Fable as a didactic literary genre in tanzimat literature

A fable is based on the didactic story with its purpose, character selection, and fantasy setting. The didactic story, which aims to teach the reader moral lessons with minimal effort, indicates moralism rather than morality by clearly communicating the message at the end of the story. Fable, on the other hand, does not limit its audience to children with its fairy-tale storytelling. As a result, the message is sometimes left to the reader's interpretation. As a result, fables are not a simple genre that can be easily read like didactic stories and whose message can be easily perceived; rather, they are structures with profound content suitable for multiple readings. Fable, as one of the oldest narrative genres, evolved from the tradition of raising statesmen in Eastern and Western literatures and has become one of the references in the field of education. Beydeba's Calila e Dimna is the oldest and most interesting example of the genre, the first examples of which can be found in the East in the Panchatantra Tales in ancient Indian literature. Epistle of the Birds by Al Ghazzali and Farid ud-Din Attar's The Conference of the Birds, which shows how fables are used for religious and moral education in the East, is a work written for sufistic purposes in which the philosophy of unity of existence is explained in an allegorical manner. Rumi's Masnavi should also be evaluated within this group. Gulsenî's Gulsenname, Ali Shir Nava'i's Lisanu't-Tayr, Mehmed Arif's Ravzatu'tevhid, Gulsen-i Simurg of Zaifi, Fedaî Dede's Mantıku'l-Esrar, Şemseddin Sivasî's Deh-Murg are works that depict the tough ways of Sufism by symbolizing them with birds and have the same subject as Mantku't-Tayr but are regarded a translation of this work with various stories. Guvahi's Pendname is full of stories that can be examples of fables. (The scorpion and the Frog, Fox and Lion, Cicada and Ant, Two Geese and a Frog, Goat and Sheep, Lion and Woodcutter). Another important work in this field is Seyhî's Harname, written in the 15th century. Hésiode's story "The Hawk and the Nightingale" was the first known example of fables associated with the names Aisopos and La Fontaine in Western literature. According to Quintilien, Hésiode invented the didactic story, and his poem Des Travaux et Des Jours (Works and Days) is the Western world's oldest fable. While Sinasi published the only semi-political, semi-philosophical fable in Tercüme-i Manzume in 1859, as in French literature, La Fontaine is the only name associated with fable translations; the proximity of one of the three fables he published in Müntahabat-i Eş'âr to Fénelon's fables prevents La Fontaine from being the only source for fable translations. The other two fables in question appear to be fables written by Sinasi in imitation of La Fontaine, implying that other national/copyright fables were given during the Tanzimat period. As a matter of fact, Ahmet Mithat Efendi's translations from Aisopos under the title "Kıssadan Hisse, Kıssadan Hisse Alır Akiller" include fables from Fénelon and Voltaire, and in addition to that, publishing the fables he rewrote in Kıssadan Hisse necessitated the discovery and examination of other works written in the genre of fables during the Tanzimat period. Based on the idea that societies seeking to innovate can only be spiritually and mentally open to innovations after undergoing modern education, innovations in the field of education accelerated during the Tanzimat period with independent works and periodicals. In the works of educators such as Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem, Muallim Naci, Manastırlı Mehmet Rifat, and Hac Zahid, fables take their place as copyright and translation. The genre grew in popularity with the prominent figures such as Nabizade Nazım, Osman Rasih, Halil Edip, and Ebuzziya Tevfik, and it remained popular until the Second Constitutional Era (1908).