The past 2019 year has been declared as the ‘Year of Nasimi’ in Azerbaijan by President Ilham Aliyev devoted to the 650th anniversary of the birth of the outstanding Azerbaijani poet and great thinker Imadaddin Nesimi (in 1369 born in Shamakhy region of Azerbaijan and in 1417, skinned alive in Aleppo).
It was held various concerts, conferences, festivals, exhibitions, contests and other cultural events dedicated to the poet’s anniversary in the Republic of Azerbaijan and abroad during this year.
In an unprecedented public action for a greener future, 650 000 trees have been planted across Azerbaijan on 6 December 2019. This environmental campaign took place at the initiative of Azerbaijan’s First Vice-President Mehriban Aliyeva to mark the jubilee of poet’s birth.
Alī Imādud-Dīn Nesīmī (Azerbaijani: Seyid Əli İmadəddin Nəsimi (سید علی عمادالدّین نسیمی), often known as Nesimi, was a 14th-century Azerbaijani Ḥurūfī poet. Known mostly by his pen name (or takhallus) of Nesîmî, he composed one divan in Azerbaijani, one in Persian, and a number of poems in Arabic. He is considered one of the greatest Turkic mystical poets of the late 14th and early 15th centuries and one of the most prominent early divan masters in Turkic literary history (language used in this divan is the same with Azerbaijani).
There is much in common in the fate and views of the great Sufi poet Nesimi with the famous Sufi thinker of the Eastern world, Mansour Al-Hallaj, whose name today is remembered as the embodiment of freedom of speech and justice in the Arab scientific and literary environment.
His poetry is rooted in the social, political and cultural development of the countries of the Near and the Middle East, Middle Asia and especially of his homeland, Azerbaijan.
The poet wrote about 300 poems, including ghazals, qasidas (“lyrics”), and rubais (“quatrains”) in Azerbaijani (turc), Arabic and Persian languages.
The Institute of Linguistics at the Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan is named after him, and there was also a 1973 Azerbaijani film, Nasimi (the Azerbaijani language spelling of his name), made about him. The 600th anniversary of Nesîmî’s birthday was celebrated worldwide in 1973 by the decision of UNESCO, and representatives from many countries took part in the celebrations held both in Azerbaijan and in Moscow, Russia. An event dedicated to the 600th anniversary of Nasimi’s death was conducted in Paris, at the headquarter of UNESCO in May 2017.
Hurufism
There are conflicting reports about most famous shath of Mansour Al-Hallaj and repeated after him by his ideological follower Imadedddin Nesimi, أنا الحق Anā l-Ḥaqq “I am The Truth, ” which was taken to mean that they were claiming to be God, since al-Ḥaqq “the Truth” is one of the Ninety Nine Names of Allah, while others interpreted it as an instance of annihilation of the ego which allows God to speak through the individual.
Hurufism (Arabic: حُرُوفِيَّة ḥurūfiyyah) was a Sufi doctrine based on the mysticism of letters (ḥurūf), which originated in Azerbaijan and spread to all areas of South Caucase, Middle Asia, Near East, and Anatolia in the late 14th–early 15th century.
The founder and spiritual head of the Hurufi movement was Fazlallah Naimi (1340–94). While living in Tabriz, Fazlallah gained an elite following in the court of the Jalairid Sultanate. At that time, Fazlallah was still in the mainstream of Sufi tradition.
After his death, Fazlallah’s ideas were developed and propagated by Imadaddin Nesimi in Azerbaijan and Arabic countries, especially in Irak and Syria. Imadaddin Nesimi (?–1417) and other Hurufis make kabbalistic tendencies subordinate to mystic concepts of Sufism, and specifically those of Mansur Al-Hallaj, who was another great influence on poet.
Through Nesimi’s poetry, Hurufi ideas influenced in different degrees people like Niyaz-i Misri, Fuzûlî (1483–1556), Khatai (1487–1524), Habibi, Ismail, Rushani. The Bektashi Order, which is still active in Anatolia and the Balkans, was a repository for the Hurufi teachings and writings. One of Fazlallah’s personal students, Rafî’î, emigrated into the Balkans. He transmitted a central thesis of Hurufism, that the cardinalities of the Arabic alphabet respectively enumerate all types of shape and sound, by axes of symmetry. A Hurufi rebellion in Kwarezem was suppressed by the Mongols, and that motivated the exodus of Hurufis to the Balkans. The Bektashi manuscripts show almost 500 years of Hurufism in the Balkans, with a peak in the 1700s. Other Sufi orders, such as the Qadiriyya and the Naqshbandi, contributed in the collection, retrieval, and translation of Hurufi manuscripts.
- Asteroid 32939 Nesimiwas named in his memory.
- The movie dedicated to the poet Nesimi by Azerbaijanfilm
- The ballet dedicated to the poet “A Tale of Nesimi” by Azerbaijani composer Fikret Amirovin 1973.
- The Nesimi Institute of Linguistics is part of the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences.
- Nesimi raionis an urban district (raion) in Baku.
- A Baku metro station is named Nesimi.
- There are middle schools, streets, villages, parks named after Nesimi.