I will present the case of the warrior woman and Muslim convert Efromiya in the fourteenth century Turkish epic romance Danişmendname in order to demonstrate two major points: Firstly, because warrior women violated gender norms — even when fighting for the spread of Islam — they posed a potential threat to their own (adopted) community; and, secondly, female converts are only accepted as full members of the community as long as they are legitimized by a Muslim husband or protector. That is, the loyalty of the female convert to the faith or the cause is predominantly defined through her lawful attachment to male muslims. Within early Anatolian Turkish epic literature Greek born Efromiya is certainly the most important and most prominent warrior woman figure. The woman warriors of this genre are almost exclusively Christian born converts, just as their counterparts in contemporary Italian epic romances are Saracen (Muslim) born converts. Therefore I challenge the comparison of this warrior woman type in early Anatolian conversion narratives to the ‘pre-Islamic Turkish warrior woman,’ as often seen in modern studies of literature. Efromiya is also the only heroine who retains her pre-conversion name. That means, the audience of the epic narrative was continously reminded of her otherness not only by her prowess in martial arts, but also by her foreign name. Nonetheless Efromiya is celebrated for her strength throughout major parts of the epic. She often appears commanding the Muslim troops together with the eponymous hero Melik Danişmend and her husband Artuhi, a new convert like herself. When first her military leader and then her husband die towards the end of the narrative, Efromiya is now perceived as a threat to the Muslim community because of her extraordinary strength. Without much elaboration she is poisoned by her own eunuch slave whose motivation is to prevent her from apostasizing and becoming a Christian again. Although it is a common epic theme that the hero is poisoned by a base and treacherous slave in the end, Efromiya’s case is different because the action of the slave is not condemned. In a later reworking of the Danişmendname from the sixteenth century the slave is even praised for his sincere loyalty. After losing the protection of her leader Melik Danişmend and her husband Artuhi warrior woman Efromiya’s conversion no longer suffices to make her a trusted member of the community.

Early Persian poets and critics conceive of binary generic categories, bounded largely by topical or modal concerns: madḥ (panegyre, an epideictic mode) and ghazal (lyric mode, love poetry); hazl (a facetious, possibly obscene mode) and jidd (a serious, high-minded mode); hijā’ (invective, a topical genre) and rithā’ (eulogy, a topical and occasional genre). Two twelfth-century poets of the eastern Persian-speaking lands—Majdūd b. Ādam al-Ghaznavī, better known as Ḥakīm Sanā’ī (d. 1131?), associated with the Ghaznavid court in Ghazna and with Sufi circles in Nayshāpūr and Sarakhs; and Muḥammad b. ‘Alī Nasafī, better known as Sūzanī (or Sōzanī, d. 1173?), associated with the Qarakhanid court in Samarqand and the Burhānid Sadr of Bokhara—bring interesting innovations to the genre history of Persian. Sanā’ī’s dīvān preserves the first large body of Persian ghazals that survive to us, and crystallizes the ghazal as a fixed-form genre of poem; once defined as a structure (7 to 14 lines, with a maṭla‘ and a takhalluṣ line), is thereafter no longer necessarily confined to the thematic of love. Sūzanī, meanwhile, provides us the first large body of Persian hazliyyāt (facetiae), many of which rely upon a sexually aggressive and vulgarly transgressive vocabularly (his pen-name means the “prickler” or “needler,” though praise qaṣīdas and some ghazals are also attributed to him). The oeuvre of both poets includes obscene poems, few in Sanā’ī’s case, a plethora in Sūzanī’s, and illustrate a range of the lexical and semiotic conventions for the expression of amorous (ghazal, ‘ishq), erotic (būs u kinār, mujūn), playful (muṭāyibah), satirical (hajv), and invective exchanges/flyting (naqā’iḍ) of poetry. This paper explores the generic modes and moods in which Sūzanī and Sanā’ī deploy erotically charged or aggressively sexualized vocabulary to better understand the relationship between generic horizons of mood and lexical and thematic development, including when we can expect sexual descriptions to be erotically (hetero- or homo-erotic), when humorously, when obscenely, and when aggressively employed. Because Sūzanī explicitly imitates or ridicules some specific poems of Sanā’ī, and because both poets compose poems in the same mode of social satire combined with praise of a patron (Sanā’ī’s Kār-nāmah-yi Balkh, and Sūzanī’s stand- alone muṭāyibah or hajv qaṣīdas, which combine, e.g., satires of wine kegs with praise of a patron). It also speculates about the patronage circumstance for vulgar or obscene poems, and the degree to which they were disseminated and imitated at different geographically remote Persophone courts.

This paper focuses on the works of a very colorful figure from the Early Modern Ottoman world of literature, S̱ābit (d. in early 1710s), in order to trace the representation of men, women and their relationship with a special focus on the language and metaphors used in their depictions. S̱ābit’s two mes̱nevīs used in this paper share a similar and simple plot: There is a charming and ruthless beloved who does not respond to the lover’s feelings. The lovers are passionate men trying every possible way to reach the beloved. As all the common paths of attracting the beloved are vain, they trick the beloved and take advantage of him/her sexually. In both narratives there is no poetic justice, as the men are not punished. The beloved are totally silent throughout the both narratives and there is no clue what happens to them afterwards. It is widely accepted that S̱ābit introduced a new set of vocabulary and images to Ottoman Classical Poetry. In S̱ābit’s stories, sexual intercourse is narrated with very clear and graphic images. The stories selected for this presentation challenge the norms of the courtship and the desired union with the idealized beloved. They turn the courtship into a trick, and the union into a rape - thus they violently challenge the established norms of mes̱nevī. The expressions of obscene/erotic content are of particular interest for the purposes of this paper, because they are an integral part of this genre in spite of the disregard of many scholars. S̱ābit, while challenging the established ideals of the “Classical” literature, still made use of the traditional imagery and metaphors, nevertheless he expanded its boundaries with witticisms, connotations, proverbs and puns. Obscene and erotic content was an integral part of their narrative, and created the humorous effect that aims at entertaining the readers/audience. The reaction of the addressee is very hard to determine; they might consider these as skillful literary descriptions, humorous witticisms, graphic and arousing displays, or disgusting content. It is important to realize that S̱ābit creates a humorous and grotesque world in his path of seeking originality, and he challenged the boundaries of the language and content. In that, he was obviously successful, proven by the people he inspired, by the widely scattered copies of his manuscripts, and especially by the very fiction and language he created.

Although Ottoman art is not well-known for its erotic content, there are in fact a considerable corpus of sexually explicit manuscript illustrations that, with precious few exceptions, have been entirely neglected in the literature. Moreover, those among them that were produced during the late eighteenth and even the very early nineteenth century contradict the received idea that Ottoman miniature painting ended in the early eighteenth century, the painter Levni representing its swan song. Quite to the contrary, sumptuously illustrated volumes continued to be produced for nearly another century, only to be ignored by modern art historians due to their explicit content. The goal of this paper is to present a selection of these works and highlight the evolution of their visual codes and conventions, from the highly abstract and ambiguously situated in the sixteenth-century, to the naturalistic and meticulously localized in the late eighteenth. Nineteenth-century lithographic books and even early twentieth-century manuscripts will also be briefly reviewed to demonstrate that the line remained more or less unbroken until the advent of mass-circulation publishing, which reinvented the genre on a western model. This paper is in part based upon joint work with XXXXX XXXXX.