Yunus Emre
I wish the idea that you only fall in love three times in your life, or how the soul mate, karmic love, and twin flame affect your love life were merely esoteric; however, this text about the power of love, written by an Anatolian queer mind with a Sufist family tradition and a broken heart, is rooted in factual experience.
In my hometown, Karaman, Yunus Emre is one of the most celebrated public figures; I grew up reading his statements on the walls and seeing his busts around. There are numerous scenarios about his biography and birthplace; Anatolian cities such as Eskişehir, Kütahya, Karaman, or Aksaray, ironically, all simultaneously reclaim the cultural heritage of this 13th century mystic, who ceaselessly championed the power of love, sharing, and forgiving. At the same time, this ambiguity led us to an understanding of his widespread influence across the region. Let me clearly explain why I bring such a reference to a complex equation set between peace and love.
Yunus Emre’s poetry often centers on the theme of love, particularly divine love. He expresses an understanding of love that transcends human relationships and points towards a profound connection with God. This love is not just spiritual but also worldly, emphasizing the need to extend compassion and kindness to all people. He proposes an application of this discourse, rather than mystifying, narrating, or idealizing the reality of love. He often wrote that true love entails humility and selflessness. Forgiveness is another key theme in Yunus Emre’s work. He emphasizes the importance of forgiving others as an essential aspect of spiritual growth and inner peace. For him, holding on to grudges is contrary to the path of a true believer. His messages encourage individuals to seek forgiveness and to grant it freely, reflecting the values of compassion and understanding that are central to Sufism. Yunus Emre’s understanding of faith is deeply personal and experiential. He conveys that faith is not purely an intellectual belief but involves a heartfelt connection with the divine. His poetry illustrates the simplicity and depth of this relationship, often encouraging followers to seek a direct experience of God rather than relying solely on dogmatic teachings. Faith, for him, is intertwined with love and forgiveness, forming a holistic approach to spirituality. In a nutshell, he proposes methodic thinking for love, while a few centuries later, William Shakespeare still wrote about love as being an illness or a disease.
“My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease;
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please.”
William, Shakespeare2
Is this a way of coming closer to the dilemma Michael Hardt unveils, when he states: “You are simply left with two notions of love that are equally unlivable—one outside time in the sense that it is all change and the other outside time in that it admits none.”?3 Either we let love change us and accept that loving someone also means giving that person the power to destroy us, or we are afraid of love because it is connected with our fear of loss and belonging.
Married With Three Men
For the larger part, I was in Istanbul while writing this text. Most of the people around me have been concerned lately about the increasing violence towards women, animals, and children in the country. Economic conditions, political pressure, and other uncertainties have caused a radical shift toward domestic violence and crime toward others in a country with a tradition of killing women due to male pride, family reputation, or “love,” as is preposterously claimed. I thought of an earlier work, a video performance by Şükran Moral: Married with Three Men (2010), and a series of photographs entitled Mardin from the same year. The artist creates a socially scandalous moment by breaking taboos in a country where women received their voting and eligibility rights earlier than in many other European countries, and also the Islamic rule of the men’s permission to marry four women based on their needs and housekeeping requirements was eliminated. This is a larger problem, clearly defined by the Paris collective that decided to stay anonymous for their joint authorship:
“What civilization has done to women’s bodies is no different than what it’s done to the earth, to children, to the sick, to the proletariat; in short, to everything that isn’t supposed to ‘talk‘, and in general to whatever the knowledge-powers of government and management don’t want to hear, which is thus relegated to exclusion from all recognized activity, relegated to the role of a witness.”4
There is nothing wrong with these lens-based and performative works other than the gaze of young men looking at the camera with shy, disturbing, and unhappy eyes. Şükran Moral is probably one of the most controversial artists from the limited history of performance art in Turkey and makes work with social themes such as immigration, prostitution, feminism, equality, death, sex, and mental illness. Through these works, which operate as a reminder of the gender inequalities, injustices, and violence in the forms of tradition, we remember that marriage is an invention of the Victorian Age as a form of ritual or ceremony, not only defining the duration of love but also creating an institution, which protects its territories and de facto rights to reproduce and to share private property. We are not shocked that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan thanked Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni for her stance of supporting the notion of family and upholding family values in the face of LGBTQ+ advocates. This news is highlighted in the PR marketing and communication of the state; it appears as if the only public enemy left in Europe are faggots!
The trolley problem: Is it still possible to love today?
One notion clearly formulated by Hardt in his discourse on love is based on the notions of ritual, ceremony, and institution: “Institutionalize love, you might object, and that will be the death of it! No, love can only live as an institution, a sequence of ceremonial returns.”5 .
It has taken me a long time to bring the diverse approaches of Sufism and queer culture together to melt in one pot. As westernized forms of identity, we mostly perceive the body as a property, as something we own, as a sort of space that belongs to us. In the western-centric reading of feminism and queerness, the position, ‘my body, my space, my politics’6 , has been around for a long time, since the 1960s and peaking in the 1990s with rising gender studies and new wave feminism. Nevertheless, we are part of a chain running between those before us and those after us, between our ancestors and the generations following us. My body does not only belong to me. Of course, I can tattoo it, place piercings on it, and take a more nihilist and more punk position. But at the same time, I am part of this metaphysical, spiritual, and also developmental chain. To protect love, I started to believe more and more in the living forms of wildness. The trolley problem is typically understood as posing the more general philosophical question of whether it is ethical to perform an action that harms someone to prevent a greater number of people from being harmed. This is why to ask whether love is possible or not—by definition—has no merit in my view. That is not the point. Perhaps we can move to a better space with this question: In a world full of isolation, disruption, and destruction, how do we protect love, and develop care and compassion?
