İbn Kemâl’in Vücûd Risâlesi’nin Ali Nihad Tarlan Tarafın-dan Yapılan Osmanlıca Tercüme Eşliğinde İncelenmesi

• Published in: Eskiyeni no. 46; pp. 169 - 220
• Main Author: Güven, Mustafa Salim
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: Turkish
• Published: Anatolian Theological Academy 2022; Anadolu İlahiyat Akademisi
• Subjects: Philosophy; Theology and Religion; Ali Nihad Tarlan; Wujūd Risâlesi (Booklet of Existence); Unity of existence (wahdat alwujūd); Ibn Kemal; Sufism
• ISSN: 1306-6218; 2636-8536

Ibn Kemal (d. 940/1534) is one of the most influential and powerful Ottoman sheykh al-Islams. He is both a scholar and an Ottoman intellectual and thinker. The decisions he made, the ideas he had and the works he wrote had a great impact on the society. He made a great contribution to the Ottoman science and thought tradition, which was established and developed in harmony with the apperent (ẓāhir) and the unmanifest (bāṭin). The works he left behind as a legacy are the strongest proof of this. Especially his booklets, which deal with the existence, are the basic works that reflect his way of thinking. Ali Nihad Tarlan translated one of these works into Ottoman Turkish with the name “Wujūd Risâlesi (Booklet of Existence)”. Sufism has an important place in the maturation of Ibn Kemal's mentality. One of the proofs of this is Wujūd Risâlesi.Wujūd Risâlesi generally includes the problems of theoretical sufism and deals with the idea of "wahdat al-wujūd" without giving a name. According to Ibn Kemal, a person's ability to establish healthy relationships between God, the universe and its contents depends on having correct knowledge about the emergence of existence, both in physical and metaphysical aspects. For this reason, in the content of the booklet, many sufistic issues and concepts, which are thought to help solve the problem of existence, from an ontological point of view are mentioned. In order to facilitate understanding, quotations from previous scholars, sufis and poets were frequently made. The legitimacy of ideas has been demonstrated by referring to verses and hadiths. Wahdat al-wujūd means the “unity of existence”. It is a theory that tries to explain how the transition from true existence to shadow existence, in simpler terms, how the creation process takes place and what stages it consists of. It is difficult to understand. For this reason, Ibn Kemal, thought that he would explain the subject better by making use of the similarities in the events taking place in nature and giving different examples from them. At the beginning of these examples are the representations of "light-shadow" and "one light-multi color". According to Ibn Kemal, the divine existence is only a complete and simple light (nūr); the created beings are the shadow of that light. In other words, the universe consists of the appearance of that light in different forms. This situation is similar to the fact that colorless light reflected on the glass is separated into different colors. Referring to the representations of “mirror-image”, “sea-wav” and “rain-cloud”, Ibn Kemal emphasizes meticu-lously not to confuse the example with the truth and warns his interlocutors about this. He states that those who do not have a sound understanding of existence can either fall into the perversion of unity, hulūl (penetration) and pantheism, or fall into the error of deism and atheism, which isolates Allah from the universe.In this article, firstly, the problem and need were determined, and then brief information about Ibn Kemal and Ali Nihad Tarlan was given in the context of the subject. Then, Ibn Kemal's Wujūd Risâlesi has been introduced and analyzed from the Ottoman translation made by Ali Nihad Tarlan and the text of the Ottoman translation has been transcribed into the Latin alphabet. Thus, it has been ensured that a work that reflects the Ottoman understanding of science and thought was brought to the present day.