The incorporation of Turkish makams into polyphonic forms through the equal-tempered approximation of microtonal inflections remains among the most fraught issues in Turkish music discourse: to what extent can modal affect and identity survive into the structures and conventions of Eurocentric polyphonic art music; what is lost in the process of abstraction and resignification? This article addresses these questions through the history and afterlife of the ilâhi (Sufi hymn) “Şol Cennetin Irmakları,” which Ahmed Adnan Saygun adapted as “Aşkın Aldı Benden Beni” in his oratorio, Yunus Emre (1942). Building on Turkish makam theory, recent musicology, and post-colonial theory, the article argues that Saygun’s makam-inspired style in Yunus Emre must not be reductively framed as a “confluence of East and West,” but rather as a political and aesthetic negotiation in which makam is isolated from its Ottoman-Islamic associations and rearticulated as a disciplined, modern, and internationally legible sign of Turkishness. The author seeks not only to elucidate a specific historical and analytical case, but also to contribute to ongoing debates about the politics of musical translation, the invention of tradition, and the paradoxes of cultural modernisms in the post-Ottoman world. In tracing the ironic trajectory of “Şol Cenettin Irmakları," the article aims to demonstrate that musical authenticity in modern Türkiye is neither stable nor singular.