Symposium Papers: Literature

For the last of my updates on scholarly papers, I will summarize those that I heard in the session that dealt with literature.

“What is Common in Eastern and Western Literature: The Origin of Courtly Love and Ottoman Classical Literature”
The issue of romantic love and romance in Islamic literature seems like a contradiction, but Muslims during the Ottoman period apparently wrote amazing love poems that seem very similar to the medieval love literature.  This reminded me of my college medieval Europe course in which we read "The Art of Courtly Love," a guidebook of sorts on how to romance women. This paper said that the Islamic world was very much influenced by this book.

“Dervish, Dream and Sultan in the Ottoman Sufi Literature, 1300-1600”
Sufis are mystical Muslims who try to understand God through trances, spiritual exercises, and dreams.  They are known as great poets, and this presentation dealt with dream imagery.  The professor, however, seemed to quote more from the Epic of Gilgamesh than any one other piece.  He really likes how Gilgamesh literally follows his dreams.  Sufis loved to interpret the dreams of the Ottoman sultans.  

“Great Transformation of Turkish Literature in Rum (Anatolia)”
The Islamic literature is vast with beautiful poems written from all sorts of spiritual and person perspectives through centuries.  He compared the literary tradition of Islam to the stone statues on Easter Island: wonderful and grand--but leading to more questions than answers.   

"Byzantium in the History of Book Burning and Censorship”
I went to this session to support my new scholarly friend Dan from New England in his book burning presentation.  He spoke about the Byzantine "golden age of book burning" in which the church authorities in order to enforce orthodox thoughts destroyed books in mass dozens of times.  Most of the books were written from the perspective of those who different in what seems like minor issues of doctrine with Christian thought.  Of course the issues seem minor today but then people were willing to die over the issues.  He has documented about 30 instances of mass book burnings in the late Roman and Byzantine times.  I found it interesting how none of the book burnings involved Islamic writings.