The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures: The Culture of Love and Languishing 9781350988484, 9781786732262

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Alireza Korangy has been Assistant Professor of Classical Persian and Contemporary Iranian Linguistics at the University of Virginia and has taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 2007 and is currently the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Persian Literature and acting president of Societas Philologica Persica. His recent books include Development of the Ghazal and Khaqani’s Contribution: A Study of the Development of Ghazal and a Literary Exegesis of a 12th c. Poetic Harbinger (2013) and an edited volume, Essays in Islamic Philology, History, and Philosophy (2016). Hanadi Al-Samman is an associate professor of Arabic Language and Literature in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Anxiety of Erasure: Trauma, Authorship, and the Diaspora in Arab Women’s Writings (2015) and has published in the Journal of Arabic Literature; Women’s Studies International Forum; and Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics. She is co-editor of “Queer Affects” a special issue of the International Journal of Middle East Studies. Michael C. Beard is Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor of English and Adjunct Professor of Peace Studies at the University of North Dakota. He is co-editor of the journal Middle Eastern Literatures and is editor for the monograph series Middle East Literature in Translation. He publishes frequently on Arabic and Persian literatures, as well as translating works of literature. He has won the Lois Roth Award for a Translation of a Literary Work.

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“From its editors’ statement of its aim “to rekindle the lost harmonious ties among Middle Eastern peoples” to a concluding essay on meanings of Arabic words exhibiting an h-b-b root system and on hubb synonyms and antonyms, The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures is a rich, variegated, mustread study of its important subject. Through plot summaries and analyses of a handful of recent novels, analyses of Arabic love poems by Jamîl (early 7th century CE), Abu Nuwâs (d.c. 814 CE), and Ibn al-Rumi (d. 896 CE) and of Persian love poems by leading Persian woman poets Jahân Malek Khâtun (14th century) and Forugh Farrokhzâd (1934–67), along with treatments of several treatises and anthologies, The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures delivers on its promise ‘to offer an alternative intervention – one that affirms subjectivity and the universality of love affects across time and geography.’ For students of Persian love poetry, such as this blurb writer, the book sheds needed light on ‘the unresolved nature of the beloved in Persian love poetry’ (which, after all, traces its origins to Arabic poetry).’’ Michael Craig Hillmann, Professor of Persian, The University of Texas at Austin “This magnificent collection on love and the beloved in Middle Eastern literatures is groundbreaking for its comparative, interdisciplinary, and transregional approach. It is sure to become the standard work on the subject.’’ Jonathan Smolin, Chair and Associate Professor, Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Languages and Literatures, Dartmouth College “The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures is a welcome contribution to gender, love and sexuality studies on the Middle East. The essays provide cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspectives to the concept of the beloved as it appears in distinct yet connected literary cultures of the premodern and modern Middle East. Through an innovative organization of essays that focus on thematic and linguistic nuances and unifying affects rather than a chronological approach, editors achieve to weave a story about the revolutions of the concept of beloved in Middle Eastern literary traditions. Love is analyzed in chapters organized after dangerous, divine, erotic, and dialectical forms of it as well as its relation to gender.’’ Selim S. Kuru, Associate Professor and Department Chair, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, University of Washington

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THE BELOVED   IN MIDDLE   EASTERN    LITERATURES THE CULTURE OF LOVE AND LANGUISHING

EDITED BY

ALIREZA KORANGY, HANADI AL-SAMMAN AND MICHAEL BEARD

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Published in 2018 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd London • New York www.ibtauris.com Copyright Editorial Selection and Introduction © Alireza Korangy, Hanadi Al-Samman and Michael Beard Copyright Individual Chapters © Asaad Alsaleh, Domenico Ingenito, Christine N. Kalleeny, Mehmet Karabela, Benjamin Koerber, Miral Mahgoub al-Tahawy, Pernilla Myrne, A.Z. Obiedat, Dylan Oehler-Stricklin, Richard Serrano, Ali-Asghar Seyed-Gohrab, Paul Sprachman, Sarah R. bin Tyeer The right of Alireza Korangy, Hanadi Al-Samman and Michael Beard to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted by the editors in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. References to websites were correct at the time of writing. Library of Middle East History 71 ISBN: 978 1 78453 291 8 eISBN: 978 1 78672 226 3 ePDF: 978 1 78673 226 2 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Typeset by Newgen

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Dedicated to the children of Syria. May love transform the violence and hate which enveloped their beloved homeland.

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Contents List of Contributors Acknowledgements I ntroduction: Beloved: Love and Languishing in Middle Eastern Writings

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DANGEROUS LOVE



1 Writing to the End of Love: Waḥīd and the Motif Extremes of Ibn al-Rūmī

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Sarah R. bin Tyeer

2 Sexual Displacement in Season of Migration to the North

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Asaad Alsaleh

3 The Seduction of Fayrūz Baḥrī: The Affective Dimensions of Cultural Politics in Gamāl al-Ghīṭānī’s Ḥikāyāt al-Khabī’a (2002)

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Benjamin Koerber DIVINE LOVE



4 Satan as the Lover of God in Islamic Mystical Writings

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Ali-Asghar Seyed-Gohrab

5 Reverence for the Beloved as a Religious Metaphor: A Study of Rajā’a ‘Ālim’s Ḥubbā (The Beloved)

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Miral Mahgoub al-Tahawy GENDER AND LOVE



6 Individualism and the Beloved in the Poetry of Furūgh Farrukhzād Dylan Oehler-Stricklin vii

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Contents 7 Making Love through Scholarship in Jamīl Buthayna 155



Richard Serrano 8 Jahān Malik Khātūn: Gender, Canon, and Persona in the Poems of a Premodern Persian Princess



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Domenico Ingenito EROTIC LOVE

9 Pleasing the Beloved: Sex and True Love in a Medieval Arabic Erotic Compendium



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Pernilla Myrne

10 Love and Lust in the Early Islamic Republic: Amir Hassan Cheheltan’s Revolution Street

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Paul Sprachman

11 Tempting the Theologian: The “Cure” of Wine’s Seduction

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Christine N. Kalleeny DIALECTICAL LOVE



12 Lovers in the Age of the Beloveds: Classical Ottoman Divan Literature and the Dialectical Tradition 285 Mehmet Karabela



13 The Semantic Field of Love in Classical Arabic: Understanding the Subconscious Meaning Preserved in the Ḥubb Synonyms and Antonyms through Their Etymologies

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A.Z. Obiedat

Appendix I

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Appendix II

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Appendix III

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Index

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Contributors Asaad Alsaleh is Assistant Professor of Arabic Literature in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Indiana University. Alsaleh is particularly interested in issues related to autobiography and displacement in Arabic literature. His recent book, Voices of the Arab Spring:  Personal Stories of the Arab Revolutions (2015), touches on this topic. Domenico Ingenito received his Ph.D.  from Università di Napoli L’Orientale. He is the director of the Program on Central Asia and Assistant Professor of Classical Persian at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His publications include: “Tabrizis in Shiraz Are Worth Less Than a Dog: Saʿdī and Humām, a Lyrical Encounter,” in Politics, Patronage and the Transmission of Knowledge in 13th–15th Century Tabriz, and Beholding Beauty: Saʿdi of Shiraz and the Persian Lyric Tradition, (forthcoming). Christine N. Kalleeny is an American-Egyptian of Coptic heritage. She is the Director of the Arabic Language Program at Franklin & Marshall College and has been since 2014. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Emory University in 2010 and her doctoral thesis was a comparative study that explored the vital relations among the experiences of erotic desire, intoxication and poetic language in the poetry of the ninth-century Arab poet Abu Nuwas and the Symposium of Plato. Her new research explores the ways in which olfactory experience, particularly as it relates to perfume and cosmetics, is shaped by the religious, aesthetic and cultural practices of the medieval Islamic world (particularly the Arabic-speaking world) and how these practices are both represented and interpreted in major literary and philosophical works of the period. Mehmet Karabela is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of History at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada and a senior research fellow at McGill University’s the Interuniversity Consortium for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies (ICAMES). His research and teaching broadly ix

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List of Contributors consider early modern Islamic intellectual history. His articles and reviews appear in a number of international journals such as Canadian Journal of History, The Journal of Turkish Literature, Canadian Journal of African Studies, Political Studies Review, Philosophy East & West, Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review and Journal of the History of Philosophy. Benjamin Koerber is an assistant professor in the Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures at Rutgers University. His research and writings are concerned with Arabic language, literature and culture from all periods, with a particular focus on new literary genres in Egypt and Tunisia. Miral Mahgoub al-Tahawy is an Egyptian novelist and short story writer, and an affiliated member of the Virginia G.  Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University (ASU), where she is an associate professor of Modern Arabic Literature, and Classics and Middle Eastern Studies at the School of International Letters and Cultures (SILC). Pernilla Myrne is an associate professor and researcher in classical Arabic literature and history at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research interests include representations of women in Abbasid literature, history of emotions and slavery, and premodern Arabic erotic literature. A.Z.   Obiedat received his Ph.D.  in Arab-Islamic Philosophy and Secularism from McGill University, where he also received his MA in Islamic Law. His other research focus is Arabic Semantics (‘ilm al-dilāla) as manifested in Arabic literature and classical Islamic scholasticism. He is a specialist in the thought of Mario Bunge and Taha ‘Abd al-Rahman. He is an assistant professor of Arabic at Wake Forest University; and formerly taught and coordinated the Arabic Program at the University of Virginia. Dylan Oehler-Stricklin holds a Ph.D.  in Persian Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. She taught English and World Literature at Webster University from 2002–11, Persian language and literature at Washington University, St Louis, from 2011–16, and as of January 2017 will be teaching Persian at the University of California, Davis. Her research x

