able to use the technical repertoire of rhetorical devices and  how many tropes they could work into a single couplet (Pers., Chag. bayt, Osm.  beyt).15 The following opening bayt (Pers., Chag. Osm. maṭlaʿ) by Navāyī, first  included in his collection Badāyiʿ al-bidāya (‘The Wonders of the Beginning’),  compiled between 1470 and 1476, is a good example of a rhetorically sophisti cated couplet, though at first sight it seems to consist of two simple and perhaps a little silly-sounding hemistichs (Pers. Chag., Osm. miṣrāʿ):

Cism-i vaṣlïn qïldïm ol zulf-i samansādïn ṭamaʿ

Ol kiši yanġlïq ki qïlġay sīm savdādïn ṭamaʿ 16

I longed for the body of being with that [beauty who has a] hyacinth-like  braid of hair,

Like a merchant who longs for silver from his trade.

Although the two similes at play in this couplet seem easy to understand at  first glance, in reality they are not. Indeed, it is not entirely clear why the poet  compares his sweetheart’s braid of hair to a hyacinth, and why the poet’s amo rous yearning is reminiscent of a merchant’s longing to obtain silver through  business transactions. The explanation lies in the traditional tools of classical poetry. It is a topos, perhaps because of the physical similarity, that the  braided plait of the beloved evokes in the poet the image of a hyacinth flower.  Although the figure of the profit-hungry merchant is obviously meant to con vey the strength and intensity of the lovelorn poet’s desire, it is worth explain ing why the merchant wants to be paid in silver. The answer also lies in the  traditions of classical poetry. In ghazal verse, the beloved embodies the ideal of  beauty: her/his skin is fair, her/his hair black. In the Navāyī couplet, this poetic  ideal is at play in the background. The word cism ‘body’ evokes the beloved’s  skin, and with it the notion of ‘white’. The noun is linked to the word sīm ‘silver’  in the second hemistich through the concept of ‘whiteness’, and the two elements together form a tanāsub (‘congruency’). A similar pair is formed by zulf ‘plait’ and savdā ‘trade’, because the colour of hair is black, and the Arabic word  savdā is etymologically related to the noun asvad denoting ‘black’. The related  keywords (cism, sīm; zulf, savdā) occur in the same order in the first and sec ond hemistich and form the rhetorical figure laff u nashr-i murattab (‘folding  and spreading arranged in an orderly manner’).

Besides rhetoric versatility and the ability to use traditional elements of the  mundus significans (signifying universe) of classical poetry in a creative way,17  there was another poetic skill that was particularly valued in the Timurid and  post-Timurid period, the presence or absence of which can serve to judge the  characteristics and the value of a poet’s output, his literary qualities, and his  personality: the capability to compose elegant poetic replies (Pers. javāb, Chag.  cavāb; Osm. naẓīre) to earlier poetic texts.

Poetic imitation in general and the more specific instance where a para phrase uses the same poetic framework, that is the metre, rhyme and refrain  (Pers., Chag. radīf, Osm. redīf) combination of the model poem, had always  played an important role in the history of the classical poetical tradition.  However, the canonization and consolidation of the Persian literary legacy  that took place in the Timurid period brought with it an increase in the popularity of literary imitation.18 Though recent scholarly studies tend to view imi tation poems as texts that were by a single model, analyses of a quite a few  cavābs indicate that the process of composing an imitation of or a reply to a  model ghazal is of a more complex nature. When a number of poetic replies  are inspired by a model, a set of imitations is formed. Ghazals within such a  set are often related not only to the model poem but through a series of intertextual allusions to each other as well. The more poems there are in the set or  the farther we get in time from the composition date of the original model,  the possibility of such textual relations binding a freshly created text to its pre decessor poems increases. If many of the cavābs have connections to other  poems within the set a paraphrase network is formed.19

Paraphrase networks tend to develop their own distinct signifying universe,  which is a selection of a set of elements from the mundus significans of clas sical poetry, that can grow as time passes and more cavābs are added to the  set. Each paraphrase network has its own “life-cycle”. Some of them go out of  fashion very fast, others, like the “-ā-rā paraphrase network” in Persian and the  “beklerüz paraphrase network” in Ottoman poetry can preserve their popularity for centuries and ultimately they can develop into a ghazal sub-genre of  their own.20

From poets’ point of view all this means that there are various strategies of  composing a poetic reply. It can be modelled, for example, on a single text, it  can be a poetic reply to several poems of a paraphrase network or it can reflect  the faceless tradition of a whole paraphrase network by rearranging traditional  elements of its mundus significans.

