TURKOMANS BETWEEN TWO EMPIRES: THE ... - Bilkent University

Ve Türkmen tā’ifesi gürk (kurt) tab’ olur. Bunlarunla muvāfakat idüb yola
gitme kim kurt birbirinde kan görse birbirin yer yutar.
Tatar tā’ifesi anduk misāl olur. Bunlarun değmesi temiz olmaz. Zīrā anduk gāh
olur ki otlar, gāh olur ki murdār yer. (Gāh cīfe yer, gāh olur ki ot otlar.) Pes
bunlardan diyānet ve salāhiyet umma.
Ve Köle tā’ifesi katır gibi bed-huy ve mütemerrid olur. Zīrā ki katırı ne denlü
nāz-ı nā’īmle besleseler isyānun ve haramzādeliğün komaz. Pes bunlardan
toğruluk ve mürüvvet umma.
Ve Türk tā’ifesi sādık ve müşfīk ve yavaş tā’ife olurlar. Koyun gibi birbirine
muvāfakatı ve ülfeti ve şefkati ve tā’ati vardur. Görmez misin kim mecmu’sı
birbirine ittibā’ ider ve hem cemi’ hayvanatda koyundan menfe’atlüsü dahī
yokdur ve koyundan yavaşı dahī olmaz ve hem ganem ganimetdür dimişler. 358
What is interesting here is that he deems Türkmen (Turkoman) and Türk (Turk)
as different socio-‘ethnic’ groups like ‘Arab’ and ‘Turk’ or ‘Kurd’ and ‘Turk’ etc. His
description of both is also quite interesting and informative indeed. To him Turkomans
resemble wolves while Turks are like sheep. He warns his reader not to believe in the
friendship of Turkomans, for they always betray when opportunity arises. On the other
hand Turks were the best of all the seven groups. They were loyal, compassionate, and
slow; they harmonize and obey each other like sheep. Ali bin Hüseyin el-Amasī deems
their obedience to each other as their most valuable feature. One can obviously observe
in this depiction that Ali bin Hüseyin el-Amasī calls nomadic Turkish elements as
“Türkmen” while sedentary Turkish elements, or the ordinary re’āya of the Ottoman
state, as “Türk”. 359 Thus, this testimony puts forward that already during the mid-
fifteenth century the Turkish people in the Ottoman realm were differentiated in terms of
cultural, social, political, and even religious aspects: one was the sedentarized ‘peasants’
358
Ali b. Hüseyin el-Amâsî, Tarīku’l-Edeb, haz. Mehmet Şeker, Ankara: Diyanet Đşleri Başkanlığı
Yayınları, 2002, pp. 254-5.
359
For a similar usage of ‘Türkmen’ see Kemal, Selâtîn-nâme (1299-1490), haz. Necdet Öztürk, Ankara:
TTK, 2001, pp. 180-81. Modern scholars also appriciate the usage of ‘türk’ and ‘türkmen’ with such
connotation. See, for example, Irène Mélikoff, “L’Islam hétérodoxe en Anatolie”, in her Sur les traces du
soufisme turc. Recherches sur l’Islam populaire en Anatolie, Istanbul: ISIS Press, 1992, p. 63. Mélikoff
puts stress on that ‘türk’ indicates the sedentary Turkish people who became ordinary Muslims and
Iranized culturally while ‘türkmen’ denotes nomadic or semi-nomadic Turkish groups who were either
mal-Islamized or not Islamized.
137