Religious and Moral Education God. When God creates humans, he gives them His own light. Bektaşi
see God in inanimate objects and in people, and say ‘To look at an object
is to look at God.’ In fact, both Bektaşi and we Mevlevi say ‘In order to
reach God it is necessary to love Him.’ This love of God unites a human
with God. Study Sufism well, understand it well.”^82 This was also a period
when some Dönme became leading Mevlevis. Mehmet Esad Dede, for
example, who was born into a Kapancı family in 1843 , had a dream that
caused him to become a proper Muslim, referred to in his biography as
a conversion, and eventually, he became one of the leading turn-of-the-
twentieth-century Mevlevi sheikhs in Istanbul.^83
Sufi pieces such as “Vahdaniyet” (The Unity of God), by the gendarme
commander Osman Agha, are prominent in Gonca-i Edeb, reflecting the
Dönme-Sufi connection.^84 The article provides an ingenious numerologi-
cal explanation of a couplet written by the author, which he uses to prove
the singleness of God: “There is one God, yet His 1 , 001 names imply
duality; / But remove the superfluous two [letters] from ‘others’ [i.e., than
God] and what remains manifests the Beloved [God].”^85 The unity of
God is a core principle of Judaism, Islam, and Dönme religion, as mani-
fested in the first commandment of Shabbatai Tzevi.^86 The unity of God
is also a common Sufi theme, according to which everything other than
God is a manifestation of God’s qualities, evident in God’s names. “Being”
is one, but “duality” arises, since God wishes to be known and therefore
shows forth names in the manifold things of the world. In the Sufi inter-
pretation, “others” refers to all things other than God, “beloved” to God.
Remove the first two letters from the Ottoman word used in the couplet
for “others” (agˇ yar) and “beloved” (yâr) remains. Hence, one should not
focus on the manifestations of God, but on the Beloved (God) Himself.
The head secretary of the Ministry of Tithes of Salonika wrote an essay
in which he explains how he discovered that the numerical significance
of the phrase Gonca-i Edeb, “rosebud of literature,” is 1299 ( 1883 ), the
year the journal first appeared.^87 For military officers and civil servants,
religion was an integral component of being. Thus, the articles in Gonca-
i Edeb display the writers’ and readers’ purposeful mixing of morality,
spirituality, science, and technology in their lives. Being Muslim, Sufi, or
Dönme, and having an ethical and moral core was not incompatible with
being in tune with the latest western European trends.
Dönme literary journals not only had a religious side, but were also
revolutionary. Ahmet Emin Yalman explains the founding of Gonca-