It mattered a little which approach poets chose. Imitation was in general  perceived as an artistic process aimed at creating texts that were in constant  discourse through a web of intertextual allusions with other texts previously  produced and through them the freshly created imitations became immedi ately connected to the literary tradition itself. ʿAbd ar-Raḥmān Jāmī (d. 1492),  the last great poet of the “classical” period and a near contemporary of both  Bābur and Muḥammad Šaybānī, described this process with a metaphor comparing the work of poets to constantly redressing the beauty of poetic ideas  into newer and more stylish garbs:

A fine poetic idea is like a beautiful person with a pure body, Who always appears dressed in a different garment.

The new dress becomes a cause for shame,

If it does not enhance the beauty of the person who wears it. Thus it is a virtuous deed to remove an old woollen robe,

And exchange it for a dress of silk and brocade.21

Jāmī’s words suggest that an important notion defining the relationship of  a text with previously composed poetic works was that of a competition.  Imitation poems were considered good if they equalled or surpassed their  model or models in terms of artistic quality. As well-written cavābs were highly  appreciated, composing imitation poems was an “easy” way to gain profes sional acknowledgment and fame.

As noted above, these two skills, the ability to use traditional rhetoric  devices in a creative way and the ability to compose successful poetic replies,  can help to evaluate a poet’s output and define his place in the poetic tradition.

Both Muḥammad Šaybānī and Bābur yearned to be recognised by their  contemporaries as poets of distinction. Šaybānī, as previously mentioned,  expected the inhabitants of Herat to reward his poetic efforts with gifts. Bābur  chose another strategy when he questioned and corrected Navāyī’s description  of the rubāyīʿ metre and claimed that most of the great poet’s Persian poems  were “flat”.22 Through these symbolic acts both of them were competing with  Navāyī, their highly celebrated contemporary who lived most of his life in  Herat, who was an acknowledged expert of poetics and who wrote fine poetry  in Persian.

An analysis of their poetic oeuvre shows that both of them were furthermore  competing with Navāyī in the field of poetic production, and both of them  composed poetic replies to Navāyī’s Turkic ghazals. However, there is only one  Navāyī poem that seems to have inspired both Bābur and Muḥammad Šaybānī.

The poetic framework, which is to say metre and rhyme combination, used  by all three poets had already been quite popular in the pre-Navāyī period, and  it seems to have been developed by Persian poets because at least two of them,  both celebrated composers of ghazals, Salmān Sāvajī (d. 1376) and Kamāl  Khujandī (d. 1401) have ghazals that draw on this model.23 This poetic frame work consists of the metre ramal-i musamman-i maḥẕūf (- . - - | - . - - | - . - - | - . -)  and the rhyme -īb. All the Persian and the Chagatay poems are composed in an  amorous (Pers. ʿāshiqāna, Chag. ʿāšiqāna, Osm. ʿāşıḳāne) tone and this defines  the topic of the ghazals: all of them are about the agony of unrequited love.

The idea for this poetic framework very clearly came from the two Persian  poets, whose ghazals are textually connected to the first two Chagatay poems  composed by ʿAṭāyī and Gadāyī,24 two 15th-century poets.25 However, ʿAṭāyī,  the author of the Chagatay model poem, introduced an innovation: he real ized the poetic potential in -Ib verbal nouns and started to use Turkic verbs as  rhyming words.26

As the poetic framework in question gives great freedom to poets because  the metre is one of the easiest metres to use in Turkic poems and the set of  available rhyme words ending in -īb or -Ib provides authors with a vast range  of choices, poems of the Chagatay paraphrase network are only loosely  connected.27 This also applies to Bābur’s poem and Šaybānī’s four ghazals28  as they are typical examples of cavābs inspired by not a single model but by  the whole textual tradition of a paraphrase network. Though they rely mostly  on traditional elements of the mundus significans of the “-īb/-Ib paraphrase  network”, they are textually not connected to other poems and this means that  they are not modelled on Navāyī’s ghazal.

Bābur’s poem is a very simple piece of poetry. In the light of the potential  inherent in the flexible poetical framework and the rich mundus significans of  the paraphrase network, the rhetoric flatness of the text and the lack of any  kind of cohesive force binding the two hemistichs in most couplets and the fre quent use of “meaningless” lexical items used only to fill the metrical pattern  suggest that this ghazal was authored by an unskilled beginner. Let it suffice to  mention one example here:

Tilba bolmaqlïqdïn özge čāraī yoqtur manga

Ol parī-rū nāgahān er čïqsa öydin yasanïb

Except for becoming insane there is no other solution for me, When that fairy-faced [beauty] suddenly steps out of the house in full  finery.