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List of Contributors interests include the effect of patriarchy on the development and literary expression of individuality, especially in contemporary Iranian women. Richard Serrano is Professor of French and Comparative Literature and the founding chair of the Department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures at Rutgers University (New Brunswick). He is the author of Neither a Borrower: Forging Traditions in French, Chinese and Arabic Poetry (2002), Against the Postcolonial:  ‘Francophone’ Writers at the Ends of French Empire (2005), and Qur’ān and the Lyric Imperative (2016). His current book project is titled Missed Readings:  The Unseen Displaced Half-Lost Lyric. Ali-Asghar Seyed-Gohrab is an associate professor of Persian Studies at Leiden University. His publications include Soefism: Een levende traditie (2015); The True Dream: Indictment of the Shiite Clerics of Isfahan, (2017, together with S. McGlinn); Literature of the Early Twentieth Century: From the Constitutional Period to Reza Shah (ed., Volume XI of A History of Persian Literature, I.B.Tauris, 2015), Layli and Majnun:  Love, Madness and Mystic Longing in Nizami’s Epic Romance, (2003), Mirror of Dew: The Poetry of Ālam-Tāj Zhāle Qāʾem-Maqāmi, (2015), Metaphor and Imagery in Persian Poetry, (2012), The Great Omar Khayyam: A Global Reception, (ed., 2012), Courtly Riddles:  Enigmatic Embellishments in Early Persian Poetry, (2008, 2010); He is the founding general editor of the Iranian Studies Series at Leiden University Press, and the Modern Persian Poetry Series in Dutch. Paul Sprachman studied Persian at the University of Tehran and the University of Chicago and has taught in Afghanistan, Iran, and at Rutgers University. He is the translator of a number of works from Persian to English. Among them are Gharbzadegi (“Plagued by the West”) by Jalal Al-e Ahmad; Once Upon a Time by M.  A. Jamalzadeh; A Man of Many Worlds: the Memoirs of Dr. Ghasem Ghani; and Chess with the Doomsday Machine and A City under Siege:  Tales of the Iran–Iraq War by Habib Ahmadzadeh. Sprachman is also the author of two studies of censored Persian writing: Suppressed Persian: an Anthology of Forbidden Literature and Licensed Fool: the Damnable, Foul-mouthed Obeyd-e Zakani.

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List of Contributors Sarah R.  bin Tyeer is a research associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She is trained in English and Comparative Literature, Classical Arabic Literature (adab), and Qur’anic Studies. She has taught undergraduate and graduate courses on the Qur’an, Arabic Rhetoric, Arabic Literature and Comparative Literature at SOAS and at the American University of Beirut, where she was an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow. She is the author of the monograph The Qur’an and the Aesthetics of Premodern Arabic Prose (2016). Her recent publications appearing in forthcoming volumes are ‘The Literary Geography of Meaning in the Maqāmāt of al-Hamadhānī and al-Ḥarīrī,’ in The City in Premodern and Modern Arabic Literature: Classical and Modern Perspectives (forthcoming), ‘The Qur’an and the Aesthetics of Adab: Ḥikāyat Abī’l-Qāsim al-Baghdādī, by Abu’l-Mutahhar al-Azdi (fl. Fifth/Eleventh Century)’ in Qur’an and Adab: The Shaping of Literary Traditions in Classical Islam (2017).

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Acknowledgements We would like to thank all the contributors who so diligently and patiently worked with us to make this project a reality. Also, this project would not have been possible without the professional and congenial attention of Maria Marsh, who saw the project through to its mid-point. Her passion for the subject of the beloved – and the field in general – was the cornerstone of this project’s success, and the light that guided its path from the initial to middle stages. Although no longer at I.B.Tauris, this project owes its inception, its contract, and its creative focus to Maria: truly every editor and or author’s most ideal correspondent. Sophie Rudland continued the journey with us after Maria’s departure, guiding the project with immense interest and unparalleled attention to detail. Kudos to her for taking this project on midway and seeing it through to the end with earnest passion and patience. Many thanks go to Lisa Goodrum for her patience in the editorial process; and Tia Ali in the marketing department at I.B.Tauris. We would like to thank our internal and external peer-reviewers for their invaluable comments and surgical attention to detail. We, the editors, are forever indebted. Alireza Korangy Hanadi Al-Samman Michael Beard

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Introduction: Beloved: Love and Languishing in Middle Eastern Writings

We live in a historical moment when the Middle East is defined by its nation states. If the casual observer sees a shared culture at all it is likely to be a negative, threatening one. In pre-modern times, however, stretching from the seventh century to early nineteenth century, the literary world of the Middle East displayed porous borders and fluid intercultural interactions. One shared concept from early on was the idea of the beloved in all of its personal, divine, and erotic manifestations. There is a vast literary corpus in Arabic, Ottoman, Persian, and other literatures in the Middle East celebrating the beloved trope and glorifying love and languishing for the sake of the beloved. The project of exploring the concept of the beloved in these literatures sets out to rekindle the lost harmonious ties amongst Middle Eastern peoples, and will focus on the crucial issues of affiliations, affection, and acculturation, rather than acrimony. This collection covers the topic in a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary manner, which brings together essays that approach the concept of the beloved from different directions:  philological, philosophical, affective, prosaic, and poetic. The contributions highlight a multitude of roles and treatments of the beloved under the rubric of the literary and the cultural in the Middle East. In the long literary history of the region, the

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures notion of the beloved has been central to both poetry and prose of the Middle East. To truly convey the inter-religious and cross-cultural resonance of the beloved’s trope, we opted to showcase its affective trajectory highlighting thematic, linguistic nuances, and unifying affects, rather than geographic-political divisive delineation. The essays underscore prevalent intercultural conversations, which supersede geographical and temporal barriers, and contested concepts of nationhood. Additionally, they reflect on the value of cross-cultural exchange and the nuances of the beloved’s concept amongst the examined languages and cultures of the Middle East. Rather than using the traditional national or religious variants to organize the essays in question, we opted to group them along lovers’ roles and love’s respective affects. We view affects of love, hate, ecstasy, jealousy, disgust, pity, shame, and lust as universal emotions that cut across various past and present players. This organizational decision will allow readers to reflect on the lived experiences of our lovers, on their respective roles in the lover/ beloved binary in a manner, which highlights their subjectivity and agency. We thought it fitting to start our discussion of love with the work of Ibn Ḥazm al-Andalusī (994–1064 CE) of Córdoba, one of the leading Muslim thinkers of al-Andalus who was the pioneer in classifying love according to the various emotions (affinity, attraction, repulsion) and ailments that it engenders in its affected subjects long before affect theory was in vogue. He wrote extensively on a variety of topics ranging from jurisprudence, ethics, comparative religion, and love in his canonical treatise The Ring of the Dove (1022).1 Ibn Ḥazm’s positioning in Muslim Spain at the crossroads of cultural exchange between East/West, North/South, past/present is crucial to his oeuvre of comparative studies on the poetics of love. His view of love incorporates certain Platonic notions of soul’s division prevalent in his time, and augments it with the Islamic notion of the souls’ complementarity: affects experienced by lovers young and old, past and present. For my part I  consider Love as a conjunction between scattered parts of souls that have become divided in this physical universe, a union effected within the substance of their original sublime element. I do not share the view advanced by Muhammad Ibn Dawud – God have mercy on his soul – who followed certain philosophers in declaring that spirits are segmented spheres; rather do I  suppose an affinity of their vital

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Introduction forces in the supernal world, which is their everlasting home, and a close approximation in the manner of their constitution. We know the secret of commingling and separation in created things to be simply a process of union and disassociation; every form always cries out for its corresponding form; like is ever at rest with like. Congeneity has a perceptible effect and a visible influence; repulsion of opposites, accord between similar, attractions of like for like these are facts taking place all round us. How much more then should the same factors operate within the soul, whose world is pure and ethereal, whose substance is volatile and perfectly poised, whose constituent principle is so disposed as to be intensely sensitive to harmony, inclination, yearning, aversion, passionate desire and antipathy. All this is common knowledge it is immediately observable in the moods which successively control every man, and to which we all accommodate ourselves successfully. Allah Himself says, It is He that created you of one soul, and fashioned thereof its spouse, that he might find repose in her. (Koran VII I8g) (21).

