Edirne Müftüsü Mehmed Fevzi Efendi

Prolific late Ottoman scholar and teacher, long mufti of Edirne, who wrote Sayf al-ghullāb, a gloss on al-Maghnīsāwī’s Īsāghūjī commentary Mughnī al-ṭullāb.

Life

He was born in 1826 in Tavas (formerly Yarangüme) near Denizli. TDV gives his given name as Meḥmed ʿAlī and Fevzī as his pen-name; he also used the name Kureyşīzāde. He studied in his home town and in Manisa, taught in İzmir and Alexandria on his way to the pilgrimage in 1840, and spent 1841–1843 in Mecca, studying and teaching Qurʾān . After completing his studies in Manisa he went to Istanbul and was sent to Edirne as a teacher (dersiʿâm) in 1847; he soon became mufti there and for some twenty years taught al-Bayḍāwī’s commentary, the Shifāʾ, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, the Mathnawī and the Burda in the Old Mosque (Eski Cami).

Dismissed in 1864, he served as deputy judge (nāʾib) in Antalya, Plovdiv, Ankara, Aleppo, Jerusalem, Kayseri, Bitlis, Medina, Balıkesir and again Edirne, and rose to the rank of chief judge of Rumelia. He died at his home in Karagümrük, Istanbul, on 28 Rabīʿ II 1318 (25 August 1900) and is buried in the cemetery of the Fatih mosque.

TDV identifies seventy-five published works by him, many written as textbooks for his own classes: and glosses in Arabic on grammar, , theology and , Turkish works on religious and social questions, and a large body of devotional poetry.

Uncertain or disputed

TDV gives his birth year only as 1826, without a hijri date.

Works

Sayf al-ghullāb ʿalā Mughnī al-ṭullāb سَيْفُ الغُلَّابِ عَلَى مُغْنِي الطُّلَّاب — on al-Maghnīsāwī or al-MaghnīsīA gloss on al-Maghnīsāwī’s commentary on the Īsāghūjī, printed in Istanbul in 1284 AH (TDV). In it he discusses, among other things, the meaning of the nisba ‘al-Abharī’, which he takes to refer to a tribe rather than a town (TDV, ‘Ebherî’). A modern printing of Mughnī al-ṭullāb gives Sayf al-ghullāb in the footnotes.gloss

Sources (4)