Tilba (‘insane; mad’), the first word in the first hemistich, is an important key word of the couplet. Since a vast array of poetic images are attached to the  notion of ‘madness’ in classical poetry, the adjective offers a variety of valences,  and there are many possibilities to create semantic bonds with other key ele ments of the couplet. Nevertheless, Bābur opted not to make use of any of these and tilba is rhetorically not bound to any of the second miṣrāʿ’s key elements. The use of elements with “neutral” meaning is also very telling. The expla nation for the use of the Persian indefinite marker (yā-yi waḥdat) at the end  of the word čāra ‘solution’ and also for the inclusion of the adverb nāgahān ‘unexpectedly’ is that the poet had to fill in the metrical pattern and since the  poetic message was not long enough, he had to resort to include “meaningless”  elements in the line, which a skilled poet would rarely do.

Despite the poetical clumsiness of most bayts, the last couplet (Pers., Chag.  maqṭaʿ; Osm. maḳṭaʿ) indicates that Bābur was aware of the basic rules and cus toms of classical poetry, and he tried to comply with them as much as he could:

Bāburā hargiz qulaq šiʿiringġa ol gül salmadï

Gülgä ne parvāy yüz faryād qïlsa ʿandalīb

Bābur! The rose [faced beauty] has never listened to your poem[s], Why should the rose worry if the nightingale wails?

Bābur and Muḥammad Šaybānī 319

The couplet is evidently pieced together from traditional elements of the  signifying universe of classical poetry: the poet’s ghazal complaining about the  agony of unrequited love is compared to the wailing of the nightingale who  longs for the love of the rose. However, the rose doesn’t listen to the woeful  lover’s song, in the same way that Bābur’s beloved doesn’t pay attention to  his poem. In addition to this metaphor (Pers., Chag., Osm. istiʿāra), the poetic  cohesion force holding the two miṣrāʿs together is increased by the inclusion of  another istiʿāra comparing the poet’s beloved to a rose and the semantic bind ing (Pers., Chag. tanāsub; Osm. tenāsüb) of the notions ‘rose’ and ‘nightingale’.  All the key elements of the couplet were available in previous classical poetic  texts. The fact that Bābur was able to recognize and use the poetic opportuni ties offered by his model, which in this case may have been Khujandī’s clos ing couplet where ʿandalīb is the rhyming word and the noun gul also occurs,  and with the help of carefully selected traditional elements he could formulate  his own couplet, shows that Bābur had a flair for composing poetry, he had  already acquired a good knowledge and understanding of the system of classi cal poetry and he had a high potential of becoming a truly accomplished poet  someday.

Muḥammad Šaybānī’s four ghazals on the other hand, show a very differ ent picture. Two of his cavābs were composed late in Šaybānī’s life,29 which is  to say at a time when a poet might be expected to possess all the poetic skills  needed to be recognised. However, these poems show only a superficial knowl edge and understanding of classical poetry.

One of them is a merdāne ghazal, a type of ghazal boasting of a ruler-poet’s  triumphs and political accomplishments, typical of 15th–17th-century Turkic  language classical poetry written by rulers and princes throughout the Turkic  cosmopolis,30 while a second is also a very simple piece of poetry written in  simple Turkic without rhetoric embellishments. This is true also of a third  poem, which sticks out from the other poems of the paraphrase network  because its set of rhyming words consists only of Turkic verbal nouns.31

Though these poems use the same metre and rhyme as other ghazals of the  “-īb/Ib” paraphrase network they significantly differ from them because they  are written in simple Turkic style, and draw neither on the set of rhymes nor  the mundus significans of the network.

Šaybānī’s fourth ghazal is the only poem that seems to fit well into the “-īb/ Ib” paraphrase network.32 However, even this poem bears evidence of the  poet’s inability to comply with the conventions of classical poetry and use set  elements of its signifying universe in an informed way.

The second couplet of the poem illustrates this point well:

Zulf u ḫāl u nargising ġamzasïna tüšti köngül

Baḫt u davlat ham-nišīn u fatḥ u nuṣrat ʿan-qarīb

[My] heart has fallen for your curly lock, your mole and a wink of your  eye[s],

Luck and fortune are my partners and triumph and victory are close by.

Despite a metrical mistake in the third foot,33 the first hemistich could be part  of any of the traditional “-īb/Ib” poems. It is composed in ʿāšiqāna mood prais ing the poet’s beloved for the beauty of her/his hair, mole and mischievous  glance that captivate her/his lover. Huge semantic fields developed around  these key-concepts/keywords in classical poetry, providing poets with a range  of possibilities to semantically bind them to other elements in a couplet.  Šaybānī, however, failed to exploit these poetic potentials and introduced concepts in the second miṣrāʿ that conventionally have nothing to do with the  beloved’s beauty marks. The result is a typical Šaybānian couplet, which is very  simple and lacks the poetic force that would connect the two hemistichs in  any way. These kinds of couplets were regarded poorly in 15th–16th-century  literary criticism and it is no wonder that the people of Herat, who were used  to a repertoire of sophisticated poetic texts, were not very enthusiastic about  Muḥammad Šaybānī’s poetry.