Ibn Ḥazm’s insistence that love “can only be apprehended by personal experience,” by examination of the lovers’ moods, and is felt innately as “a baffling ailment” expressed in “yearning, aversion, and passionate desire” – a “delightful malady” that carries its remedy within is in congruence with contemporary affect theory’s focus on emotions to assert subjectivity, and on the primacy of affective resonance as a source of human communication. Furthermore, Ibn Ḥazm identifies several kinds of love ranging from the spiritual, familial, fraternal, carnal, and eternal. In his repertoire, “love is neither disapproved by Religion, nor prohibited by the Law; for every heart is in God’s hands.” (19). Ibn Ḥazm wrote at a historical moment when the component parts of a burgeoning love tradition were beginning to coalesce. Further to the East of Al-Andalus, in Baghdad, there was already a well-established tradition of love poetry. Still further to the east, in the Persian-speaking world, Ibn Ḥazm’s contemporaries there were great Persian poets, at the court of Maḥmūd of Ghazna (Rūdakī, Farrukhī, ‘Unṣurī) developing a lyric tradition, which would evolve into the tradition of the unsurpassable Ḥāfiẓ. Firdausī, the first prominent example of narrative poetry in Persian, wove into his epic Shāhnāma love stories from pre-Islamic history. Moreover, Gurgānī’s adaptation of an ancient 3

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures Iranian story about the lovers Vīs va Rāmīn comes from the same period. Generations after Ibn Ḥazm, to his north in Europe, are the first recorded versions of the great love poetry tradition of the troubadours. There is, in The Ring of the Dove, a compendium of little narratives used to illustrate the delightful malady in all its varieties. They are stories of aristocrats, but they are recognizable to us as well: the frustrations which follow a man who falls in love with a woman in a dream, the complications which result from sending an intermediary to the loved one, love at first sight, the devastation which accompanies the death of a loved one, the ecstasy of union; there are examples of searches, stratagems, jealousy, rejection, and of languishing. In other words, affects that continue to be relevant in contemporary times, and to reflect the universal lived experiences of lovers and beloved’s various roles worldwide. Not unlike Ibn Ḥazm, the authors of this collection explore various manifestations of love and tropes of the lover/beloved binary. Their interventions range from focusing on the traditional unrequited, to the Sufi, and homoerotic love. Along the way, they detour into modern and postmodern manifestations of the beloved’s concept, especially as it intersects with divinity, politics, and nationalism. Beloved addresses its topic as widely as it is applicable to classical, modern, postmodern manifestations, and sexual orientations. From the pre-modern ‘Udhrī (romantic unrequited love), to the erotic same-sex thirteenth-century poetry and prose, to the divine Sufi reflections on the topic, and post-revolutionary love encounters in Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, Beloved connects the affective and the cultural, with the political and the obscene. Our collection echoes Ibn Ḥazm’s multi-faceted outlook on love, and charts contested, dangerous, divine, gendered, erotic, and dialectical terrains. It explores nuanced framing for the topics addressed that transcends temporal, linguistic, and geographic categorization. It further highlights the liminal and transgressive roles for the lovers in question. We have a wider range of works to account for, and more conceptual tools to put into play as already mentioned, however these essays sketch possible overviews. The first set of essays underscore love’s dangerous affects in engendering languishing, possessive jealousy, and anxiety of sexual transgression. In “Writing to the End of Love,” Sarah bin Tyeer offers an interesting 4

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Introduction intervention to the concept of unrequited love in Ibn al-Rūmī’s poetics. The focus on love’s philological association with malady in Arabic offers an affective and somatic variation of that widely spread trope outlined in Ibn Ḥazm’s characterization of love as a malady. The rhyming of the poem with the beloved’s name adds to the confluence of vocabulary, poetic meter, grammar, and phonetics. Form and content harmoniously contextualize al-Rūmī’s articulation of unrequited love in the sphere of his contemporaries. The modern world develops additional complex variations on the traditional relations of lovers and their beloveds. A  poignant example is “Sexual Displacement and Season of Migration to the North,” where Asaad Alsaleh explores the morphing of sexual desire in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1966). Alsaleh delineates the hefty price paid by the Western lover/Eastern beloved for possessive distortions of the concept of love. Additionally, he poses the question of how can we fashion the body of the beloved in light of colonial displacements? The colonial situation comes into focus through relations between individuals shaped by the anxieties of their discordant cultures. The affect of anxiety dominates the stage in Benjamin Koerber’s “The Seduction of Fayrūz Baḥrī,” a study of Ḥikāyāt al-Khabī’a (2002) by the late Egyptian author Gamāl al-Ghīṭānī. The anxiety under scrutiny, both in the novel and in parallel phenomena in the cultural life of Cairo, is “homosexual panic,” a condition peculiar to modern sensibilities related to colonial conquest. Koerber offers a nuanced reading of the concept of homoerotic love, particularly as it intersects with the public’s fear of queer affects. The anxiety created in al-Ghiṭānī’s subtext, as well as in the public arena, articulates the tensions experienced when the political and the homoerotic beloved converge in contemporary times. This anxiety reaches a critical mass when the next two chapters define divine love in a nuanced, dare we say antinomian, framing. Specifically, Ali-Asghar Seyed-Gohrab’s “Satan as the Lover of God in Islamic Mystical Writings” is a fascinating journey in the Sufi and Eastern philosophical variants, notions of Satan, and the anxieties one must certainly face in lieu of a religious dogma that pre-dates Islam. Satan as God’s lover par excellence is a concept well documented by Seyed-Gohrab’s chapter and his detailed look into classical texts. Seyed-Gohrab brings to purview a Miltonian concept 5

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures in the Islamic world and more specifically in the Sufi tradition of Islam, and as such highlights a dogmatic notion by the token of a hyper-emotive Kriekegaardian anxiety that envelops it: Satan as the ultimate example of a lover. Another form of transgressive divine love is casting Islam’s holy shrine of al-Ka‘ba as a feminine beloved. In “Reverence of the Beloved as a Religious Metaphor,” Miral Mahgoub examines Rajā’ al-‘Ālim’s novel Ḥubbā (2000), where the female beloved merges with the divine, with the Ka‘ba itself. The mythological unites with the pre-Islamic female deities to create a feminine narrative intent on rewriting the beloved’s image in that of the feminine divine. The contradictory and complimentary texts (margin/central text) in al-ʿĀlim’s narrative articulate the usurpation of feminine divinity and power by a dominant, patriarchal culture. She alludes to the importance of this feminist reframing of the story, despite the dominant Wahhabi theology in Saudi Arabia, which takes issue with the Ka‘ba’s characterization as a historically feminine shrine. Just as the feminine voice is resurrected in the lost image of the feminine divine in Mahgoub’s chapter, the next section examines the articulation of gender and love as represented by multi-faceted, feminine, masculine, and androgynous voices. Dylan Oehler-Stricklin’s “Individualism and the Beloved in the Poetry of Furūgh Farrukhzād” takes on one of the most contested contemporary literary debates in Persian Studies: Furūgh’s panache for unapologetic individualism. The chapter examines the ways in which her poetics can at times universalize individuality, and organically undo the limitations of gender. The author engages with pivotal questions such as: What was Furūgh saying? Who was her audience? And where is the individual in her voluminous work, particularly Asīr? In this study, Oehler-Stricklin reveals Furūgh to be “a feminine, autobiographical voice, unique in over a thousand years of Iranian literary tradition.” Consequently, the beloved as an individual in the literary and philosophical sense is restructured within the lines of her poetry, and biographically traced in a transgressive fashion. Imagining the voice of the beloved, traditionally silent, can produce a deepening of the genre. In “Making Love through Scholarship in Jamīl Buthayna,” Richard Serrano sheds light on the lost voice of Buthayna in the renowned Jamīl/Buthayna love duo. The emphasis is on the process 6

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Introduction whereby the beloved/lover, prose/poetry in relation to women’s/men’s voices uncovers the historical lacuna that muffled the beloved’s voice. Gender bending and the interplay of the beloved’s feminine/masculine voices characterize the next contribution. Domenico Ingenito’s “Jahān Malik Khātūn: Gender, Canon and Persona in the Poems of a Premodern Persian Princess,” is a multi-layered study of gender biases and historical realities faced by a woman poet in the fourteenth-century Persian-speaking world. Ingenito’s focus on the unresolved nature of the beloved in Persian love poetry as a means to explore Jahān’s creation of a fluid literary persona interacting at multiple levels with the classical poetic canon, gender, and historical reality is an exploration in liminal gender identity. Ingenito observes that “the nature of the beloved in this tradition is often abstract,” suspended as it is between the political, the erotic, and the metaphysical. The beloved’s gender ambiguity generates certain ambivalences, affects that are often the telltale sign of contested, fluid sexual identities. The primacy of erotic love, its entanglement with violence, hypocrisy, and power, as well as women’s rights to sexual pleasure, are defining issues for the next set of chapters. The persistence of the woman’s voice occupies the foreground in Pernilla Myrne’s “Pleasing the Beloved” where the subject of erotic love, the distinction between active/passive women lovers, and men’s duty of satisfying their wives take central stage in Islamic jurisprudence as seen by jurists and writers of medieval Arabic. Here the reader is introduced to early Muslims’ progressive approach to women’s agency, and to the view of their entitlement to sexual pleasure. Paul Sprachman’s “Love and Lust in the Early Islamic Republic: Amir Hassan Cheheltan’s Revolution Street,” gives much-deserved attention to the study of lust and sex in the Iran of post-revolution and how these taboo topics are addressed within a contemporary, prosaic paradigm. In Sprachman’s analysis the beloved becomes a social commentary on hypocrisy, and amorous exchanges a mere hedonistic celebration of lust and deceit in the guise of piety and truth. The interplay between spiritual and erotic love highlight the hypocrisy, the impossibility of foregrounding love in the context of the Iranian state where lust for power and violence reign supreme. In “Tempting the Theologian,” Christine Kalleeny offers a new reading of Abū Nuwās’s (d. 813) most famous poems from a new angle situated in the concept of the fluidity of desire, and the erotica of violence. 7

