Dīwān by Poet Mahir Abdullah Bosniak (1649-1710)

Abstract

This paper presents an untreated Diwan of poems by Mahir Abdullah Bosniak, a Bosnian poet from the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The Diwan draws our attention with its diversity of poetic forms. In his qasida, Mahir prefers the panegyrical style; in inscriptions – tarihs, descriptive, factual and elevated expressive style; in museddeses and ghazels, lyric dominates with its thematic diversity; in rubais the style is simple, while in mufreds, the unity of meaning is limited to the couplet (beyit) in the proper sense. With regard to the content and number of certain poetic types, Mahir can be described also as a ”museddes poet” as he ranks as a poet with the largest number of museddeses in diwan literature. In the ”Gazeliyyat” Chapter of Mahir’s Diwan, there are ghazels rhyming with every grapheme (harf) of the Arabic alphabet, which ranks him amongst the poets who, in writing ghazels, fulfilled all formal requirements of the Diwan poetry. Additionally, Mahir’s ghazels have a great thematic and stylistic diversity. In a nutshell, he is quite an educated poet, who successfully mastered the language and poetic writing techniques in aruz-metre.