Šaybānī fared only slightly better when he tried to imitate a single model,  which could have given him a less poetic freedom and thus a more secure sup port. Headings preceding three ghazals in the unique copy of Šaybānī’s col lection of poems (Pers., Chag. Osm. dīvān) indicate that they were meant as  poetic replies to poems by Navāyī.34

Ghazal no. 111 in Karasoy’s edition follows closely the order of rhyming  words in Navāyī’s ghazal, first included in his dīvān titled Navādir aš-šabāb (‘The Rarieties of Adolescence’).35 Quite interestingly a great number of  Navāyī poems that inspired Šaybānī, are from this work that is part of Ḫazāʾin  al-maʿnī (‘Treasurehouse of Poetic Ideas’),36 a collection of four dīvāns compiled between 1491–1498, which means that most of Šaybānī’s poetic replies  were written in the 1490s, when he was a middle-aged man and might have  been expected to have mastered his craft.

Navāyī’s poem uses an easy metre, ramal-i musamman-i maḥẕūf, the rhyme  -ūd, which gives poets access to a relatively large set of rhyming words and a  flexible radīf, emäs (‘isn’t’). Šaybānī followed the order of the model poem’s  rhyming words, which suggests that he aimed at composing a close copy of  Navāyī’s poem. His imitation strategy was a well-established method of writing  poetic replies mainly applied by beginners or less talented poets. The author  of the cavāb selected keywords or key concepts of the model couplet and he  either replaced them with their synonyms or put them into a slightly modified  poetic context.

Navāyī’s penultimate couplet is a good example of this approach.

Navāyī

Mayda ʿaqsïndur köz andan almasam saqïn ne tang

Tā ki dīdār olsa mendin mastlïq maqsūd emäs

[As] your reflection is in the wine, don’t think it is strange that I cannot  take my eyes off it,

My goal is to see you and not to get drunk.

Šaybānī

Yār ʿaqsïn körär ermiš ol muṣaffā balda

Baldïn ber Sāqīyā kim özgesi maqsūd emäs

The beloved saw her/his reflection in that pure honey-wine, Cupbearer, give me from that honey-wine because I don’t want anything  else.

The maʿnā of Navāyī’s first hemistich is that since the reflection of the  beloved’s face appears on the surface of a cup of wine, the poet keeps watch ing it. Though Šaybānī tried to create a close copy of the miṣrāʿ by naming  the beloved (yār), who is in the background in Navāyī’s line, by retaining the  keyword ʿaqs ‘reflection’ and by replacing the word may, the most often used  noun for wine in classical poetry with a near-synonym bal ‘honey; wine made  of honey’. However, he could reproduce only half of the poetic idea, i.e. “wine  reflects the beloved’s face”. Moreover, the line contains a serious metrical mis take. In classical Chagatay prosody an extra syllable is inserted after syllables  containing a long vowel if they are followed by a word or a grammatical element with an initial consonant. As the Old Turkic vowel length had been short ened by this period, words of Turkic origin do not have long vowels and the  rule is valid only for Arabic and Persian loans. Bal is of Turkic origin and thus  inserting an extra syllable before the locative suffix balǝda ‘in honey-wine’ is  wrong. The mistake is repeated in the next miṣrāʿ as well. Though the second  hemistich clearly seeks to echo the poetic idea present in Navāyī’s couplet, it  obscures the original message and it is difficult to understand if one doesn’t  know the model.

The third bayt of the same poem, which is modelled on Navāyī’s third cou plet, is slightly better as a poetic reply.

Navāyī

Köksüm ačtïm här ṭaraf qïldï gumān ol ṭifl kim

Lālalar birlä bezäb men dāġ-ı ḫūnālūd emäs

I uncovered my chest everywhere, and that child thought,

Those are not blood-smeared wounds and I have decorated it [i.e. the  chest] with a field of roses.

Šaybānī

Nāvakï paykānïdïn yār ačtï könglüm gülšanïn

Lālazār baġrïm qanïdïn rang alur ālūd emäs

[My] beloved opened up the rose field of my heart with the tip of her/ his arrow,

The tulip field takes its colour from the blood of my heart, it is not  smeared.