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures The example of Abū Nuwās shows a development of poetry in which love extends beyond the predictable erotic search. The conventional, detailed verse analysis is paired with contemporary theory to create a nuanced understanding of his verse informed by Bataille’s take on desire as violence and transvestitism. The shifting of the concept of the beloved from humans to wine, the presence of a judging observer, and the exploration of the sado/masochist relationship of the lover and the beloved give us a new set of nuanced love registers. From examples of dangerous, divine, androgenous, and erotic love in the Arabic and Persian canon, we move to the concept of dialectical love in Ottoman courts and in Arabic semantics. Ottoman literature has benefited from its intermeidary positioning amidst classical Arabic and Persian literature. Being a vital interlocutor in this tripartite love conversation, Ottoman court poetry introduced a third figure to the lover/beloved dyad  – that of the contested rakîb (the judging observer) who acts as a voyeur, at times facilitiaing, at times hindering the lovers’ union. “Lovers in the Age of the Beloveds,” a comparative approach to the concept of the beloved, applies contemporary philosophy to Ottoman Divan literature. In it, Mehmet Karabela navigates the dialectical discourse amongst the three players – in Turkish aşık (lover), maşuk (beloved) and rakîb (voyeur) – of the texts in question, thereby delineating the linguistic and cultural fluidity of these concepts. Examining the tensions of the dialectical love/hate relationships, A. Z. Obiedat’s philological probing in “The Semantic Field of Love in Classical Arabic,” explores further the realms Ibn Ḥazm has begun to map in his treatise. Obiedat asserts the Arabic language’s awareness of the confluence of love/hate emotions as they pertain to the antithetical lived experience of being in love. Obiedat’s exploration of the dialectical semantics of the word jawā, for example, where it simultaneously indicates the utmost love and hate, affirms Ibn Ḥazm’s earlier characterization of love as a “delightful malady.” In setting out to explore Middle Eastern beloveds, our goal was to offer an alternative intervention – one that affirms subjectivity and the universality of love affects across time and geography. Our essays were solicited so as to examine the beloved and traditions, which shape the emotions of writers and their readers, to trace the rules of the game and the various 8

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Introduction ways the contemporary world has found variations of them. The editors will be pleased if we, contemporary lovers of Middle Eastern cultures, have succeeded in prolonging Ibn Ḥazm’s investigation, allowing it to open up into contemporary scholarship. Alireza Korangy, Hanadi Al-Samman, Michael Beard (Editors).

Note 1. See Ibn Ḥazm al-Andalusī, Tawq al-Ḥamāma fī al-Ilfa waal-Ulāf. Ed. Al-Ṭāhir al-Makī. Cairo: Dār al-Ma῾ārif, 1975. All references are to the translated edition Ibn Ḥazm, The Ring of the Dove: A Treatise on the Art and Practice of Arab Love. Trans. A. J. Arberry. London: Luzac Oriental, 1994.

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1010

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Dangerous Love

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1 Writing to the End of Love: Waḥīd and the Motif Extremes of Ibn al-Rū mī Sarah R. bin Tyeer

If you have never been in love and don’t know what love is, Be a stone, from the hardest rock there is, a boulder. Al-Aḥwaṣ al-Anṣārī (Umayyad poet, d. 723 CE)

Abstract This chapter seeks to analyze how the stylistic aspects of one of Ibn al-Rūmī’s (d. 896 CE) most famous poems, Waḥīd, serve its motif of unrequited love. The poem (no. 593 in his dīwān) is an expression of unreciprocated love to a singing girl set in ninth-century Baghdad. The poet’s careful utilization of vocabulary, poetic meter, grammar, and phonetics conveys the expression of unrequited love on the levels of both word and sound. I seek to situate Ibn al-Rūmī’s poem in its traditional genre, ghazal, and read it against the backdrops of the Arab-Islamic literary tradition of adab writings on love as well as philology and grammar. It is necessary to begin by discussing the literary aspects of the qaṣīda in the context of the theorization of love in premodern Arabic treatises on love by Ibn Ḥazm (d. 1064 CE) as well as medieval medical humoral etiology. The chapter shows how the poet’s choice of the vocabulary of love, as discussed by early Arab philologists

13

14

The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures and grammarians, corresponds to the notions and symptoms of unreciprocated love, as highlighted by the treatises on love and Arabic philology (fiqh al-lugha). I then discuss Ibn al-Rūmī’s utilization of the radīf (long vowel) that precedes the monorhyme or the poem’s rhyme letter (rawī), the choice of the monorhyme itself, and the properties of Arabic letters as explained by grammarians. These elements, as used by Ibn al-Rūmī, simulate the melancholic symptoms induced by love, specifically unrequited love. The poem’s content and form therefore express the suffering of the poet on both the written and the aural or performance levels. Thus not only is it a poetic expression of unrequited love, it is also true to Ibn al-Rūmī’s personal style in ‘exhausting motifs’ (istinfād al-ma‘ānī), ‘giving motifs their full due’ (istīfāʾ al-maʿānī), ‘killing motifs’ (imātat al-ma‘ānī).

Introduction With recent advances in biotechnology offering some medical assistance in “curing love,” one wonders if classical Arab poets would opt for biotechnological solutions to end the pain – but deprive the world of the genre of ghazal – or heroically endure the heartache and reap the creative rewards?1 Ghazal, or love poetry, is “certainly one of the most successful genres in world literatures.”2 Its success is proved by its globetrotting progress from its birthplace in the Arabian Peninsula to Persia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mauritania, Turkey, and as far as Germany and Sweden.3 While the theme of “lost love” in the nasīb (the introductory section) is a significant trope in pre-Islamic poetry, the poem itself is not devoted to love alone. Ghazal could be argued as a progressive expansion of the nasīb – though it never replaced the latter, it helped to develop it.4 The image of a powerful beloved who holds tremendous power over her lover – which dominates the world of ghazal – appears after the advent of Islam.5 It was not until the ninth and tenth centuries that ghazal was fully developed, and so it continued for more than a millennium afterwards.6 A ninth-century love poem is still relevant for discussion in the twenty-first century and for us today. But why does ghazal survive? For the Abbasid poet Ibn al-Rūmī, love is a malady, and he revels in its description. Born in Balkh to parents of both Persian and Byzantine origins, he was close to many powerful figures and patrons throughout his life, 14

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Writing to the End of Love as the panegyrics he composed attest.7 In one of his most famous poems, Waḥīd, Ibn al-Rūmī describes the pains of unrequited love to a singing girl, Waḥīd. He depicts the paradoxical relationship between the heart that thinks of the beloved as a blessing and the mind that deems her a curse:8 ‫ولي ُد‬ ‫ف ْه َي نُعْمى يمي ُد منها كبيرٌ* وه َي بلوى يشيب منها‬9 A blessing that causes mature men to sway, And a curse that turns the hair of newborns white.

The distinctive feature of Abbasid love poetry is paradox.10 In the eponymous poem, Ibn al-Rūmī speaks about the nature of the lover’s rejected advances towards Waḥīd as she sends him mixed messages. He watches her being affectionate towards others while he is left to sorrow and melancholy. Yet the lover cannot cease describing her effect on him. The “lover’s choice of pain over indifference,” Andras Hamori tells us, is the principal paradox that lends ghazal its dramatic quality.11 As Ibn al-Rūmī says elsewhere in his dīwān, ‫صاب ُر‬ ‫أملي فيه ليأسي قاهرُ* فلذا قلبي عليه‬ My longing for him defeats my despair, And so my heart remains patient with him.12

Robert McKinney contends that the poem is believed to have been composed as a challenge to the poet to describe the songstress as the prompt “Describe her” (ṣifhā) indicates.13 This was not uncommon. Such requests were part of literary salons; they were motivated by challenges from the poets’ patrons or their audience, to prove the poet’s own talent and craft, naturally.14 This is cleverly declared by Ibn al-Rūmī as he responds to the challenge by saying: ‫*ويعس ُر التحدي ُد‬،ً‫يسهل القول إنها أحسن ال ْشيا ِء ط ّرا‬ It is easy to say that she is invariably the most beautiful of all creatures, But difficult to say precisely how.

Having declared the paradox of what McKinney calls “the impossibility of the task” and his own undertaking of that task, the poet created a 15

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures favorite conceit of his to celebrate his skills.15 But it may be truly a paradoxical expression indicating the “impossibility” of highlighting the ethereal nature of experiencing beauty, as Īliyā Ḥāwī suggests. Beauty has an overwhelming effect that is difficult to articulate, and what is left of this experience and that moment, if one were to describe it, are only the vestiges of it.16 Ḥāwī suggests a feeling akin to an “aesthetic arrest,” especially as Ibn al-Rūmī combines the aesthetics of Waḥīd’s physical beauty with her artistic and musical talents.

I.The Philological Measures of Love In their scholarship on poetic craft and techniques, premodern rhetoricians and literary critics stressed the importance of the poem’s opening line (barā‘at al-istihlāl, “the excellence of the opening line”). They argue that part of its importance is defining the poem’s genre (ghazal, panegyric, invective, etc.), thereby indicating the purpose (gharaḍ) of the poem’s composition.17 The rhetorician al-Khaṭīb al-Qazwīnī (d. 1338) posits that the best opening is that which fits the purpose (mā nāsab al-maqṣūd).18 Defining the purpose of the poem becomes a condition for “an excellent opening.” Indeed, this should not be stated explicitly (min ghayr taṣrīḥ) but with a subtle hint (ishāra laṭīfa) that finds delicate reception in those with good taste (dhawī al-dhawq al-salīm).19 Ibn al-Rūmī’s first line addresses his speech to two friends: ‫عمي ُد‬ ‫ي تَيّ َمتني وحيدُ*ففؤادي بها معنّى‬ ّ َ‫يا خلِيل‬ O my [two] friends, Waḥīd has enslaved me. My heart is besieged, ruined by her love.

