Tradition of Writing Arbain in Turkish Literature: on the Example of “Arbain” by Alisher Navoi and Muslikhiddin Mustafa Akhtari

This article talks about the tradition of hadith writing in Eastern Muslim literature. This tradition, which began in Turkish literature with Alisher Navoi, continued in Azerbaijani literature with the work of Muhammad Fuzuli “Forty Hadiths”. In the 16th century, Muslihiddin Mustafa Akhtari also responded to this tradition in Ottoman-Turkish literature and created his work “The Book of Forty Hadiths”. The article compares this work of Akhtari with “Arbain” by Alisher Navoi and explores the common and different aspects of both works. If Navoi used the poetic form of kitaa for the artistic interpretation of hadiths, then Akhtari’s quatrains were written in the form of mutually rhyming mesnevi. Navoi chose the hafif meter to express hadiths, and in Akhtari’s quatrains the ramal meter was used, expressing the capabilities of the Turkish language in a simplified form. The author of the article also finds out that eighteen hadiths in the works of Alisher Navoi and Muslihiddin Mustafa Akhtari are common in content.