The poetic idea behind Navāyī’s couplet counts as a topos in classical ghazal  poetry: the pain of unreciprocated love causes open wounds (dāġ) to evolve on the sorrowful lover’s upper body, which are always associated with the notion  of ‘blood’ and ‘red’ and tend to be compared to red flowers, such as roses and  tulips. Šaybānī slightly modified the poetic image, when he transfered the  focus of attention from the chest to the heart and combined it with another  poetic topos saying that it was the beloved (yār) who opened it with her/his  glances, which are conventionally compared to the iron tip of arrows.

Navāyī’s second hemistich is dominated by a rhetorical figure called ḥusn-i  taʿlīl or ‘fantastic etiology’ explaining the origin of the imaginary love wounds  on the poet’s chest. Šaybānī also used this figure when he gave the reason for  the tulips’ red colour. He managed to create a close copy of the model cou plet by retaining not only the basic poetic ideas but also its keywords, such as  the verb ač- ‘open’, lāla ‘tulip’ and the rhyming word in the couplet. However,  the rhyming word Šaybānī uses is problematic because ālūd, a word related  to the Persian verb alūdan (‘to stain’), is used only as part of a compound like  ḫūnālūd ‘stained with blood’, and it cannot stand alone.

Quintilian, a Roman author of a much-used manual on the art of rhetoric,  advised his reader “to consult his own powers when he shoulders his burden.  For there are some things which though capable of imitation may be beyond  the capacity of any given individual, either because his natural gifts are insuffi cient or of a different character”.37 Šaybānī was quite obviously unable to select  poetic texts to which he could compose successful poetic replies and the mis takes he made in his poetry show the image of an amateur poet who knew  the basics of versification but who was not very well-versed in the tradition of  classical poetry.

Compared to Šaybānī, Bābur composed only a few poetic replies to ghazals  by Navāyī, perhaps because unlike his rival who wanted to show off with his  cavābs, Bābur wished to demonstrate his ability to compose poetry on his own,  without being evidently influenced by the oeuvre of an acknowledged and cel ebrated poet.

Ghazal no. 54 in Bilal Yücel’s edition is an exception and an excellent exam ple of Bābur’s imitation skills and poetic talent.38 The model poem is con tained in Navāyī’s collection of poems titled Favāʾid al-kibar (‘The Profits of  Old Age’).39

As is often the case with cavābs, Bābur’s maṭlaʿ makes it clear that the poem  was meant as a poetic reply to Navāyī’s ghazal.40

Navāyī

Sen quyaš yanglïġ yarub subḥ-i šabāb ayyāmïda

Bizgä tün-dek tīrelik qismat qarïlïġ šāmïda

You shine like the Sun in the morning of the days of adolescence, Our fate is dark like the night in the evening of old age.

Bābur

Çun meni qoymas falak bir laḥẓa vaṣl ayyāmïda

Tang yoq ay bī-mihr agar ölsäm firāqïng šāmïda

Since the Sky doesn’t give [me] a minute of the days of being together  [with my beloved],

It is no wonder that without a sun I will perish in the night of separation.

It is clear even at first glance that Bābur’s couplet is not a close copy of Navāyī’s  bayt. The ageing Navayi describes the differences between youth and old age in  poetic terms, while Babur’s lines lament the fact that fate does not allow him to  be with his beloved. Seemingly, apart from the common rhyming words, noth ing connects the two couplets.

However, a rhetorical analysis can reveal that the two bayts have shared fea tures. Navāyī’s couplet is rhetorically based on two similes, comparing youth  to morning time, old age to night, two pairs of opposite concepts (Pers., Chag.  tazād, Osm. tezāt), ‘light’ vs. ‘darkness’; ‘adolescence’ vs. ‘old age’ and tanāsubs  centered around the notions of ‘morning’ and ‘night’.41

Bābur’s cavāb is basically an imitation of this rhetorical structure. In his  couplet only one simile is explicitly present, comparing separation to night,  the other one stating that being together is like dawn remains tacitly lurking  behind the words. The pairs of oppositeness are represented by the opposing  notions of ‘union’ vs. ‘separation’ and ‘dawn’ vs. ‘evening’, with dawn appear ing through a wordplay (Pers. tawriya, Chag. tavriya, Osm. tevriye), as the “hidden” or “remote” meaning (Pers. muwarrā anhu, Chag., muvarrā anhu, Osm.  müverrā anh) of the string of letters tang. The tanāsubs are provided by the  semantic bondings of tang and mihr (‘dawn’, ‘Sun’) and falak and mihr (‘sky’  and ‘Sun’). Since the noun mihr has a double meaning, denoting ‘love’ as well,  by including it, in addition to another tavriya Bābur managed to insert an extra  tanāsub in the couplet as well, since mihr ‘love’, vaṣl ‘union’, firāq ‘separation’ all  belong to the semantic field of ʿašq ‘love’.