The reader is tempted by this unintentional eavesdropping into an intimate conversation and cannot turn away. The poet, Northrop Frye maintains, “so to speak, turns his back on his listeners, though he may speak for them, and though they may repeat some of his words after him.”20 The poem becomes a public confession of the poet’s love by virtue of its mere existence and our ability to read it. Yet it is also an illusion of peeking into this private world. Ibn al-Rūmī is at once with the tradition in calling out for the two friends, as per the pre-Islamic Arabic qaṣīda, but his novelty lies in 16

17

Writing to the End of Love going to extremes in the pursuit of the motif of pain and grief. The intimate universe of love and suffering is one that is certainly not for public sharing. However, the fantasy of being in that universe with the poet, his friends, and the object of his affection creates a sense of an emotional communion that satisfies his audience and the readers equally. The poet’s honesty, propelled by the intimacy of sharing his suffering with his two friends, is obvious in his diction. There is an openness that is at once disarming and engaging. In the first line, he introduces a single verb, tayyamatnī (“she enslaved me”). This identifies the genre as ghazal and philologically situates the degree of love felt towards the beloved as it introduces her. Arab philologists seeking a deeper understanding of language went to painstaking lengths analyzing the semantic capacities of words. Words related to love were no exception. Philologists filled volumes ascribing meaning to words according to the emotions to which they corresponded. In other words, “love” words were not synonymous. Rather, they indicated different levels of emotion and affection. In a chapter devoted solely to the degrees of love, al-Tha‘ālibī (d. 1038) lists 11 degrees (marātib), which start with hawā (“to like/to love”).21 When al-Tha‘ālibī reaches grade ten (al-tadlīh, “to lose reason”) and beyond, it is love that strips the lover of all reason. Ibn al-Rūmī’s poem, in fact, is on grade eight (tatayyum, “enslavement”), which comes right before becoming ill from love (saqam) and losing all reason (dalah and huyām).22 But is it realistic or even possible to measure love, even philologically? Or are philologists being silly and pedantic? How does one measure that which is by its very nature subjective? Who is to judge what degree is appropriate for a certain emotion? The consensus is usually that these degrees were established for emotions that surpassed what is considered the “norm” between two people.23 Relativists may argue for the nonexistence of norms, but focusing on what is not the norm usually highlights the “norm”. If Majnūn and Laylā and their universal likes were the “norm,” they would not have kept littérateurs busy nor would they have acquired their eponyms in world literary history and idiomatic phrases. Philologists operated from the same paradigm of extreme emotion. The Damascene poet and littérateur Ibn Abī Ḥajala (d. 1374) maintains that only subjects of either great importance (ʿaẓīman) or danger (khaṭarahu jasīman) have more lexical units in language for Arabs. He gives examples of the lion, the 17

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures spear, the sword, disasters, wine, and love.24 There are more than a hundred lexical entries for the ‘sword’, for instance, each with a different property, shape, and quality; the same holds true for the ‘lion’, boasting with more than two hundred entries, as another example, thereby occupying more lexical units than other words. Philologists, then, were not silly; they were merely documenting people’s fears and topics of great importance in the manner relevant to their area of expertise. Love was not a philological obsession only. Arab physicians wrote about love as a malady when they reported several cases with the physical symptoms of lovesickness.25 The conception of love as both dangerous and important according to Ibn Abī Ḥajala’s explication of certain semantic preoccupations in Arab philology is also articulated medically. Should a union with the beloved be impossible, love is deemed both incurable and fatal, as both adab and medical treatises tell us. It is not surprising to see physicians also preoccupied with one of the incurable and often life-threatening maladies. Adab combined the literary discussions of love with its somatic side. In his treatise on love, Ṭawq al-Ḥamāma (The Ring of the Dove), the Andalusian theologian and philosopher of Cordoba Ibn Ḥazm (d. 1064) maintains that love is a meeting of souls and temperaments. It happens despite oneself and regardless of the beloved’s appearance, and it is very difficult to cure.26 His discussion of love is not concerned with the religio-ethical aspects only, as his training in jurisprudence and comparative religion might suggest, but also with the spiritual, social, somatic, and literary. In his chapter on the signs of love, Ibn Ḥazm highlights the involuntary behavior and mannerisms associated with being in love. Regardless of the degree of love, he says that the major giveaway is an inability to take one’s eyes off the beloved and a need to focus one’s attention with all one’s senses on the beloved.27 There is also a desire to be constantly with the object of one’s affection and a certain anxiety and confusion if the lover sees someone who looks like the beloved28 – a consequence of the unremitting longing to see the beloved that suddenly fills the world with their lookalikes. Ibn al-Rūmī turns these legitimate wishes that unite lovers around the world into a poetic banquet. As the poet “describes her,” the poem is turned into a scene with a gathering where Waḥīd is performing a song. That Waḥīd becomes the focus of the poet-lover’s attention 18

19

Writing to the End of Love comes naturally, in a nonthreatening manner. A  beautiful songstress capable of melting the most stubborn of hearts, she is the focus of everyone’s attention, ‫القلوب وه َي حدي ُد‬ ُ‫وتذيب‬29 َ Though she has melted hearts as hard as iron.

Neither he nor anyone else would want to take their eyes off her. She dominates the mise-en-scène of the poem. Ibn al-Rūmī allows the lover to enact what Ibn Ḥazm describes as the first and essential symptom of love:  the addictive gaze (idmān al-naẓar).30 This is also reminiscent of poem 795 in his dīwān, which begins, hal yantahī naẓarun illā ilā naẓarin (“Would gazing end in anything but more gazing”).31 Gazing in typical circumstances requires discretion, especially if the feeling is not reciprocated. The poet cleverly replaces discretion with intense gazing – as dictated by love of the eighth degree (tayyamatnī) – under the pretext of watching the beloved perform a song. Ibn al-Rūmī, therefore, validates the philological degree of love concomitant with tayyamatnī with the intensity of the gaze. The persona of the lover expresses this in a dynamic intensity. He is lost in the beloved; he repeats the act of falling in love with every glance. Every glance becomes an affirmation of this love despite the inner dialogue expressing the paradox between heart (blessing) and mind (curse), her rejection and his helplessness. In line 32, Ibn al-Rūmī begins to resolve this conflict by telling us about Waḥīd’s incomparable beauty as a pretext for the love he feels for her: ‫وحيد‬  ٌ‫حسنها في العيون حسنٌ وحيد*فلها في القلوب حب‬ Her beauty is incomparable; And the love felt for her is exclusive.

In the subsequent lines, he ventures to relate the paradox between heart and mind by relating Waḥīd as a blessing and a curse and he also informs us about the blame he receives for this love. Ibn al-Rūmī categorizes those who blame him as “lacking sound judgment” (ḍalla ‘anhu al-tawfīqu wa al-tasdīdu). He therefore rationalizes this love by describing those who do not understand it in the semantics of reason. After doing so, he presents 19

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures his evidence that resolves this paradox. In lines 42 and 43, Ibn al-Rūmī describes Waḥīd within the parameters of a perplexing puzzle: ‫ليت شعري إذا أدام إليها*ك ّرةَ الطّرْ ف مبدى ٌء وم ِعي ُد‬ ٌ ‫أهي ش‬ ‫تجدي ُد‬ ‫ئ لتسأم العين منه ؟*أم لها ك ّل ساعة‬ I wish I knew when someone looks at her repeatedly, Once, and then again. Does the eye not tire of her? Or does it always discover something new?

He then offers a solution to this puzzle thereby resolving the conflict between the heart and mind as the answer becomes a factor of equilibrium that balances this contradiction. Using the same phraseology of the line that invited blame, he emphasizes it as a reply to the context of the riddle. Ibn al-Rūmī substitutes the two occurrences of waḥīd (used in the capacity of incomparable and exclusive, respectively, as it is also a play on her name) in line 32 with jadīd (renewable and new, respectively). ‫جديد‬  ٌ‫حسنها في العيون حسنٌ جديد*فلها في القلوب حب‬ Her beauty renews itself every time, So every time, there is new love for her.

This “renewed beauty” becomes another pretext for the addictive gaze. In other words, the “renewed beauty” elevates the beloved’s face from ordinary (non-renewable) beauty to the extraordinary (renewable) beauty that mystifies the lover and demands an answer to a puzzling situation. This also becomes a plausible reason against indifference, which leads Ibn al-Rūmī to further characterize Waḥīd’s beauty as something otherworldly and therefore impossible to capture. Waḥīd’s perplexing beauty, so “difficult to describe” that it is an “impossible task,” is expressed by Ibn al-Rūmī as a riddle in itself. The intellectualization of the effect of her beauty advances the lover’s argument that his feelings are not reducible to the jejune zero-sum heart-mind dichotomy in which one cancels out the other. Rather, the poetic reasoning of her beauty presents a nuanced view that embraces the inexplicable aspect of the beloved, which is a reflection of the unfathomable aspect of love itself and of the lover’s feelings. The poet-lover is cognizant of this, which reaffirms his initial declaration that 20

21

Writing to the End of Love Waḥīd, like love, is both a “blessing” and a “curse.” Ibn al-Rūmī furthers this dichotomy with thermal metaphors that portray the nature of Waḥīd and her many admirers as under her control: she is both “fire” and “ice.”32 The use of fire imagery to describe Waḥīd’s beauty and its effect appears to resort to the usual poetic description of the beloved’s beauty that sparked its “fire” (nāra) from Waḥīd, and the fire that her beauty “kindled” (taṣṭalīhi) and “melted” (tudhīb) people and their hearts. Waḥīd’s beauty and its effect derive their semantics from “fire,” which could only be extinguished by a kiss – a rather expected but unattainable wish. Naturally, the fire imagery aims to highlight several things:  the dazzling beauty of the beloved, its compelling effect, and consequently the pain felt by the lover because of this unrequited love. Yet, despite this agony in the fire, she is described as “coolness” (bardun) and “peace” (salāmun). Both the style and imagery are inspired by the Qur’an’s account of the story of Abraham’s fire as “coolness and peace.”33 Ibn al-Rūmī obviously borrows only the Qur’anic expression and the imagery but not the context. The metaphor is not unique and has been frequently used in Arabic poetry.34 It has become idiomatic in Arabic parlance and subsequently adab for entities that are a source of pain but are regarded affectionately as a “blessing,” as Ibn al-Rūmī contends.35 Although the image is overused, its contextualization reiterates Ibn al-Rūmī’s intellectualization of the unfathomable aspects of love. Ghazal has always put metaphors into the service of courtship and cruel beloveds. Waḥīd is not an exception. As Hamori maintains, the cruel beauty who commands the hearts of poets is “a persona that rules the love poetry of the Abbasid age.”36 But Ibn al-Rūmī goes beyond the usual, albeit obligatory, tropes to elaborate on both the effect and meaning of beauty and love. He concludes the poem with what appears on the surface to be a mystifying couplet but upon closer examination it summarizes the extended binaries developed in the poem: ‫البعيد‬ ‫هو في القلب وهو أبعد من نجـم الثريا*فهو القريب‬ It is in the heart, and yet is farther than the Pleiades; It is at once both near and far.

