The kasida of Ahmed Vahdeti from his Sarajevo Divan

Abstract

Ahmed Vahdeti, the Bosnian 16th century poet and a member of the heretic al-Hurufi sect left behind a Divan of poems in Turkish. The manuscript collection of the Ghazi Husref-Bey Library in Sarajevo contains one of two (unfortunately, both incomplete) copies of the manuscript of Vahdeti's Divan. Among the 48 poems that the Sarajevo manuscript contains, there are only two kassidas whose Serbo-Croatian translation with a critical commentary was made by the present author. The content of the kassidas, like the content of most of Vahdeti's poems, are culogies of the founder of the Hurufi sect Fadlallah Estrabadi, satires on local religious authorities, as well as an exposition of the fundamentals of Hurufi teaching.