Hüzün

Hüzün, the Turkish word for melancholy, has an Arabic root; when it appears in the Koran, it means much the same thing as the contemporary Turkish word. The Prophet Mohammed referred to the year in which he lost both his wife Hatice and his uncle, Ebu Talib, as ‘Senettul Huzn’, or the year of melancholy; this confirms that the word is meant to convey a feeling of deep spiritual loss.

…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 or 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, 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 hüzün in high esteem.

Orhan Pamuk (2005) Istanbul: Memories of a City. London: Faber and Faber Limited, pg. 81.