MURÂD-NÂME VE MUHAMMEDİYE MESNEVÎLERİNDE ÖLÜM TEMİ

Death, the inevitable fact of life, has ever made one of those unchanging themes of our classical literature as has been in the literatures of the whole world. Although the notion of death in our classical literature first reminds one marsiyyas (elegies), one could witness that death is elaborated on chiefly in literary works like nasihat-namahs, which mostly deal with religious-mystical issues, including the majority of mathnawis. In almost all of these works death is interpreted within the frame of the divine decree “every soul shall taste death”. Again, while separate chapters have been allotted to the theme of death in some of these works, it is observed that the issue has been dispersed throughout almost the whole work in some others. In fact, the works called Murad-namah and Muhammadiyah we are studying here are such works as will set an example for each group. In this article first brief information has been given concerning death; and then the issue how the theme of death is elaborated upon in both the works has been studied in details. Still, we have endeavored to determine all the uses and elements in both the mentioned works as regards to death in consideration of the coverage and volume of the article along with only numbers of exemplary couplets thereof.