Mihri Hatun the Early Modern Ottoman Woman Poet

“At one glance
I love you
With a thousand hearts
Let the zealots think
Loving is sinful
Never mind
Let me burn in the hellfire
Of that sin”

This is just one snippet of a poem from an unusual source: Mihrî Hatun of the Ottoman Empire (1460-1515). In a place and time where most written voices were of men, the _meclis_ were intellectual gatherings where poems were recited and discussed. In fact, much written poetry of the Ottoman Empire deals with romantic and sexual love between older and younger men — some scholars think of the time as having three genders: older man, younger (“beardless”) man, and woman. The praising of male youthful beauty was completely normal until a backlash against men-with-men sex inspired by Western Europe grew in the 19th century.

But throughout, female love remains sadly less documented. Even the comedies of “shadow theater” that populated Ottoman urban centers that portrayed women as sexually promiscuous were written by men.

And so the poetry of Mihrî Hatun is especially valuable. As a daughter of an Ottoman judge (“kadi”), she was involved in the literary society of Prince Ahmed, and thus privileged in a special way that allowed her to make use of her talents. In fact, Mihrî embraced her gender, not hiding her female voice in her poems, but pointedly announcing her gender and making claims that her voice was every bit as strong as her male counterparts.