08/02/2021 Boys, Boys, Boys: Enderunlu Fazıl Bey’s Hubanname - Asian and African studies blog

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08 February 2021

Boys, Boys, Boys: Enderunlu Fazıl Bey’s Hubanname

In June 2019, I shared with you the British Library’s beautifully illustrated copy of the Hamse-yi Atayi, which included
copious illustrations of same-sex desire. In that post, I had the opportunity to tease out how we see and interpret
homosexual love and sex in pre-modern Ottoman literature, and what that says about our worldview today. Of course,
Atayi’s Hamse is far from the only work of Ottoman literature that speaks to this topic. I would be remiss if I did not make
use of LGBT+ History Month to highlight another item that helps queer our collections.

A view of Palace activities in the late 18th century taken from an illustrated copy of Enderunlu Fazıl Bey's Zenanname.

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(Enderunlu Fazıl Bey, Zenanname, 1190 AH [1776-77 CE], Turkey. Or 7094, f 7r)

Frequent readers and fans of our blog might remember Dr. Sunil Sharma’s particularly popular post from November 2016
on the Zenanname, an Ottoman Turkish book on the women of the world penned by Enderunlu Fazıl Bey. The Zenanname
is far from a work of women’s lib or a celebration of female feats and triumphs. Rather, it encapsulates an essentialist take
on the characteristics of various women, their weaknesses and strengths, and constructs rigid typologies around class and
country. Exceptionally misogynist at times, this literary piece was clearly destined for male readers. As Dr. Sharma points
out, the Zenanname is actually a companion piece to the Hubanname, an earlier work by Enderunlu Fazıl Bey, which
discusses the qualities of the beautiful young men of the world. This latter poem falls into a category of literature known as
the şehrengiz, works on the beauties of various cities.

Who was Enderunlu Fazıl Bey? Although no definitive date can be found for his birth, he is believed to have been born in
the 1750s or 60s in the city of Akka, Liwa of Safad, Ottoman Palestine (today Acre, Israel) to a family both well-placed in
the Ottoman bureaucracy, and with a rebellious streak against central authority. His given name was Hüseyin, but he took
the mahlas or poetic pseudonym Fazıl, as well as the qualifier Enderunlu or Enderunî because of his education in the
Enderun. This was the interior court of the Ottoman imperial bureaucracy, destined to service the imperial family, and was
located inside Topkapı Palace. He was ejected from the Palace in 1783-84 for his behaviour and spent more than a decade
in destitution in Istanbul before seeking out Selim III’s beneficence. He wrote poetry to curry the Sultan’s favour, and also
took positions in Aleppo, Erzurum and Rhodes. It was in this last location that Fazıl Bey lost his sight, which eventually
resulted in his return to Istanbul, where he died in 1810. His grave can today be found in the municipality of Eyüp.

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The opening of a combined version of the Hubanname and the Çenginame, a work on the male dancers of Istanbul.
([Collected Works of Fazıl Bey Enderuni], 19th century, Turkey. Or 7093, f 1v)

What was the behaviour that resulted in Fazıl Bey’s expulsion from the Palace? Sabahattin’s article in the Türk Diyanet
Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi claims it was “addiction” or "fixations" (“düşkünlük”) and "love affairs" ("aşk maceraları"). Love
and eroticism, indeed, are key themes in his poetry, and large motivators for his fame today as a poet. This history of
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same-sex desire is part of the reason for the poet’s appropriation today by some LGBTQI activists in Turkey, as well as the
interest of various Ottoman literary scholars in Turkey and abroad. The Hubanname is perhaps the best example of this
orientation in Fazıl Bey’s work.

The opening text of Fazıl Bey's Hubanname. ([Collected Works of Fazıl Bey Enderuni], 19th century, Turkey. Or 7095, ff
47v-48r)

The British Library holds three copies of the Hubanname text. It can be found in Or 7093 and Or 7095, both of which are
collections of Fazıl Bey’s works, as well as Or 7083, a mecmua also containing the works of Atıf Mustafa Efendi and Hazık
Mehmet Erzurumi. Sadly, none of the British Library’s holdings are illustrated, which provides a disappointing contrast to
both the exquisite illustrations of the Zenanname (Or 7094), and to the paintings in copies of the Hubanname in other
collections. For those readers who understand Turkish, there is a wonderful video from December 2019 of Dr. Selim S.
Kuru describing and analyzing a number of images from the copy held at the Library of İstanbul Üniversitesi. The text-
heavy works present in the British Library collections were all bequeathed by E. J. W. Gibb, whose six-volume A History of
Ottoman Poetry has long been a foundational text for Anglophone studies of Ottoman literature. As Sharma has pointed
out, Gibb was not a fan of Fazıl Bey’s skill as a poet, but he did give him credit for the originality of his work, and for the use
and adaptation of popular poetry within his own oeuvre.