Not only does this poetic conclusion invoke the dichotomies of presence and absence or near and far that characterize his treatment of both beauty 21

22

The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures and love, it also highlights the experience of beauty and love as something real but elusive. Describing this experience remains the “most difficult of things,” as the poet tells us. The dual nature of the aesthetic experience is also reflected in its emotional effect. Waḥīd’s description in a register of extremes is a metaphorization of the ideas of love and beauty as both a curse and a blessing. Philosopher and physician Ibn Sīna (Avicenna) (d. 1037)  described pain (waja‘) as an “incongruous stimulus.”37 Ghazal’s paradox expresses this incongruity or pain on the philological level. The pain felt by the lover is expressed in the register of his experience as an incongruous one (near-far, fire-ice, etc.) with contrasting dichotomies. This contributes not only to the suppressed emotional tension that fuels the poem but also to the paradoxical idea that love will always be exalted despite the pain.

II. The Painful Grammar of a World That Rhymes with Her Name Ibn al-Rūmī expresses the lover’s need to constantly evoke Waḥīd. He frequently repeats her name, four times explicitly and twice as homonyms meaning “incomparable” and “exclusive,” respectively. According to classical literary theorists, repetition of names in Arabic poetry should not occur except for indicating love – a rather legitimate reason to break some poetry rules.38 The need to recall the name of the beloved is concomitant with love as Ibn Ḥazm assures us: And further to the signs is that you find the lover evokes hearing the name of the beloved, and takes pleasure in talking about their news, turning this news into consolation. Nothing comforts the lover more than this. Nothing sways her/him from this; s/he is fearless and oblivious to the consequences of others finding out. Being in love blinds and turns one deaf. If it were possible that the lover does not engage in conversations except those where the beloved is mentioned, s/he would.39

The name-evoking symptoms of love are translated stylistically into the monorhyme of the poem. The entire poem is made to rhyme with her name, with some words that take derivatives of her name, or jinās, as well. The world of the lover, as expressed poetically, takes on a semantic capacity 22

23

Writing to the End of Love as large as the love felt for the beloved. The poem’s assonance conveys and exhausts the compulsive quality of love that led to Ibn al-Rūmī’s initial declaration: “She enslaved me.” Evoking the name of the beloved bespeaks an inability to communicate directly with her. This need to communicate with the beloved, which Ibn Ḥazm maintains is one of the pressing needs of the lover, is constantly thwarted because of the beloved’s evasiveness. Waḥīd is not making life easier for the poet-lover; she appears to be sending him mixed messages, or perhaps he is reading too much into what he sees: ‫تهدي ُد‬ ٌ‫نتلقى فلحْ ظَةٌ منك و ْعدٌ*بوصال ولحظة‬ When we meet, one glance from you is a promise of union, While another is forbidding.

In the lines above, the lover describes his relationship with Waḥīd using a paradox. There is at once ‘a promise of union’ but also a sense of ‘forbidding’ rejection. The promise of union, though unlikely, is certainly the hope that fuels the intensity of ghazal. Yet both the lover and the reader understand that it is always rejection that is shown from the beloved’s side, otherwise there will not be a reason to ‘hope for a union.’ Constantly rejected, Ibn al-Rūmī tells us how the lover is “left to tears and sleeplessness.” He sheds light on the history of this love, where the literary representation of love reflects its somatic symptoms. Weeping, another major symptom of love, is dependent on its intensity.40 The reader is further invited to observe private moments that are outside both the setting of the poem itself and the temporality of Waḥīd’s performance. It is fairly accurate to deduce that Ibn al-Rūmī excelled in depicting love as a phenomenon that progresses over time, not a passing feeling of infatuation or lust and an inflated use of words sparked by the sensual atmosphere of the moment. In this respect, introducing history to this love supports the poet’s stylistics of going to the end of “love expression.” In its portrayal of extreme emotions, it relies on a rational progression of events in linear time rather than ahistorical emotional outbursts. The poem, therefore, expresses a love that has had time to reach this stage, thereby validating the assertion “she enslaved me.” The articulated intensity of emotions as well as his references to “sleeplessness” and “tears” refer to a length of time 23

24

The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures that could be estimated by the reader as older than the master chronotope of the poem. This in turn acts as a temporal background for this intensity. The lack of success with the beloved and her persona as an emotionally and socially distant femme fatale are pithily yet cleverly presented by the poet as a source of despair. The lover’s melancholia is translated poetically in the poem. On despair (ḥasra), Ibn Ḥazm tells us that its somatic symptoms are sighing (al-zafīr), lack of movement or lethargy (qillat al-ḥaraka), moaning (ta’awwuh), and deep sigh (tanaffus al-ṣuʿādāʾ).41 The somatic symptoms of despair are expressed by Ibn al-Rūmī as an outcome suffered by all those who appear to be in love with Waḥīd: ‫تبليد‬ ‫انقطاع*وسجو وما به‬ ‫من هد ٍُو وليس فيه‬ ٍ ‫مديد‬ ‫م ّد في شأو صوتها نفَسٌ كاف*كأنفاس عاشقيها‬ There is a gentleness in her voice that is not disrupted, And a calm that is not dulled. When she sings, her breath always reaches the end of the phrase; It is long, like the sighs of her lovers.

Ibn al-Rūmī praises Waḥīd’s voice and excellent singing techniques as he simultaneously embeds her effect on the many hopeless lovers using the same category of praise: breath. He describes her breath as “long,” a delicately sensual word of praise for the beauty of her performance. It parallels the aforementioned intense gaze in signaling the extreme attentiveness of a lover who is focused on the phonetic details and breath of the beloved. It evokes what Hamori calls the “permanent obsession” as a feature of Abbasid ghazal.42 Ibn al-Rūmī concurrently plays on the word anfās to mean both the sighs and breaths of her lovers. In other words, it is a double praise for both her beauty and singing. Their enchanting qualities cause people to fall desperately in love with her, hence the drawn-out sighs of her lovers. The wordplay also hints at a shared history and an imagined community with the many rejected lovers, including himself, and his and their – relentless pursuits of Waḥīd. Ibn al-Rūmī’s focus on the soundscape of the poem extends to the description of Waḥīd’s singing as a speaking silence.43 In juxtaposition similar to that of her long breath technique to “the sighs of her lovers,” Waḥīd’s gentle technique also parallels the gentle expressions of the sighs 24

25

Writing to the End of Love of her many admirers and lovers. Her almost-silent technique is emblematic of an excellent performance as according to Ibn al-Rūmī she “sings so effortlessly, it seems as though she’s not singing.” The poet contrasts her technique to the image of the lovers’ silence expressed as “sighs.” The lover’s silence is part of the etiquette of love, unrequited or otherwise, which presupposes keeping this love a secret.44 This is also expressed grammatically as the poet-lover shifts from speaking about Waḥīd in the third person throughout the poem to using the second person towards the end. This grammatical shift at the end is preceded by a long emotional build-up that intimates the unfulfilled wish to reveal the secret he is tired of hiding. This is what Ruqayya Khan terms the “dialectic of secrecy and revelation” characteristic of Arabic romances and poetry,45 and which Ibn al-Rūmī deploys in the poem: ‫*فهلْ له تجريد‬،‫شي مليح نشتهيه‬ ْ ‫قد مللنا من ستر‬ Tired of hiding the lovely object of desire, Will it ever be disclosed?

