Ahmad Yassaviy: life and hikmats

The textbook explains the theme of love and the lover in Yassaviy’s hikmats, unlike other classical poets, as love for God. A true lover is one who has given up base desires, is content, serves the good and prefers labour to comfort; love is like a priceless pearl and cannot be sold to every unworthy person. The nafs is described in the hikmats as an evil force blocking spiritual maturity, with epithets such as “shum” (ill-omened) and “bad”. The images come from two sources: pir, darvish, oshiq, zohid, ummat, shayton are tied to Sufism, while yo‘l (road), rabot (caravanserai), karvon (caravan), o‘q (arrow) are tied to folk oral tradition. The hikmats are mostly written as four-line and murabba‘ stanzas in syllabic metre, and word repetition heightens the melody. This closeness to folk oral literature explains why they spread widely.