His Life and Works

Ağlar Baba, whose real name is İrşâdi, is a sufi folk poet who lived in Bayburt between 1879-1958 and wrote poems respecting the tradition of Sufi literature. He was born in the village of Oruçbeyli (Siptoros) in Bayburt, grew up in a traditional way and started to tell poems with the effect of a dream (full drinking) he saw. The minstrel style Turkish poetry, which was built with the use of national meter and folk language within the framework of the pre-Islamic Turkish poetry tradition, has been transferred to a philosophical field with the thought of Sufism after Islam. Ağlar Baba is also an important poet who contributed to this field with his poems. Ağlar Baba comes from a Sufi and poet family. His grandfather, İrşâdi Baba, is a well-known mystical poet of the region, and influenced Ağlar Baba with his works. The poet who wrote poems mostly on religion, mysticism and ethics and left behind four works called Divan, Kısas-ı Enbiya (zeyl), Innaenzelna Tefsiri (Interpretation of Innaenzelna) and Şamun Gazi Mesnevi and Tasavvuf Mesnevi. 

Wisdom means science, secret, purpose, utility, justice, happiness, knowing and doing the truth, understanding the meanings, knowing God, philosophy. In addition, wisdom means knowing the purpose and benefits of the universe and the creatures as the information that enlightens the inner world of man is obtained through intuition. The word wisdom is accepted as "religious-mystical quintessence" in its most common form. Written by Ahmet Yesevi in the 12th century in a simple language and in quatrains, the name of the story is Dîvân-ı Hikmet. Divan-ı Hikmet, a didactic work on religion and mysticism, was written without worry about art, divine love, worship, heaven, the hereafter, etc. It is a work with a weak lyricism in which the subjects are handled. These wisdoms have inspired many poets, such as Ağlar Baba, after Yesevi.

The main purpose of Religious-Sufism poetry is guidance. As the priority of Ağlar Baba was guidance, he used local and plain language in folk poetry instead of an artistic, fancy and heavy language. Using Religious-Sufi words, nicknames and terms appropriately, the poet bases his talent in poetry on a divine inspiration. 

In Islamic mysticism, the soul represents the sufi aspect of the human being, and the spirit represents the spiritual evolution. There is always a fight between the untrained soul and the spirit inclined to the lofty. While the soul wants goodness and beauty; desire enjoys sin and prohibition. Educating the soul against the wishes of the soul leads to sublime. Ağlar Baba connects the way of knowing God and defeating the enemy to a significant degree to knowing desire. "Whoever knows his soul knows himself." attaches importance to this subject based on the sentence.

For man, his own existence is an important secret. Ağlar Baba says, only he who knows himself can reach the secrets of God. The secret is the closeness between existence and non-existence in Sufism. It is a mysterious secret thing. It is the thing that God does not make and inform the public. While secrecy means covering, “being secret” means dying. Secret in the poems of Ağlar Baba is used together with words, adjectives and combinations such as mystic, sırr-ı Hakk, sırr-ı vahdet, râz, enigma, sırr-ı Koran, mystery of the heart, sırru'llah.

Another subject the poet dwells on is heart, which is the center of love, secrets and wisdom. Heart, the place (nazargâh) that God looks at in Sufi thought is the place where all intangible activities and ingenuity occur. Heart is the center where beauty, love and God are perceived. Heart eyes open in the heart. In all religions, in all teachings and even in all of human history, there is the concept of "keeping the heart clean". Grudge, jealousy, arrogance, anger, excessive greed, passion for matter, excessive indulgence in body needs and the like are a curtain in or before the heart. These concepts, which are also defined as "heartbreak / rust", harden the heart, divert the mind from the path of the mind and drive man away from God. A person who wholeheartedly adopts God, love, friendship and knowledge is spiritually glorified and his behaviour is defined by words such as "entering the hearts" or "taking heart". 

Another theme frequently used by Sufi poets is "four gates, forty authorities". Four doors are Shariah, sect, truth and genius. In the poems of Ağlar Baba, this doctrine aimed to mature and rise to the level of "perfect person" by reaching the level of morality and inner cleanliness. Ağlar Baba, who sings didactic poems with sometimes prosody but mostly national and plain Turkish, is one of the representatives of the 20th century in the tradition of uttering wisdom with a style that evokes the wisdom of Hodja Ahmet Yesevi, the hymns of Yunus Emre and the tradition of Dede Korkut.

Source: Wisdom of Tradition in Aglar Baba, Necdet Tozlu