What is the meaning of Hüzün? Orhan Pamuk answers this question in his book Istanbul: Memories and the City. According to Pamuk, it was Hüzün that kept the people of the city rooted in what it was, but at the same time, inspired them to go forth and discover what could be. It is the collective emotion of Istanbul. But, what is it, really?
The Arabic origins of Hüzün
Hüzün, the Turkish word for melancholy, has an arabic root; when it appears in the Quran (as huzn and hazen) it means much the same thing as the contemporary Turkish word. Prophet Muhammad referred to the year in which he lost both his wife Hatice and his uncle, Ebu Talip, as ‘Senettul huzn’, or the year of melancholy; this confirms that the word is meant to convey a feeling of deep spiritual loss.
But if hüzün begins its life as a word for loss and the spiritual agony and grief attending it, a small faultline developed over the next few centuries of Islamic history. With time we see the emergence if two very different hüzüns, each evoking a distinct philosophical tradition.
The two meanings
According to the first tradition, we experience the thing called hüzün when we have invested too much in worldly pleasures and material gain: the implication is that ‘if you hadn’t involved yourself so deeply in this transitory world, if you were a good and true Muslim, you wouldn’t care so much about your worldly losses.’
The second tradition, which rises out of Sufi mysticism, offers a more positive and compassionate understanding of the word and of the place of loss and grief in life. To the Sufis, hüzün is the spiritual anguish we feel because we cannot be close enough to Allah, because we cannot do enough for Allah in this world. A true Sufi follower would pay no attention to worldly concerns like death, let alone goods and possessions: he suffers from grief, emptiness and inadequacy because he can never be close enough to Allah, because his apprehension of Allah is not deep enough.
Moreover, for a Sufi, it is the absence, not the presence, of hüzün that causes him distress. It is the failure to experience hüzün that leads him to feel it; he suffers because he has not suffered enough; and it is by following this logic to its conclusion that Islamic culture has come to hold the true meaning of hüzün in high esteem.
Reference books:
Kalampedia 