Sadly for the poet-lover, it will never be disclosed. Hiding this secret is a necessary element of the decorum of love. On the poetic level, it fuels the tension and intensity of the poem and makes “suffering” believable. Both unrequited love and its concealment grant the license of an “extreme motif.” With a burden like this, it is not surprising that the poet-lover is still not comforted by the convention of a conversation with two friends, generously handed down by the Arabic poetic tradition to all grieving poets and lovers. At this juncture, it is instructive to ask if the poem lives up to the expectations Ibn al-Rūmī sets up for readers with the opening line “she enslaved me.” How does Ibn al-Rūmī craft his poem in a manner that makes the intensity of this love truly credible? What other stylistic clues does he give to convince us of a love of the eighth degree beyond a description of the lover’s inconsolable state? It is useful at this point to look at the music or the meter of the poem as a facilitator of the ghazal’s intent. ‘Arūḍ (prosody) is the study of poetic meter and the musicality of Arabic poetry.46 It is “based on the succession of a group of long and short specific syllables.”47 It sets the musical 25

26

The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures tone – and stress (nabr) – of the poem. The prosodic meter khafīf (“light”), one of the 16 meters of Arabic poetry, reflects its name.48 Often used in Arabic poetry for dialogues that convey a reflexive sharing of emotions with the poet, it has been an apt choice for ghazals and elegies.49 At this juncture, it is imperative to emphasize the importance of Arabic phonetics in the classical Arabic sciences (‘ulūm al-‘arabiyya) and rhetoric (balāgha). The study of sounds (phonetics) in the Arabic language began with al-Khalīl b.  Aḥmad al-Farāhīdī (d. 791). Al-Farāhīdī, trained in mathematics, cryptology, and music in addition to linguistics established prosody and is also responsible for the first Arabic lexicon, Kitāb al-‘Ayn (The Book of the Letter ‘ayn).50 His arrangement of the lexicon – considered odd initially  – reflects his attention to the study of sounds and the pronunciation of letters in the vocal tract (makhārij al-alfāẓ). He arranges his lexicon beginning with the farthest sound produced in the middle place in the throat, the voiced pharyngeal fricative, the letter ‘ayn. Phonology in Arabic is one of the branches of fiqh al-lugha (“the deeper understanding of language” or, more dynamically, “the secrets of language”).51 The Arabic language, like any other, is dependent on phonemes. These phonemes correspond to 29 letters. Each letter in Arabic has its own aural characteristic, sound grouping, and pronunciation rubrics in the vocal tract.52 Al-Khalīl b.  Aḥmad divided the 29 letters into two groups according to where they are pronounced in the vocal tract – lip letters, gum letters, and throat letters  – each named according to where pronunciation starts.53 There are 25 letters that have a definite place of pronunciation and four letters that are hollow (jawf), the vowels, so called because they are pronounced from the trachea or windpipe (wāw, yā’, alif layyīna, and hamza). As far as the properties of Arabic letters are concerned, rhetoricians and grammarians divided them into two main groups: the inherent properties of letters that are characteristic of their sounds, and the acquired properties that depend on their location in a given word, the types of letters which precede or follow them, and the grammatical movements (ḥarakāt i‘rābiyya) and their corresponding endings (A, U, and I cases). The assonance of Ibn al-Rūmī’s poem follows the long vowel ī (radīf), which is not uncommon in a ghazal. There is an elongated e sound before the final letter of each word in every line of the poem. This sound aurally mimics the universal sounds of pain and intense emotion such as moaning or a wail 26

27

Writing to the End of Love due to anguish. The sound performance of each line in the poem therefore enacts the articulated pain of unrequited love expressed as an overall mood of despair (ḥasra). The long vowel is then followed by the letter dāl (d sound), which is the poem’s rhyme letter (rawī). The monorhyme of the poem, the letter dāl, enjoys the inherent phonetic quality of strength (shidda) and being sonorous (jahr).54 Another inherent quality of the letter is echo or timbre (qalqala, “moving something” or “causing it to move”).55 Grammarians and rhetoricians explain this last quality as a byproduct of the strength of the letter itself, which causes it to be pronounced emphatically. In other words, the strong sound qualities of the letter dāl need to be diffused as pronunciation takes place. The timbre sound is a reflection of this strength; it expresses this quality. If the dāl comes at the end of the word with a sukūn (no grammatical movement by virtue of grammatical case ending), it produces a strong timbre, that is, the timbre is observed (performed in correct pronunciations and sometimes involuntarily). If the dāl is in the middle of the word, it produces a weak timbre. In Ibn al-Rūmī’s poem, the dāl, which comes at the end of the monorhyme’s words, does not have a sukūn at the end (case ending) and therefore does not produce a timbre in pronunciation to reflect and diffuse its inherent strength. Ibn al-Rūmī’s poem begins with a conversation with the poet’s two friends who address his need to evoke her name in consolation. This is done in the manner of nasīb. It also suggests how the lover is compelled to speak about the beloved to someone else, hence the conversational tone. The khafīf meter matches the soundscape of the poem, echoing Waḥīd’s singing and delicate swaying with the music, though it is uncertain if the meter evolved to match the musical trends of the times.56 The stylistics of the poem therefore reinforce its theme and motif and fit with its subject and setting. The monoryhme (qāfiya) of the entire qaṣīda rhymes with Waḥīd, the name of the beloved, which adds to the musicality of the poem and so to its meaning.57 Grammatically, it is in the nominative or U-case (marfū‘). The syntax of a hopeless romance is grammatically expressed in the U case of the monorhyme as it phonetically supports the melancholic mood of the poem. The strength of the letter dāl is diffused through the inevitability of pushing air out (deep sigh) in pronouncing the u sound after the strong and deep previous e sound. This is done in a phonetic mirroring 27

28

The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures of pain and sighing, another somatic symptom of love. The grammar of the line ensures that every monoryhme ends with a sigh. It is neither an exaggeration nor an overemphasis to further explain the sound qualities of the poem and how they perform their meanings. Arab poets as early as al-A‘shā (d. 625) used to play with sounds to convey and sometimes exaggerate certain meanings to demonstrate their talent and entertain their audience. In reference to a rather full-figured and curvaceous lady, al-Aʿshā describes her as follows: ٌ ‫ِهــرْ َكــوْ لَــةٌ فُــنُـــ‬ ‫صــهَـا بِـالــ ّشـوْ ِك ُمــ ْنـتَـ ِعــل‬ َ ‫ق دُرْ ٌم َمــ َرافِــقُـهَــا*كَـأ َ َن أَ ْخـ َمـ‬ Large-thighed, beautiful and opulent, She walks slowly as if her sole’s arch is covered with thorns.58

The deliberate use of sonorous and strong letters draws a clear picture of the physical mass the poet wishes to convey. Onomatopoeia (al-tamthīl al-ṣawtī li al-ma‘ānī) was known to premodern Arab literary critics and poets for its aesthetic effects. It is worth mentioning that the Qur’an is rich in these stylistic features as well. I have so far discussed the articulation of the somatic symptoms of love and their aesthetic relationship to the stylistics of the poem as part of Ibn al-Rūmī’s style of “exhausting motifs.” It is equally imperative at this point to discuss the poem’s utilization of grammar and word form to further advance the motif of desperate love and enrich the overall meaning of the poem.

III. Grammatically in Love Beside their logical properties of making speech grammatically intelligible, Arabic letters’ movements (ḥarakāt i‘rābiyya) do have an aesthetic dimension as well in their emotive effect. These movements operate on logical, emotional, and moral levels, since they do affect the meaning conveyed.59 Grammatically, the U case (nominative case/marfū‘) is used for subjects and predicates of nonverbal sentences. Subjects of verbal sentences as well as adverbs keep the nominative markers as well but not necessarily in the nominative case. Verbs in the present tense (muḍāriʿ) always take the nominative case except in certain circumstances. The words forming the 28

29

Writing to the End of Love monorhyme of the poem, despite their different constructions, are all predicates (khabar). By its very grammatical nature, the khabar is the part of the sentence that supplies information about the subject. As love necessitates a constant feedback and flow of information to comfort the lover and evoke the beloved, subsequently – and grammatically – each line functions as a source of renewed message leading to some emotional relief. This emphasizes the emotional urgency that matches the setting of the poem. While the assonance of the poem rhymes with the beloved’s name, it varies grammatically. The monorhyme words vary between verbal nouns (maṣādir, sing. maṣdar), present-tense verbs (muḍāri‘), and one instance of a future-tense verb. The poet’s description of Waḥīd relies on verbal nouns. Verbal nouns transcend time, as their grammatical functions imply. In other words, the effect of Waḥīd’s beauty is presented as transcendental. The inability to perceive Waḥīd as an entity functioning, like all others, in time is part of this transcendence. Her depiction as someone who is not governed by the laws of nature gives her an otherworldly quality. The worldview of the lover is ultimately affected by these altered perceptions and is expressed in his own sense of time and mortality, which is typical of a ghazal: ٌ ٌ ‫ما تزالينَ نظرةٌ منك َم‬ ‫تخليد‬ ‫*ونظرة‬،‫مميت‬ ‫وت لي‬ I still find that one glance from you is deadly, While another makes me immortal.

The immense power of the beloved becomes intelligible and quantifiable as it is articulated through the parameters of life and death. That the poet has been in love with her for a period of time indicates that the passage of time has not affected the way she looks or the way he perceives her, as understood from his description. Waḥīd’s timeless beauty alters the perception of time itself. This is why it is expressed as perpetually occurring in the present tense as part of its “renewable” nature. This transcendence is further intensified as Ibn al-Rūmī uses the word tatajallā (manifest herself or reveal herself as though she was previously hidden) to describe her appearance. ‫وسعيد‬ ‫تتجلّى للناظرين إليها*فشق ّى بحسنها‬ When she appears before her audience, Her beauty torments some and leave others in delight.

29

30

The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures Transcendent beauty matches the master chronotope of the poem. It enforces the present tense as it relates to the situation (the description of Waḥīd’s performance, her “renewable” beauty, and the pangs of love). Yet it has a connection to the past and is also tied to a future. Waḥīd’s time-defying transcendence is described as follows: ‫س*وب ْد ٍر من نُورها يستفي ُد‬ ٍ ‫شمسُ دَجْ ٍن ِكل المني َريْن من شم‬ She is the sunshine on a cloudy day; the sun and moon: Both draw their light from hers.

