Is There Anywhere a Stranger Like Me: Yunus Emre on Ghurbat

The Poem

Acep şu yerde var m’ola şöyle garîb bencileyin? Bağrı başlı, gözü yaşlı, şöyle garîb bencileyin.

Gezerim Rûm ile Şâm’ı, yukarı illerî kamu. Çok istedim, bulamadım, şöyle garîb bencileyin.

Kimseler garîb olmasın, hasret oduna yanmasın. Hocam, kimseler duymasın şöyle garîb bencileyin.

Söyler dilim, ağlar gözüm; garîblere göynür özüm. Meğer ki gökte yıldızım şöyle garîb bencileyin.

Nice bu dert ile yanam, ecel ere bir gün ölem; meğer ki sinimde bulam şöyle garîb bencileyin.

Bir garîb ölmüş diyeler, üç günden sonra duyalar; soğuk su ile yuyalar şöyle garîb bencileyin.

Hey Emre’m Yûnus biçâre, bulunmaz derdine çare. Var imdi gez şârdan şâre, şöyle garîb bencileyin.

A plain rendering into English:

Is there anywhere in this world a stranger like me? Heart wounded, eyes weeping, a stranger like me.

I have walked Anatolia and Syria, all the lands of the upper country. I searched and could not find a stranger like me.

Let no one be a stranger, let no one burn in the fire of longing. Master, may no one ever know a stranger like me.

My tongue speaks, my eyes weep; my soul grieves for the strangers. Only perhaps my star in the sky is a stranger like me.

How long shall I burn in this pain, when shall my appointed hour come and I die? Perhaps only in my grave I will find a stranger like me.

“A stranger has died,” they will say, and only after three days hear it, and wash my body with cold water, a stranger like me.

Hey Emre, hey poor Yunus, there is no cure for your pain. Go now, wander from town to town, a stranger like me.

”Şöyle Garîb Bencileyin”: The Refrain That Names the Soul

The poem’s refrain, şöyle garîb bencileyin (“a stranger like me, so utterly a stranger”), repeats at the close of every stanza like a bell. Yunus does not name what the refrain points to. He does not need to. The repetition itself is the meaning.

What the refrain names is the Sufi state called ghurbat: estrangement. Ghurbat in classical Sufi vocabulary is not psychological loneliness. It is a maqam: the abiding station of one who has glimpsed where the heart truly belongs and now experiences this world as not-quite-home. The classical formulation comes from al-Qushayri’s Risala and from al-Hujwiri’s Kashf al-Mahjub: ghurbat is a positive sign, not a negative state. The seeker who is comfortable in this world has not yet noticed that he is travelling. The seeker who feels strange in it has begun to remember the homeland.

The traveller in the poem walks Rûm (Anatolia) and Shâm (Syria), the great Sufi geography of the time, and finds no one as strange as himself. This is not boasting. It is the recognition that ghurbat is, in the end, an inner station, not a place. The walker who walks every land and finds no equally strange companion is not lonely; he is admitting that the homeland he longs for is not in any geography on the map.

The Stranger’s Body: “Bir Garîb Ölmüş Diyeler”

The sixth stanza turns abruptly to the death of the stranger:

Bir garîb ölmüş diyeler, üç günden sonra duyalar; soğuk su ile yuyalar.

A stranger has died; only after three days will they hear of it; they will wash the body with cold water.

The Anatolian listener hears this verse and feels the bottom drop out. The image is concrete: a poor traveller dying in a village far from his people; no one near to call his death; the news travelling slowly; the eventual washing of the body done by strangers, with cold water rather than warm, in the haste of an unprepared community.

This stanza is doing something theologically precise. Islamic law places duties on the community concerning the dead. The body of any Muslim must be washed, shrouded, prayed over, and buried. These are fard al-kifaya: communal obligations that fall upon those who are present. The dead stranger in Yunus’s verse is the case at the very edge of those obligations: the one who has no relatives, no friends, no claim, no voice. The very poorness of the funeral exposes the gap that ghurbat names.

But Yunus is not protesting. He is saying: this might be me. And in saying so, he is doing two things at once.

First, he is reminding the listener of the community’s duty to the dead stranger; do not let any believer’s burial be neglected; do not let the news come three days late.

Second, he is teaching the listener to identify with the stranger; to feel in himself, while still alive, the position of one who might die unattended. This inward turn is the work that ghurbat requires.

The Anatolian tradition has carried this verse for seven centuries with extreme tenderness. It is sung at funerals. It is sung in the zikir circles of Bektaşî and Mevlevi gatherings. It is sung at the bedside of the dying.