Navāyī’s second couplet inspired Bābur’s maqṭaʿ.

Navāyī

Tün sevdādïda magar ḫuffāšlar parvāzïdïr

Mużṭarib cānlar qušï šabrang zulfung dāmïda

Are [those] bats flying in the blackness of the night?

[No.] Birds of agitated souls [have been caught] by the snare of your curl ing lock.

Bābur

Bābur ol gul zulfï astïda emästür ḫāllar

Cān qušïn ṣayd eylär üčün dānalardur dāmïnda

Bābur, those aren’t moles under her/his curling lock [, are they?] Those are seeds in her/his snare to catch the birds of souls.

Rhetorically, Navāyī’s couplet rests on the creative combination of semantic  bonds connecting words that all belong to the semantic field of ‘darkness’,  a rhetorical question feigning ignorance (Pers. tajāhul al-ʿārif, Chag. tacāhul  al-ʿārif, Osm. tecāhül al-ʿārif) and two traditional metaphors: the curly lock of  the beloved is a snare to her/his lovers and the soul is a bird. In classical poetry,  which is in a sense the art of visuality, the hair of the beloved is always black.  The notion of ‘darkness’ dominates the couplet as it connects the words tün ‘night’, ḫuffāš ‘bat’, šabrang ‘night-coloured’ and zulf, and these semantic bonds  provide a strong rhetoric cohesion that holds the two hemistichs together.

Bābur’s technique in composing a cavāb to the model bayt was necessarily  somewhat different this time. He retained the rhetorical question but shifted  the focus of attention from the darkness of the beloved’s hair to another fea ture of the curly lock, namely its shape. Traditionally, the curly lock and the  mole of the beloved are often compared to a snare and the seeds in it. As both  the hair and the mole are black in classical poetry, through using these concepts in the second hemistich Bābur also managed to save at least something  from the semantic bonds of words belonging to the semantic field of ‘darkness’. Bābur’s creativity in producing excellent poetic replies to artistically refined  poetry shows his talent and his knowledge of classical poetry very tellingly. He  was able to grab the essence of the model couplet and through combining it with a new or slightly modified set of elements selected from the mundus sig nificans of classical poetry he was able to create a novel poetic text. His cavābs  are not slavish imitations of his models but highly elegant emulations match ing or surpassing the original text, which would perfectly fit Jāmī’s standards of  “redressing a poetic idea into a newer and more stylish attire”. It is obvious that Bābur was a poet in the best sense of the word, who in  his prime time could use the poetic tools at his disposal with great ingenuity.  Scattered pieces of data in his memoires and his cavābs inspired by outstand ing pieces of poetical craftsmanship indicate that literary competition was in  his blood, and he competed with the texts of celebrated poets of the Chagatay  classical tradition with great success.

Compared to him Muḥammad Šaybānī was a mere poetaster even when  he was relatively old, and was supposed to have acquired all the skills to com pose poetry. It seems, however, that writing poetry was a tool for him to show  off his culture and brag about his erudition. Poetry for him served mainly  political purposes both as an important tool for spreading his political agenda  and also as part of the image he wished to project of himself, the image of  the educated and cultured ruler. However, as Bābur’s description of the recep tion of Šaybānī’s poetry in Herat indicates his efforts proved counterproduc tive. ʿAhdī (d. 1593), an Ottoman literary critic and author of a biographical  anthology, mentions in his Gülşen-i şuʿarā (‘The Rose Garden of Poets’) that  a poet using the pen name Nisārī, who was seemingly able to write poetry  in three languages – Arabic, Persian and Ottoman – “composed paraphrases  to the complete Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ” but he adds that “I wish he had not written  poetry in any language at all.” Though Muḥammad Šaybānī’s poetry truly has  historical value, from the point of view of the art of poetry, these words very  befittingly describe his literary efforts. The fight on the battlefield ended with  Muḥammad Šaybānī’s victory, but the select couplets analysed above clearly  show that Bābur was a much superior poet and he was the unquestioned win ner of duel of words.

Bibliography

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Foot Notes

1 For Central Asian Turkic names and quotes from Chagatay texts Eckmann’s system of trans literation will be used. János Eckmann, Chagatay Manual

2 Ḥaydar Ḫvārizmī, “Maḫzan al-asrār” – The Treasury of Secrets. An Edition of the Manuscript  Preserved at the Oriental Collection of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences,  ed. and transl. Benedek Péri (Budapest: Library and InformationCentre of the Hungarian  Academy of Sciences, 2020): 178–180.

