Crossing Interpretive Boundaries in Sixteenth-Century Istanbul: Aḥmed Sūdī on the Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ of Shiraz

Abstract

This article discusses an Ottoman commentary by Aḥmed Sūdī (d. ca. 1600) on the Dīvān (poetry collection) of Ḥāfiẓ of Shiraz (d. ca. 1390), a Persian literary masterpiece that enjoyed wide readership in the Ottoman world for centuries. In the first part of the article, I introduce Sūdī’s life and works and delineate the structure of his commentary, noting how that structure is underpinned by his philological approach to commentary writing. In the second part, I focus on Sūdī’s interpretation of the opening verse of the Dīvān and compare it with that of his predecessors to highlight and contextualize Sūdī’s commentarial approach. I conclude by illustrating how his grammatical-lexicographical analysis aimed to liberate the celebrated Dīvān from the dominant tradition of allegorical interpretation.