Ramadan Representations of Yahya Kemal and Mehmet Akif

Ramadan, in Turkish literature, has been represented not only as a religious time period but also as an aesthetic, social, and cultural experience. This representation can be read through two distinct yet complementary perspectives, particularly in the poetry of Yahya Kemal Beyatlı and Mehmet Akif Ersoy. Both poets approach Ramadan not merely as a month centered on worship but through the axes of social consciousness, civilizational vision, and moral responsibility. However, their representational strategies differ in accordance with their poetic preferences.

Ramadan Representations by Yahya Kemal and Mehmet Akif (Generated by AI)

Yahya Kemal’s assessment, prompted by his encounter with Mehmet Akif on his way back from Atik Valide Sultan Külliyesi, sharply illuminates this distinction. Yahya Kemal says, “Had Akif felt the joy and melancholy of the Islam I know, he would have written differently. He recites the rise of Islam and its doctrines; for me, poetry is the iftar hour at Atik Valide.”^【1】 This implies that his poetic vision is grounded in an aesthetic and emotional Islamic experience. In contrast, Akif’s friend supports this observation by saying, “Yes, this is a shortcoming in Akif; he speaks of the poverty of Islam—that is, he is social.”^【2】 According to Yahya Kemal, Akif is not “the poet of Islam” but rather “the poet of Islamic morality.”^【3】

For Yahya Kemal, Ramadan is the most painful and lyrical path back to the soul of his nation after years spent in Paris’s positivist and Westernized world. Although his years in the West temporarily distanced him from his nation’s values and belief system, he always carried within him a strange longing. This longing sometimes drew him to morning prayers, sometimes to the mosque rows on festive mornings. Even while living on Büyükada, fearing he might miss the opportunity to rise for the dawn prayer amid his modern lifestyle, he would stay awake all night, fasting and waiting for the prayer time—moments that stand as the most concrete symbols of his profound sense of belonging.^【4】 Resit Akif Pasha’s joy upon seeing someone like Yahya Kemal in the mosque after prayer—exclaiming, “I am blessed twice”—symbolizes the generation’s effort to return to its roots.^【5】 His poem “On the Street Leading Down from Atik Valide” is precisely the culmination of this spiritual state. As the iftar hour approaches, he observes the sweet anticipation in the streets, the fasting people returning home with pale faces, and the children waiting at the grocer’s. He feels himself an outsider—“fasting-free and joyless”—and this is, in essence, a feeling of exile. For him, Ramadan is a radiant joy achieved through unity with the nation.

The poet admits that even in the busiest moments of Paris, the call to prayer from the minarets of Üsküp echoes in his ears.^【6】 In Üsküp, where he spent his childhood, the “sacred silence” that fell over the city when the call to prayer was recited, his mother’s lips moving with the divine name, and that “heavenly voice” filling the sky form the unshakable foundation of his soul. According to Yahya Kemal, these sounds have a profound influence on the upbringing of Muslim Turkish children; even the bohemian life of Paris could not overshadow this spiritual heritage but instead bound him more deeply to his roots through profound nostalgia. Indeed, Yahya Kemal describes the bitterness of being deprived of this spiritual table—even if he does not fast—as “an endless evening of exile,”^【7】 because for him, stepping outside Ramadan means distancing oneself from the heart of his nation.

Beyatlı expresses the call to prayer echoing from Üsküp’s minarets as the most prominent auditory element of the cultural atmosphere he calls the “Muslim dream”:

“This dream is the Muslim dream we call childhood. Today’s Turkish fathers were born in neighborhoods saturated with the Muslim dream, heard the call to prayer at birth, saw elderly grandmothers standing in prayer in their rooms. They heard the recitation of the Qur’an from the corner of a cushion during blessed evenings, took down the Book of God from a shelf, opened it with tiny hands, and breathed in its yellow pages, fragrant as rose oil. They learned the Bismillah as their first lesson, rejoiced when the lanterns of Kandil nights glowed and when balls were thrown during Ramadan and Eid. They went to Eid prayers beside their fathers, listened to the takbirs as dawn broke inside the mosques, passed through this stage of religion, entered life, and became Turks.”^【8】

In Yahya Kemal’s poem “On the Street Leading Down from Atik Valide,” Ramadan is constructed not as an individual act of piety but as an aesthetic manifestation of collective memory. The spatial element is decisive: the Üsküdar neighborhood, the surroundings of Atik Valide Camii, and the depiction of evening time make visible Ramadan’s integration into the city. In this context, Ramadan symbolizes historical continuity. The poet emphasizes that worship is not a private, inward experience but a public visibility. The crowds moving toward the mosque, the growing spiritual intensity as iftar approaches, and the luminous atmosphere around the minarets transform Ramadan into one of the foundational elements of urban aesthetics.