3 The earliest known classical text is the Qutadgu bilig (‘Wisdom of Royal Glory’), a versified  mirror for princes by Yūsuf Ḫāṣ Ḥājib, composed in 1069.

4 Mīr ʿAlī-şīr Nevāyī, Muḥākemetü’l-Luġateyn, ed. F. Sema Barutçu Özönder (Ankara: TDK,  1996): 188.

5 Maria Eva Subtelny, “Socioeconomic Bases of Cultural Patronage under the Later Timurids.”  International Journal of Middle East Studies 20/4 (1988): 479–505.

6 Alisher Navoiy, Mukammal asarlar to’plami. Yigirma tomlik. Vol. 13. Majolis un-nafois, ed.  Suyima G’aniyeva (Tashkent: Fan, 1997): 135–142, 155–165.

7 Naṣīr ad-Dīn Ṭūsī, Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī, ed. Adīb Tihrānī (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Jāvidān, 1346  [1967]): 280.

8 Pál Fodor, “The Formation of Ottoman Turkish Identity (Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries).”  In Identity and Culture in Ottoman Hungary, ed. Pál Fodor and Pál Ács (Berlin/Boston: De  Gruyter, 2020): 24.

9 Ṣolaḳzāde Meḥmed Çelebi (d. 1657) relates how Tīmūr’s troops besieged the fortress of Nīksār  saying that “on the order of Tīmūr the army of the brainless Turks gathered and besieged the  fort of Nīksār” (… firmān-i Tīmūr ile ḫayl-i etrāk-i bī-idrāk cemʿ edüp Nīksār ḳalʿesin muḥāṣara  etdiği …; Ṣolaḳzāde Meḥmed Çelebi, Ṣolaḳzāde Tārīhi (Istanbul: Maḥmūd Beg Maṭbaʿası, 1297  [1880]): 83). An early 16th-century poet Güvāhī includes three stories in his didactic narrative  poem, Pend-nāme (‘The Book of Advice’) written in 1526 to illustrate the boorishness and  stupidity of Turks. Güvâhî, Pend-nâme, ed. Mehmet Hengirmen (Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı,  1983): 166–168.

10 Navoiy, Majolis un-nafois: 166–205.

11 Stephen Blake, The Garden of the Eight Paradises: Bābur and the Culture of Empire in  Central Asia, Afghanistan and India (1483–1530) (Leiden: Brill, 2004): 136, 466. 12 See Benedek Péri, “‘From Istāmbōl’s throne a mighty host to Irān guided I;/Sunken deep in  blood of shame I made the Golden Heads to lie’: Yavuz Sultan Selim’s Persian poetry in the  light of the Ottoman-Safavid propaganda war.” Archivum Ottomanicum 34 (2017): 183–192.

13 Zahiru’d-dīn Muhammad Bābur Pādshāh Ghāzī, Bābur-nāma. (Memoirs of Bābur), transl.  Anette Susannah Beveridge (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1990): 329. 14 For more on the topic see Benedek Péri, “Love poetry without love? Classical ottoman  amorous gazels in the early 16th century.” (forthcoming).

15 For a detailed description of late Timurid classical poetry see Maria Eva Subtelny,  “A Taste for the Intricate: The Persian Poetry of the Late Timurid Period.” ZDMG 136/1  (1986): 56–60.

16 Alisher Navoiy, Mukammal asarlar to’plami, vol. 1, Badoyi’ al-bidoya, ed. Aziz Qayyumov  (Tashkent: Fan, 1987): 255.

17 For a detailed explanation of the term mundus significans coined by Thomas M. Greene  see Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy. Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven – London: Yale University Press, 1982): 20.

18 Riccardo Zipoli, The Technique of the Ğawāb. Replies by Nawā’ī to Hāfiz and Ğâmī (Venice:  Cafoscarina: 1993):14.

19 For the concept of ‘paraphrase networks’ in classical poetry see Péri Benedek,  “« … beklerüz ». An Ottoman Paraphrase (naẓīre) Network from the 16th Century,” in  An Iridescent Device: Premodern Ottoman Poetry, ed. Christiane Czygan and Stephan  Conermann (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2018):147–180.

20 The most famous poem of the -ā-rā paraphrase network is a ghazal by Ḥāfiẓ that starts  with the well-known couplet about the Shirazi Turk. For details on the “-ā-rā paraphrase  network” and the “beklerüz paraphrase network” and on how paraphrase networks can  develop into ghazal sub-genres see Benedek Péri, “Yavuz Sultan Selīm and his Imitation  Strategies. The Case of Four Ḥāfiẓ Ghazals,” Acta Orient Hung. 73/2 (2020): 239–240; Péri,  “« … beklerüz »”.

