Fuzuli

The poet's given name was Muhammad and his father's name Suleyman; Fuzuli is his pen name (takhallus). The word carries two senses, «meddlesome, given to idle talk» and «exalted, virtuous». In the preface to his Persian divan he explains that he chose it to avoid sharing a pen name with other poets, expecting that nobody would care to take such a word. He was born in Arab Iraq during the Aq Qoyunlu period. Karbala is most often given as his birthplace, with Najaf, Hilla, Baghdad and Kirkuk also proposed. The year of his birth is unknown: modern scholarship puts it around the 1480s, while older reference works give 1494–1498. He came from the Bayat Turkmens who lived in Iraq under the Aq Qoyunlu; little is known of his family, and the tradition that his father was the mufti of Hilla is unverified.

Fuzuli learned Arabic and Persian well enough to write verse and treatises in both. In the prefaces to his divans he says that he first studied the rational and transmitted sciences, geometry and philosophy, and then Qur'anic commentary and hadith. When the Safavid shah Ismail I took Baghdad in 1508, Fuzuli was already a known young poet. His first known poem is a Persian qasida for the Aq Qoyunlu prince Alvand Mirza, and he dedicated his first known Turkic masnavi, «Bang va Bada», to Shah Ismail.

He then found a patron in the Safavid governor of Baghdad, Ibrahim Khan Mawsillu, whom he met at Karbala and Najaf; he went with him to Baghdad and presented him with qasidas and a tarji'band. After Ibrahim Khan was killed by his nephew in 1527, Fuzuli was left without a patron and, scholars suppose, went back to Hilla. Almost nothing is known of the years 1527–1534.

In 1534 Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent captured Baghdad. Fuzuli presented him with five qasidas and wrote others to Ottoman officials, and was granted a stipend of nine akçe a day from waqf revenues. Finding the sum too small, he sent the chancellor Celalzade Mustafa Çelebi a satirical letter, «Shikayatnama» («The Complaint»), after which the payments were put in order. In Baghdad he met the Turkish poets Hayali and Yahya Bey, who had come with the sultan's army, and at their request wrote the poem «Leyli and Majnun» in 1535–1536.

Fuzuli wrote in three languages: his native Azerbaijani Turkic, Persian and Arabic. About fifteen of his works in verse and prose survive; the best known are his Turkic divan, «Leyli and Majnun», «Hadiqat al-Su'ada», his Persian divan and «Haft Jam». Although he longed to see Tabriz, Anatolia and India, he never left Iraq; his life was spent in Karbala, Hilla, Najaf and Baghdad. In his ghazals and in «Leyli and Majnun», earthly love merges with mystical longing.

Fuzuli died in 1556 (963 AH) during a plague epidemic that swept Baghdad and its surroundings, by the most reliable tradition in Karbala. His son Fazli also became a poet. From the sixteenth century onward poets wrote replies in the manner of his ghazals; his books have been published many times in Turkey, Azerbaijan and Iran, as well as in Tashkent and Bukhara, and in 1908 the Azerbaijani composer Uzeyir Hajibeyov based his opera «Leyli and Majnun» on Fuzuli's poem.