The concept of Sufi love in Khwarazmi’s Mahabbat-nama : a hermeneutic interpretation through Yasawi’s thought
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This study examines the concept of Sufi love in Khwarazmi’s Mahabbat-nama through a hermeneutic interpretation informed by Yasawi’s thought. Previous scholarship has predominantly approached the work through philological, linguistic, and literary-historical perspectives, leaving the relationship between its epistolary conventions and potentially transformative meanings insufficiently explored. Addressing this gap, the study proposes a Transformative Love Framework comprising love, longing, suffering, ethical refinement, self-transcendence, and transcendent orientation. Methodologically, it combines philosophical hermeneutics, comparative textual analysis, and close reading of primary passages, while treating the Persianate dāh-nāma tradition as an interpretive control. Direct textual evidence from Mahabbat-nama is examined comparatively with selected passages from the transmitted Dīwān-i Ḥikmat corpus and contextualised through classical Sufi writings. Yasawi’s thought functions as a comparative hermeneutic horizon rather than as evidence of direct textual dependence or institutional affiliation. The findings show that the conventional language of epistolary love in Mahabbat-nama can acquire cumulative ethical and existential significance through the interaction of longing, suffering, fidelity, mortality, and self-transformation. Rather than identifying the human beloved unambiguously with the Divine, the analysis demonstrates how the poem’s courtly discourse can open toward a transcendent orientation while preserving its literary ambiguity. The proposed framework contributes to comparative Turkic literary studies and Sufi hermeneutics by explaining how courtly love poetry can generate ethical and existential meanings without being reclassified as an explicitly mystical text.
Source: Cogent Arts and Humanities
Authors: Gulbala Koshtayeva, Torali Kydyr
Institution: M.Auezov South Kazakhstan State University
Language: English
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $1,165
OpenAlex ID: W7225227864