The Garîb Hadith: “Islam Began as a Stranger”

The poem rests on a hadith that gives the whole concept of ghurbat its Islamic foundation:

Bedeʾa-l-Islāmu gharīban wa sa-yaʿūdu gharīban kamā badaʾa; fa-ṭūbā li-l-ghurabā’.

“Islam began as a stranger, and will return to being a stranger as it began; so glad tidings to the strangers.”

(Muslim, Sahih, Kitab al-Iman; Tirmidhi, Sunan)

The hadith establishes gharīb as a positive religious term. The first Muslims were strangers in Mecca. The believers in any age when the practice of faith becomes difficult will be strangers in their own time. The hadith does not lament this; it blesses it. Tūbā li-l-ghurabā’: tūbā, in the lexicon of paradise, is a tree or a state of supreme blessedness. The strangers are not abandoned. They are the recipients of paradise’s particular promise.

Yunus’s şöyle garîb bencileyin is the human side of this divine word. The stranger of the hadith is the stranger of the poem. The walker who walks Rûm and Shâm without finding his equal is the believer of any age who has felt the gap between what the world is and what the heart was made for.

This is why the poem closes the way it does:

Var imdi gez şârdan şâre, şöyle garîb bencileyin.

Go now, wander from town to town, a stranger like me.

The instruction is not despair. It is the Sufi mashreb: the disposition of the wayfarer who has accepted that his homeland is not here and who therefore walks his life on this earth as a guest. Yunus is not telling the listener to give up. He is telling the listener that the path of the garîb is the path of those to whom tūbā has been promised.

Yunus, Mevlana, and the Ney: Three Voices of One Ghurbat

The same theme, the soul as a stranger to this world, longing for a homeland it has only glimpsed, runs through three of the great Anatolian poetic openings.

Rumi’s ney, in the opening lines of the Mesnevi, cries from the reedbed it was cut from:

Listen to the reed, how it complains; it tells the tale of separation.

The reed sings of firaq, separation from the reedbed that is its source. The note is the same as Yunus’s garîb: the recognition that the heart has come from elsewhere.

Hacı Bayram-ı Velî’s “N’oldu bu gönlüm” gives the same theme in plain Turkish: what has happened to this heart, it has filled with sorrow and grief. The heart that grieves is the heart that has remembered something it cannot quite name.

And here in Yunus’s şöyle garîb bencileyin: the same firaq, the same ney-tone, but now in the most ordinary Anatolian Turkish, in the voice of a poor man who walks from town to town. Three voices of one Anatolian inheritance: the imperial Persian of Mevlana, the central-Anatolian Turkish of Hacı Bayram, and the village Turkish of Yunus, all singing the same recognition.

This is the register the listener can pick up at any door. Whoever begins anywhere in this corpus arrives in the same room.

Why This Poem Has Lasted

Seven centuries after Yunus, this poem is still recited at Anatolian funerals, sung in zikir circles, and recorded by the major classical Turkish vocalists. The reason is the same as for “Bir Kez Gönül Yıktın İse” and “Severim Ben Seni Candan İçeri”: Yunus says something structurally true about the believer’s condition, in a Turkish that the village and the lodge can equally receive.

The poem teaches three things at once.

It teaches the believer to feel the ghurbat that is the proper inheritance of the wayfarer. Tūbā li-l-ghurabā’: the stranger is blessed, not pitied.

It teaches the community its duty to the dead stranger. The body of any Muslim is sacred ground; let it not be three days before the news is heard.

It teaches the seeker that the path of the heart is not a journey to a destination but a wandering. Var imdi gez şârdan şâre: go now, walk from town to town, and let the walking itself be the path.

This is Yunus’s Anatolian register at its purest: simple, direct, anchored theologically in classical hadith, anchored ethically in the community’s care for its dead, anchored mystically in the ghurbat of the heart.

Sources

• Yunus Emre, Divan, the principal collection of his ilahis; the standard modern edition is Mustafa Tatcı’s
• Mustafa Tatcı, Yûnus Emre Divânı: İnceleme, Metin (Ankara, 1990)
• Abdülbâki Gölpınarlı, Yûnus Emre: Hayatı ve Bütün Şiirleri (Istanbul, 1971)
• Muslim, Sahih, Kitab al-Iman, the gharīb hadith
• Tirmidhi, Sunan, the gharīb hadith
• al-Qushayri, al-Risala al-Qushayriyya, the chapter on ghurba
• al-Hujwiri, Kashf al-Mahjub, the section on ghurba
• al-Ghazali, Ihya’ Ulum al-Din, Kitab al-Mawt, on the rights of the dead
• Fuad Köprülü, Türk Edebiyatında İlk Mutasavvıflar (1918)