England. The ideal would seem to be a combination of the two.
Hussein Raghib took me right back to the "Divans," a collection, or portfolio, of more or less national poems, celebrating the virtues of God and the Prophet. Love-poetry does not begin before Fouzouli, in the reign of Suliman the Magnificent. Any ghazals (i.e., love songs) that I have heard sung here do not seem to express our conception of love. The music sounds more tender and mournful than passionate, and the song itself is often addressed to the Unknown, to Love in the Abstract, and not to the individual Beloved. Again and again I caught the word "pity," suggesting ideas and moods we should not expect to find.
After the "Divans," we notice the strong influence of Persian literature in Turkey, even the introduction of Persian words—a consequence, no doubt, of wars in Persia and Arabia. Moreover, the Koran was then a predominating influence in all literature, as well as in science; and Arabic was the language of religion.
It was Selim, to whom the King of Egypt handed over the Holy Relics—the standard, the coat, and the wooden sculptured shoes—with the solemn injunction, "They are yours—to hold; for you are qualified to be Khalife." From that day and for ever, any Khalife who shall desert his guardianship of the Relics is, by that sin, self-deposed. And Great Britain, the largest Moslem Power in the whole world, revealed her ignorance, or her indifference, by calling Wahid-Eddin, "The Kalife ," long after his escape to Malta!
We see, then, that in the days of Sultan Mahmoud (that is, in our eighteenth century), the Turkish language was largely composed of Arabic and Persian, through the influence of religion. Then, precisely as our people in the old days could not read or speak the scholar's Latin of our great literature, the people of Turkey could not understand their own writers.