In the poem’s symbolic world, Ramadan represents the continuity of Ottoman-Turkish civilization. Considering Yahya Kemal’s deep commitment to history and civilization, the depiction of the Ramadan night becomes a poetic re-creation of continuity. The sanctification of space, the intensification of time, and the unification of the community around the same act of worship are the aesthetic codes of the civilization concept. Here, Ramadan generates a “shared rhythm”: the city’s daily flow is reorganized around iftar and tarawih. Thus, Ramadan emerges as a temporal organization that transforms the public sphere.

ON THE STREET LEADING DOWN FROM ATIK VALIDE

"To Nihad Sami Banarlı"

Before iftar I went to the Atik Valide quarter,

How many times have I walked these streets, yet today again,

They were silent. But Ramadan’s spiritual essence

Had turned the stillness into a sweet anticipation;

The fasting people of the quarter, their faces pale,

Return quietly from the market, one by one;

If you wait by the grocer’s, the little girls

Clearly signal the coming of the ball and iftar.

No one remains in the square, all are gone;

The day ends with the sound of a single ball.

Since the moment the ball burst and the fast was broken,

A radiant joy has filled the brick houses.

O Lord, how vast and pure this world has become!

I remained alone on the quiet street, fasting-free and joyless.

The sorrow of being distant from this iftar of my homeland

Made my soul endure an endless evening of exile.

One thought alone comforted me in this pain:

I said to myself, “To be apart from them brings me sorrow every moment;

Since these feelings remain in me, how grateful I am.”^【9】

-Yahya Kemal Beyatlı

On the other hand, Mehmet Akif Ersoy’s perspective opens onto Ramadan’s far more intimate, heartfelt, and trusting face. For Akif, this month is not a set of ornate images but a moment of worship and prayer lived fully within the rhythm of life. He is sometimes a tender father waiting for iftar with his children at home, and sometimes a humble believer sharing bread at the same table with friends like Abbas Halim Pasha or Mithat Cemal.^【10】 Yet even at his own table, his mind is occupied with the “poor” and “helpless” beyond. Just before breaking his fast, when he raises his hands to heaven, he does not pray for his own acceptance but cries out for the salvation of the entire community: “O Lord, do not destroy us because of the sins committed by those within us.”^【11】 His prayers seek guidance for those who waste their lives in neighborhood cafés, awakening for those who steal livelihoods, and aid for elderly, forgotten figures like Seyfi Baba. In Akif’s world, Ramadan is a sincere supplication for sick children’s healing, a shared bowl of warm soup, and the first spark of social awakening.

In Mehmet Akif’s poetry, Ramadan is addressed on a more explicit moral and social critique platform. In poems centered on mosques and sermons in Safahat, Ramadan functions as a means of awakening consciousness. Akif’s poetic stance is didactic; thus, the Ramadan atmosphere becomes not merely an aesthetic backdrop but the stage for a call to revival against social decay. The act of fasting is interpreted not only as the discipline of the self but also as the internalization of the ideal of social justice. The experience of hunger is linked to an empathetic understanding of poverty, transforming Ramadan into a time of intensified social responsibility.

In Akif’s poetry, the mosque space serves a critical function, unlike the aesthetic unity found in Yahya Kemal’s work. Sermons not only reinforce religious sentiment but also question ignorance, laziness, and moral weakness. The Ramadan nights, with their image of equality in the tarawih rows, symbolize Islam’s ideal social order; yet Akif insists that this symbol loses meaning if it is not carried into daily life. From this perspective, Ramadan is a potential for transformation, contingent upon individual and collective will.

Ramadan Prayer

"O Lord, for the honor of this immense Ramadan,

Remove whatever stands between us and unity;

O Lord, from this division that has lasted centuries,

Let the nation no longer sink into despair.

Since You have granted us a new spirit...

O Lord, let another breath of strength descend!"^【12】

-Mehmet Akif Ersoy

The common element in both poets is that Ramadan transcends individual worship to contribute to the construction of a collective identity. Yahya Kemal’s noble and melancholic “civilizational quest,” which soothes the loneliness he brought from Paris, is paired on the other side with Mehmet Akif’s unwavering faith and love for service to the people. One builds a spiritual refuge in the midst of modern life through the memory of Üsküp’s call to prayer, while the other makes this sacred time the most intimate path to healing society’s wounds and seeking refuge in God. Ramadan is an eternal bridge between past and future, between the individual and the collective. Crossing this bridge means feeling, like Yahya Kemal, the radiant joy after the ball bursts, and, like Akif, meeting all of humanity in a heartfelt prayer.