İsmâil Hakkı Bursevî

İsmâil Hakkı Bursevî was born on a Monday in the year 1652 (AH 1063) in Aydos. His father Mustafa Efendi, who was from Istanbul, had settled in the town of Aydos after a fire that broke out in 1650. While he was still three years old he was entrusted to Seyyid Atpazarlı Osman Fadlî Efendi; at the age of seven he lost his mother. At the age of ten he went to Edirne and came under the upbringing of Abdülbâkî Efendi, and for seven years he received lessons in morphology, syntax, logic, rhetoric, jurisprudence (fıkıh), theology (kelâm), Quranic exegesis (tefsir), and hadith. In 1674 he received his diploma (icazet) from his master Osman Fadlî Efendi. He was appointed to Bursa as a deputy (halîfe); he preached and gave counsel in Skopje for ten years. In 1685 he went to Bursa, and then to Famagusta. In 1695, upon the invitation of Sultan Mustafa II, he went to Edirne and joined the army in the campaign against Austria. Twenty-eight years after the death of his master, he went to Damascus to stay for three years, then moved to Üsküdar for three years. In 1722 he returned to Bursa and had the Câmi-i Muhammedî lodge built. Besides the Islamic sciences, he became renowned in the field of sufism; he composed more than a hundred works—according to some sources around one hundred and six—of which sixty are in Turkish. Among his principal works are the four-volume Tefsir-i Rûh-ul-Beyân, the two-volume Şerh-i Muhammediyye, the two-volume Şerh-i Mesnevî, Şerh-i Pendi Attar, Şerh-i Bostan, Kitâb-ül-Kebîr, Silsile-i Nâme-i Celvetî, and the Dîvân. The page also relates his counsels concerning how those who commit sins deceive themselves. He died at the age of seventy-six, in the year 1725 (AH 1137). His grave is located behind the mihrab of the Câmi-i Muhammedî which he himself had built.