Trépanier|25when I would see him. With the light of his sainthood, our master knew that,
that was the pit of the fig. At that moment I went straight to the orchard of that
friend and I bought those nice figs, gave him the price, and made them legal
by him. In the end, [Rumi] of course accepted and ate them and bestowed his
favor.”It is clear that, in such cases, the reciprocity implicit in the act of giving was to be
found either in the shape of blessings received from the religious master or, for
those who prefer a cynical interpretation, in the image of piety that would come
with ostentatiously serving the spiritual leader. Either way, these examples make
it clear that receiving food was not in itself the mark of an inferior social status.
However, depictions of members of the elite receiving food were limited to the
religious masters and did not extend to the political elite.
Looking at the lowest-ranking individuals in the religious hierarchy, often
designated as fuqarâɆ, the modalities of gift giving shed further light on the social
identity of religious professionals. FuqarâɆ is a plural Arabic term literally mean-
ing “the poor,” designating recipients of food in Arabic-, Persian-, and Turkish-
language sources (both the Turkish and Persian languages, while grammatically
very different from Arabic, borrowed a large proportion of their vocabulary
from the latter). In some cases, the context leaves no doubt that the term fuqarâɆ
actually means dervishes, the ascetic, monk-like followers of Sufism (Muslim
mysticism). For example, in this passage from the hagiography titled Vilâyet-
nâme, a money changer gives a dervish a donation for the religious master Hacı
Betkaş Veli:
And he added a thousand more gold coins and said: “Dervish, no matter how
many religious masters you see, give this thousand gold coins to the fuqarâɆ
who are in their service so that they can eat.”Another passage from the same source further points out that the religious
fame of Hacı Betkaş brought to him a community of people that it designates,
in successive sentences, as fuqarâɆ and then “dervishes” and “abdals.” An even
clearer example of such religious use of the term appears in a vakfiye, or endow-
ment deed, that specifies that the revenues of the endowed property should be
given to the
Mawlawî [followers of Rumi] fuqarâɆ who are engaged in the zâwiyah that
follows the master Jalâl al-Musallah wa al-Dîn, the Rumi by burial and the
Balkhî by origin, being located in [the city of] Qara ণiৢâr al-Dawlâh itself.In other cases, the term is more ambiguous. In the three or four dozen vak-
fiyes that remain from that period, the word most often (though not always) ap-
pears as part of the set expression “fuqarâɆ wa masâkîn” (the poor and destitute),