21 Nūr ad-Dīn ʿAbd ar-Raḥmān b. Aḥmad Jāmī, Bahāristān wa rasāʾil-i Jāmī, ed. Aʿlākhān  Afṣaḥzād (Tehran: Mīrās-i Maktūb, 1379 [2000]): 146.

22 Bābur, Bābur-nāma: 271–272.

23 Salmān Sāvajī, Dīvān, ed. Abū al-Qāsim Ḥālat (Tehran: Nashriyāt-i Mā, 1371 [1992]): Kamāl  Khujandī, Dīvān, ed. Aḥmad Karamī (Tehran: Nashriyāt-i Mā, 1372 [1993]): 30, 31.

24 Atoiy, Dīvān, ed. Sayfiddin Sayfulloh (Tashkent: Fan, 2008): 39; Gadoiy, Devon, ed. Erkin  Ahmadxo’jaev (Tashkent: G’afur G’ulom: 1973): 27.

25 E.g. the noun phrase zunnār u ṣalīb ‘sacred thread and cross’ appearing at the end of the  second hemistich of ʿAṭāyī’s maṭlaʿ is also present in Salmān Sāvajī’s poem (5th couplet)  and the phrase miskīn ġarīb ‘miserable stranger’ occuring in the fourth couplet of Gadāyī  is also there in Khujandī’s first ghazal.

26 E.g. sändin ayrïlïb ‘separating from you’.

27 Navāyī for example inserts the phrase zunnār u ṣalīb and the name Masīḥ (‘Messiah’) into  one of his ghazals, which together can be interpreted as intertextual allusions to ʿAṭāyī’s  model poem, and his couplet ending with the phrase yā naṣīb might have been modelled  on Gadāyī’s third bayt.

28 Bilal Yücel, Bâbür Dîvânı. Gramer-Metin-Sözlük-Tıpkıbasım (Ankara: Atatürk Kültür Merkezi,  1995): 142–143; Yakup Karasoy, Şiban Han Dîvânı. İnceleme-Metin-Dizin-Tıpkıbasım (Ankara:  Türk Dil Kurumu, 1998): 82, 84, 85, 86.

29 Ay dirīġā kim qarïlïq vaqtïda boldum ġarīb “What a pity that I became an outcast in my  old age” Karasoy, Şiban Han Dîvânı, 86. In one of his other ghazals Šaybānī alluded to  his successful campaign for the conquest of Transoxania and his preparations to fight  with the Safavids for Khurasan, which suggests that the poem was composed in the early  1500s: Bidʿat ahlïnï savurdum Māvarāʾ an-nahr ara/Ušbudur išim Ḫurāsān mulkïda ham  ʿan-qarīb “I scattered the heretics in Transoxania/The same is my job in Khurasan in the  near future” Karasoy, Şiban Han Dîvânı: 82.

30 For a detailed description of the topic see Benedek Péri, ““Merdane” Ghazals And Rhetoric  In 16th Century Turkish Classical Poetry,” In Osmanlı Edebi Metinlerinde Teoriden Pratiğe  Belâgat, ed. Hatice Aynur, Müjgan Çakır, Hanife Koncu and Ali Emre Özyıldırım (Istanbul:  Klasik Yayınları, 2021): 348–381.

31 Karasoy, Şiban Han Dîvânı: 86–87.

32 Karasoy, Şiban Han Dîvânı: 84.

33 According to the strict rules the second syllable of ġamzasïna cannot be counted as long. 34 Karasoy, Şiban Han Dîvânı: 144–145, 145–146, 180–181.

35 Alisher Navoiy, Mukammal asarlar to’plami. Yigirma tomlik. vol. 4, Navodir ash-shabob, ed.  Hamid Sulaymon (Tashkent: Fan, 1989): 171.

36 See e.g. ghazals no. 31, 47, 112, 163.

37 Haidd Edgworth Butler, (ed./trans.) The Institution Oratoria of Quintilian with an English  Translation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996): 85.

38 Yücel, Bâbür Dîvânı: 150.

39 ʿAlī Şīr Nevāyī, Fevāyidü’l-Kiber, ed. Önal Kaya (Ankara: Türk Dil Kurumu, 1996): 22–23.  This ghazal is preserved only in one manuscript.

40 For more on the topic see Péri, “« … beklerüz »”, especially160.

41 ‘Morning’ (ṣubḥ) is semantically connected to the words ‘Sun’ (quyaš) and the verb yaru-  ‘shine’ while ‘night’ (tün) is semantically bound to ‘darkness’ (tīrelik).