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WHO IS YUNUS EMRE
Yunus Emre (Turkish pronunciation: [juˈnus emˈɾe]) also known as Derviş Yunus (Yunus the Dervish) (1238–1328) was a Turkish folk poet and Sufi mystic who greatly influenced Turkish culture.[3] His name, Yunus, is the equivalent to the English name Jonah. He wrote in Old Anatolian Turkish, an early stage of Turkish. The UNESCO General Conference unanimously passed a resolution declaring 1991, the 750th anniversary of the poet’s birth, International Yunus Emre Year.[4] Yunus Emre was influenced by the founder of Alevism, Hacı Bektaş Veli, and is an important figure amongst Alevis.
Yunus Emre has exercised immense influence on Turkish literature from his own day until the present, because Yunus Emre is, after Ahmed Yesevi and Sultan Walad, one of the first known poets to have composed works in the spoken Turkish of his own age and region rather than in Persian or Arabic. His diction remains very close to the popular speech of the people in Central and Western Anatolia. This is also the language of a number of anonymous folk-poets, folk-songs, fairy tales, riddles (tekerlemeler), and proverbs. Yunus Emre was a Sunni Muslim.[5]
Like the Oghuz Book of Dede Korkut, an older and anonymous Central Asian epic, the Turkish folklore that inspired Yunus Emre in his occasional use of tekerlemeler as a poetic device had been handed down orally to him and his contemporaries. This strictly oral tradition continued for a long while.[6] Following the Mongolian invasion of Anatolia facilitated by the Sultanate of Rûm’s defeat at the 1243 Battle of Köse Dağ, Islamic mystic literature thrived in Anatolia, and Yunus Emre became one of its most distinguished poets. Poems of Sultan Yunus Emre — despite being fairly simple on the surface — evidence his skill in describing quite abstruse mystical concepts in a clear way. He remains a popular figure in a number of countries, stretching from Azerbaijan to the Balkans, with seven different and widely dispersed localities disputing the privilege of having his tomb within their boundaries. Yunus Emre’s most important book is Risaletu’n Nushiyye.[7]