Muhyi Gulshani

Muhyi Muhammad Gulshani ibn Fath-Allah ibn Abu Talib, best known as Muhyi GulshaniTemplate:Efn (born c. 1528 – died after 1606/7) was a Oghuz Turks scholar and author who worked and lived in the Ottoman Empire. He wrote in Turkish and Persian. Due to his excellent command of Persian, Gulshani was known to his Turkish contemporaries as Acem-i Küçük.Template:EfnTemplate:Sfn He was also known by the Turks as Acem Fethioglu, Muhyi Celebi and Dervish Muhyi.Template:Sfn In addition to his literary output, Gulshani may have been the inventor of Balaibalan, a constructed language.Template:Sfn

Biography

Gulshani was born in Adrianople (modern Edirne) to a family originally from Shiraz and Qazvin in Iran, at a time when these cities were ruled by the Ak Koyunlu.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Muhyi's grandfather, Abu Talib, lived in Iran during the reign of Uzun Hasan (1453–1478) and was killed during the conquest of the Ak Koyunlu realm by Shah Ismail I (Template:Reign1501–1524).Template:Sfn As a result of the political upheaval created by the rise of the Safavids, Abu Talib's son, Fath-Allah (Fethullah Effendi), moved to the Ottoman realm, and settled in Adrianople.Template:Sfn He married in Adrianople and joined a scholarly and Sufi social netwerk that encompassed the cities of Adrianople, Cairo and Constantinople (modern Istanbul).Template:Sfn

Muhyi attended the Üçşerefeli and Bayezid madrasas in Adrianople.Template:Sfn In 1546, he moved to Constantinople to complete his education at the Sahn-i Seman madrasa.Template:Sfn There, he attended lectures of contemporaneous scholars such as Ebussuud Efendi and Gelibolulu Süruri (died 1562).Template:Sfn In 1552 he moved to Cairo in order to join his brother Muhammad (Mehmed) who served in the local Ottoman bureaucracy of Egypt.Template:Sfn Gulshani became deputy judge in Egypt, and became a student of Ahmad Kayali (Ahmed-i Hayali; died 1569/70), son and successor of Shaykh Ibrahim Gulshani (founder of the Gulshani order).Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn He stayed in Egypt until his death and functioned as custodian (turbedar) of the main Gulshani order hospice in Cairo.Template:Sfn

In the Ottoman Empire, Gulshani's family were known as the Etmekçizadeler.Template:Sfn Muhyi Gulshani married the daughter of Shaykh Ibrahim Gulshani.Template:Sfn

Literary output

Though Gulshani claimed to have written a hundred works, only 43 are extant.Template:Sfn His Persian works include Ketab-e ma'ab and Ketab-e haqq al-yaqin. He wrote a divan mostly containing poems in Persian, but also include some in Turkish.Template:Sfn His Alfiya-ye Muhyi, consists of a collection of ghazals in Persian and Turkish.Template:EfnTemplate:Sfn His Masader-e alsena-ye arba'a is a quadrillingual dictionary, in which Persian functions as the base, and equivalents to words are provided in Turkish, Arabic and Balibilen (the artificial language he created himself).Template:Sfn Of Gulshani's extant works, 34 are in Turkish, including the Loghat va qawa'ed-e Balibilen, the Manaqeb-e Ibrahim Gulshani, and the Nafahat al-ashar.Template:Sfn

Sources

• Template:Encyclopaedia Iranica