Gibb’s lack of appreciation is far from surprising, especially when we consider his disdain for Atayi’s bawdy tales. This
disapproval, nonetheless, is hard to square with our own sensibilities or, perhaps, those of Fazıl Bey’s contemporaries. As
Dr. İrvin Cemil Schick explains, homoerotic themes were far from rare in Ottoman literature, including descriptions of
sexual acts, which are absent from the current work. The author’s decision to depart from the usual şehrengiz template and
to describe the young men of the world by ethnicity and characteristics, on the other hand, is both his claim to fame, and
the area in which Fazıl Bey might have found himself in hot water today. For several years, intense discussion within the
gay community, as well as other groups under the LGBTQI umbrella, have focused on the prevalence and impact of implicit
and explicit racism. Some of the descriptions included in the Hubanname would be sure to raise eyebrows, even if the
ridiculousness of the broad brush strokes employed might also elicit a few chuckles.

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The end of the description of Jewish men, and the one on Roma youths, from the Hubanname. (Enderunlu Fazıl Bey,
Hubanname, 1210 AH [1795 CE], Turkey. Or 7083, ff 54v-55r)

In his presentation, Kuru focuses on the Hubanname’s exposition of the young men of Istanbul, where Greeks, Armenians
and Jews are the first up for examination. Fazıl Bey is much taken with Greek men, claiming that they are the most
beautiful of their peers. Nonetheless, these “roses” have peculiar accents, and their pronounced sibilants and confusion
between sīn and shīn leave much to be desired. Armenians come next, charming Casanovas of the capital, followed up by
Jewish men, who feel the poet’s particular wrath. While some light-skinned Jews take his fancy, our wily and fickle ways,
and, apparently, horniness, make us “enemies to all nations”. Afterwards come the Roma, whose young men, with their
dark features, are pretty, lithe, musically-inclined, commercially-oriented, and totally untrustworthy; which is why, Fazıl Bey
tells us, they are unsuited to love. The list of Istanbul’s communities continues: Rumelians, Tatars, Bosniaks, Albanians,
Georgians, and Circassians. These are surrounded, both before and after, by descriptions of men from other communities
outside of Istanbul: Persians, Baghdadis, Damascenes (faces white as wax), Hejazis, Moroccans, Algerians (iron-hard,
whether young or old), Ethiopians (lusty, strong, and charming), Black men (diamonds, coral, eyes of love), Frenchmen,
Englishmen, Russians, Germans, Spaniards (each one exceptional in his beauty), and even the Indigenous peoples of the
Americas (big-mouthed and wide-faced).

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Description of Black men and Ethiopian ones, from the Hubanname. (Enderunlu Fazıl Bey, Hubanname, 1210 AH [1795
CE], Turkey. Or 7083, ff 43v-44r)

Fazıl Bey’s sharp-tongued review of the gifts and flaws of the world’s most beautiful young men feels like a late 18th-
century Ottoman drag act, complete with the zingers you’d expect from a vicious queen taking hold of the stage for an
evening’s roast. They could be dismissed as mere fun, or even as personal preference. But the truth is that some of his
phrasing and stereotyping cuts close to home for those of us who have been both victims and guilty of the typecasting and
casual racism of the gay dating scene. As much as Fazıl Bey’s Hubanname is a testament to the forms of same-sex desire
in different times and places, it’s also a showcase of how sex, stereotype, and prejudice can easily blend into one hot sticky
mess.

This LGBT+ History Month, revisiting the Hubanname lets us delve into the history of same-sex desire in the Ottoman
Empire. It can also help us reflect on the power dynamics encoded in our own gaze. Enderunlu Fazıl Bey might have been
maligned for his sexuality, but he was also still part of the Ottoman elite. His work, and others like it, is an opportunity for us
all to problematize the boundary between predilection and prejudice, preference and persuasion. At the end of the day,
love is love, and sex is sex, and they should be available to all, without detriment to one’s dignity or human worth.

Dr. Michael Erdman, Turkish and Turkic Curator

Further Reading and Listening:

Çil, Okan, “Osmanlı'nın eşcinsel şairi: Enderunlu Fâzıl”, Duvar Gazete, 21 October 2019. Last accessed: 10 January 2020.
<https://www.gazeteduvar.com.tr/kitap/2019/11/21/osmanlinin-escinsel-sairi-enderunlu-fazil>

Kücük, Sabahattin, “Enderunlu Fâzıl: Mahallîleşme eğilimini ileri bir safhaya götüren divan şairi”, Türk Diyanet Vakfı İslâm
Ansiklopedisi. Last accessed: 6 January 2021. <https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/enderunlu-fazil>

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08/02/2021 Boys, Boys, Boys: Enderunlu Fazıl Bey’s Hubanname - Asian and African studies blog

Schick, İrvin Cemil, “Representation of Gender and Sexuality in Ottoman and Turkish Erotic Literature,” The Turkish
Studies Association Journal, 28:1/2 (2004), pp. 81-103. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/43383697>

For the Ottoman History Podcast based on Schick’s study of eroticism in Ottoman literature, see here.

Yılmaz, Ozan, “Enderunlu Fazıl Divanı’nda Yahudilikle İlgili Unsurlar ve Andnâme-i Yehûdî-Beçe”, Türkbilig, 22 (2011), pp.
1-30. <https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/990142>

The Hubanname was most recently published in translation into modern Turkish by SEL Yayncılık. The work was
translated by Reşit İmrahor, an alias that has been employed by a number of authors and translators for more than 30
years.

Posted by Michael Erdman at 1:00 AM

Tags
LGBTQ+, Literature, Manuscripts, Middle East, Ottoman Turkey, Turkish

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