We are becoming more and more isolated every day. The pandemic has affected us deeply. Through the strategic tools organizing everyday reality, we were thoroughly taught about isolation and control mechanisms; and we have not yet been able to get rid of their emotional burden. Re-reading Hardt's essay now, almost twelve years later, rekindled my perception that in this situation a crucial segment of time, possibilities of intimacy, and especially ‘closeness’ were stolen from us. Due to a political strategy, we were isolated, and in this sense, we are now living in a world that is not only held captive by artificial intelligence but also by horizontal intelligence. Recent discussions about self-love, altruistic love, and romantic love in the age of digitalization and AI reflect a complex interplay between technology, human emotions, and relationships. With platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and others, self-love has gained visibility. Many influencers and mental health advocates promote self-care and self-acceptance, contributing to a broader cultural acceptance of mental health discussions. However, the curated nature of social media can also lead to comparisons and feelings of inadequacy, challenging true self-love. AI-driven applications focused on mental health are on the rise, offering resources for self-care and mindfulness.
“[...] as much as [Wild Things] is a genealogy for wildness, it also offers an alternative history of sexuality within which the so-called natural world is neither the backdrop for human romance nor the guarantor of normativity. Wildness indeed seeks the unmaking of that world and represents its undoing” as it passes within and beyond “the canon of modernist thought.”7
The rise of online dating applications has transformed how romantic relationships are formed. Algorithms and AI play a significant role in matching individuals based on preferences, behaviors, and even predictive models of compatibility. While this can enhance connectivity, it also raises concerns about the reduction of romantic love to data points and algorithms. While technology can enhance connections and facilitate compassion, it can also complicate traditional notions of love and relationships. The discourse around these themes continues to evolve as society navigates the impacts of technology on the deep human experiences of love and connection. The emphasis on mindfulness, authenticity, and genuine interaction remains crucial for nurturing all forms of love in this digital landscape.
Almost at the end of the process of writing this text, I arrived at a train station in a German city and saw the main hall covered by many advertising posters from a new brand of dating app. Most of the faces used for this campaign represent a certain idea of diversity through their skin color, look, styling, aging, and class, among other things. I looked around me and searched for the same happy, healthy, diverse faces.
I could not find them.
All the promises we give to young people about love are a big lie because there is no other space left for them anymore to experience intimacy, care, and passion than the screens: They will look for something they have never experienced, and of which they not know whether it is possible or not.
Peace is also hidden in there. Your relationship with your body is the same as your relationship with the planet. It is a mental place; it is a shared land.
If you have peace there, you can find peace everywhere.
Misal Adnan Yıldız is a curator, writer, and researcher inspired by his Mediterranean heritage, the sun, water, and poetry. He was director of the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden from 2020 to 2024, a position he shared with Çağla İlk. Yıldız served as the director of Artspace Aotearoa in Auckland, New Zealand, between 2014 and 2017, and prior to that was the artistic director of Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany, from 2011 to 2014. He was also the co-curator of the main exhibition of the 6th Ural Industrial Biennial in Yekaterinburg, Russia, in 2021. In 2025, Yıldız will be the international curator of MEDITERRANEA 20 (European Young Artists Biennial, BJCEM) as part of the European Capital of Culture program, GO! 2025.
- 1 Grace Martin Smith (ed.): The Poetry of Yunus Emre, A Turkish Sufi Poet, transl. by Talat Sait Halman, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993, p. 124
- 2 William Shakespeare, Sonnet 147, first published in: Shakespeare’s Sonnets: London: Thomas Thorpe, 1609: shakespeare.mit.edu/Poetry/sonnet.CXLVII.html
- 3 Cf. Michael Hardt: The Procedures of Love / Die Verfahren der Liebe. 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken, No. 068, Engl./Germ. ed. by dOCUMENTA (13) / documenta and Museum Fridericianum Veranstaltungs-GmbH, Kassel, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2012, pp. 4-5: bettinafuncke.com/100Notes/068_Hardt.pdf
- 4 Tiqqun #2, Sonogram of a Potential, Brooklyn: Pétroleuse Press, 2011, p. 22; first published in French as Echographie d’une puissance in 2001: azinelibrary.org/approved/sonogram-potential-1.pdf
- 5 Michael Hardt: The Procedures of Love / Die Verfahren der Liebe. 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken, No. 068, Engl./Germ. ed. by dOCUMENTA (13) / documenta and Museum Fridericianum Veranstaltungs-GmbH, Kassel, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2012, p. 11: bettinafuncke.com/100Notes/068_Hardt.pdf
- 6 Cf. among others: Wendy Harcourt: Body Politics in Development: Critical Debates in Gender and Development, London: Zed Books, 2009: pure.eur.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/122258460/10.4324_9781003036432-11_chapter.pdf
- 7 Jack Halberstam, Wild Things. The Disorder of Desire, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2020, p. 22: dukeupress.edu/wild-things