Muḥammad Fużūlī’s The Debate of Weed and Wine (Beng ü Bāde) Revisited: Towards a New Interpretation
Muḥammad Fużūlī’s (d. 1556) Beng ü Bāde (The Debate of Weed and Wine), a short narrative poem written sometime between 1510 and 1524 by one of the outstanding authors of the classical Turkish literary tradition, has induced many scholars to come forward with an interpretation. A common feature of all these attempts is that they look at Fużūlī’s work as a unique text and tend to forget that there are two other versions of the story. Yūsuf Amīrī’s Beng ü Çaġır was written in Central Asian Turkic in the early fifteenth century and the recently found Esrār-nāme was composed in Ottoman. The present paper aims to give a short description of the Esrār-nāme and provide the reader with a new interpretation of Fużūlī’s Beng ü Bāde, in light of the comparative analysis of the three texts.