Waḥīd’s essence is thus compared to those of these celestial bodies. The use of the present tense (min nūriha yastafīdu), in order to point to the sun and moon benefiting from her luminosity to enhance their own is telling. Another alternative to turning the present tense verb yastafīdu (benefit from/draw from) into the passive mustafīd (beneficiary) would have been possible without harming either the meaning or the assonance. How does yastafīdu convey a better understanding of the degree of love over mustafīd grammatically? The present tense of the verb in reference to the sun and moon, drawing their luminosity from hers, indicates a perpetual action, timeless refulgence from the beloved to the sun and moon. This metaphor implies that their luminosity is a result of an implicit appeal to Waḥīd: the source of light that gives them their own light. If both the sun and moon turn into passive recipients of Waḥīd’s luminosity, it implies that her luminosity is not sought after but rather involuntary and even unsolicited. Waḥīd’s timeless beauty and transcendence naturally extends to the future tense as the poet describes her effect: ‫ضا ٍه‬ َ ‫ف في يَ َديْها ُم‬ ِ ‫ُ َوتَ َر ال َّزحْ ف فِي ِه سه ٌم شَديد* َوتَ ُر ال َع ْز‬ ‫ستصيد‬ ‫ب يوما*أيقن القو ُم أنها‬ َ ‫وإذا أ ْنب‬ ِ ْ‫ض ْتهُ لل ّشر‬ A lute-string in her hands is as deadly as the bowstring in a battle – With a sharp arrow ready and set. If one day she draws it, aiming at the drinkers, Everybody is certain that she will hit her mark.

“She will hit her mark” or “she will hunt” – sa-taṣīd continues to ascribe to her otherworldly powers that are decidedly lethal regardless of time. 30

31

Writing to the End of Love The threefold meaning of the hunting motif skillfully points to her seductive and distinctly irresistible beauty, which makes her a huntress despite herself. It also captures the emotional distance felt by the lover, which Ibn al-Rūmī clearly conveys in the poem. He visualizes Waḥīd as a distant, detached, and impersonal hunter oblivious to her many victims. The hunting motif also reaffirms the lover’s vulnerability and his wounds – he has become her “prey”  – following the convention of the beautiful and destructive beloveds of ghazal. The somatic symptoms of love then take on an extended meaning as the emotional wounds of love and rejection are expressed through the physical wounds of the imagery of hunting with the prey’s bleeding lacerations and flesh perforations. The image suggests a parallel between being emotionally hunted, devoured, and consumed by the beloved and its material counterpart in hunting. And because it is unrequited, these images mirror the pain of the lover and bolster the conception of his enslavement by her (tayyamatnī) introduced in the first line.

IV. Ghazal: The Mode Immortal A poem about unrequited love, or love in general, is perhaps the most recycled theme not just in Arabic literature but also in World literatures. Its originality then stems from the poet’s utilization of all available tools (grammatical, philological, phonetic, literary) to write to the end of a certain motif or a theme in an original manner. As Ebrahim Moosa observes, “While the content, themes, and plots of the poetry were known to the poet’s audience, his individuality manifested itself in the manner of his expression; the more inventive he was, the more he was admired for his originality.”60 Ibn al-Rūmī’s structure and stylistics expressed love not just on the level of the word (description and philology) but also on the level of performance (grammar and sound). This is an element of his poetics, which has been rendered as istiqṣā’ al-ma‘ānī, “going to extremes in the pursuit of a motif ” or “pursuing it to the utmost length.”61 G.  J.  van Gelder describes it as a desire to “extract every possible conceit from a given motif and not to abandon it before he has exhausted it.”62 This is also known as istinfād al-ma‘ānī (exhausting motifs), istīfā’ al-ma‘ānī (giving motifs their full due), and imātat al-ma‘ānī (killing motifs), which eventually lead to the long-windedness (ṭūl al-nafas) noticed in many of 31

32

The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures his poems and his dīwān in general.63 Indeed, the sighing effect of the monorhyme may not have been deliberate. But it is Ibn al-Rūmī’s craft that reflexively and unconsciously conveyed the somatic aspects of love through technique. Some studies on Arabic poetry maintain that part of our satisfaction from any work of art is its ability to regulate our own emotions, perhaps by articulating and connecting them.64 Some arguments go further and link the beat of poetic meter in prosody (wazn) to the pace of the human heart. Beside the literary rewards, this generates a “feel good” emotional state from listening to and reading poetry.65 By extension, the other side of “feel good” is “pain control,” which explains the effect induced by various aural and visual artistic activities, poetry reading included, as a method of pain management and regulation of the emotions. Majnūn Laylā (Qays b. al-Mulawwaḥ) – one of the most famous lovers and poets in the history of Arabic literature, who lost his mind, and eventually life, because of his love for Laylā – told us about the therapeutic power of art in general and poetry in specific: “And I only recite poetry to soothe myself ” (wa mā unshidu al-ash‘āra illā tadāwiya).66 Majnūn understood that time is not really a healer and it does not cure love, but poetry soothes it: (“May God curse those who say, ‘we found time to be a cure for love’ ” [laḥḥā Allāhu aqwāman yaqūlūna innanā wajadnā ṭawāla al-dahri li al-ḥubbi shāfiyā]).67 Thomas Bauer and Angelika Neuwirth argue for the consideration of ghazal as World literature. When confronted with the phenomenon of love, it gradually appears that ghazal, the most emotionally charged genre, is “accessible to all members of the literary community and can thus provide an emotionalized atmosphere with a cathartic function.”68 Aside from students and scholars of Arabic, what makes an Arabic Abbasid ghazal, written in the ninth century, relevant to us today is precisely its ability to transcend linguistic, cultural, and temporal boundaries. One may also argue that the transcendence and timelessness of ghazal reflect the transcendent qualities of its subject matter. Love and the genre it engenders are indefatigable. A ninth-century Abbasid ghazal may be read anywhere in the world today by specialists and non-specialists alike, and still be understood and appreciated for what it is: a poem about a universal emotion (and its universal complications and joys) uniting people in its acknowledgement of both human vulnerability and the strength to write about it. 32

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Writing to the End of Love

Notes 1. Brian D.  Earp, Olga A.  Wudarczyk, Anders Sandberg, and Julian Savulescu, “If I Could Just Stop Loving You: Anti-Love Biotechnology and the Ethics of a Chemical Breakup,” American Journal of Bioethics 13, no. 11 (2013): 3–17. 2. Thomas Bauer and Angelika Neuwirth, “Ghazal as World Literature,” in Ghazal as World Literature I:  Transformations of a Literary Genre, ed. Thomas Bauer and Angelika Neuwirth (Würzburg:  Ergon Verlag, 2005), 9.  For more on ghazal see, A.  Hamori, “Love Poetry (Ghazal),” in ‘Abbasid Belles-Lettres, ed. Julia Ashtiany et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 202–18; Thomas Bauer, Liebe und Liebesdichtung in der arabischen Welt des 9. und 10. Jahrhunderts:  Eine literatur- und mentalitatsgeschichtliche Studie des arabischen Gazal (Wiesbaden:  Harrassowitz Verlag, 1998); A.  Bausani, “Ghazal,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, ed. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W. P. Heinrichs (Brill Online, 2012), accessed 20 October, 2014. 3. Bauer and Neuwirth, “Ghazal as World Literature,” 14–16. 4. Simon Kuntze, “Love and God: The Influence of Ghazal on Mystic Poetry,” in Bauer and Neuwirth, Ghazal as World Literature, 159. 5. J. Christoph Bürgel, “The Mighty Beloved: Images and Structures of Power in the Ghazal from Arabic to Urdu,” in Bauer and Neuwirth, Ghazal as World Literature, 283–4. Bürgel specifically mentions that powerful beloveds began with ‘Udhrī Ummayad poets. The ‘Udhrī poets of the ‘Udhra tribe are known to have been reputably star-crossed lovers and have all suffered from tragic, albeit platonic, romances. The most famous is the Umayyad poet Jamīl b.  Maʿmar, also known as Jamīl Buthayna (Buthayna is his beloved). 6. Bauer and Neuwirth, “Ghazal as World Literature,” 18. 7. For more on his life and work, see M.  M. Badawi, “Abbasid Poetry and Its Antecedents,” in Ashtiany et  al., ‘Abbasid Belles-Lettres, 164–66; Beatrice Gruendler, Medieval Arabic Praise Poetry:  Ibn al-Rūmī and the Patron’s Redemption (London:  Routledge, 2003); Rhuvon Guest, Life and Works of Ibn Er Rûmî (London: Luzac, 1944); Robert C. McKinney, The Case of Rhyme versus Reason: Ibn al-Rūmī and His Poetics in Context (Leiden: Brill, 2004); Akiko Motoyoshi Sumi, Description in Classical Arabic Poetry:  Waṣf, Ekphrasis, and Interarts Theory (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 122–54. For more on his life and controversial death, see al-ʿĀmilī as he mentions Ibn al-Rūmī’s last lines when he was dying of poison in al-Kashkūl, ed. Muḥammad ‘Abd al-Karīm al-Nimarī (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-an ʿIlmiyya, 1998), 2:125. See also Ibn Khallikān, Wafayāt al-Aʿyān, ed. Iḥsān ‘Abbās (Beirut:  Dār al-Thaqāfa, 1968)  3:359–62 for the story of his murder, which he attributes to a certain vizier who was scared of his invective poetry. Ibn al-Rūmī’s death is reputed to have been caused by his invective (hijā’) poetry that created its own Arabic idiom:  ahjā min Ibn al-Rūmī (More

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures caustic in invective than Ibn al-Rūmī). For a counterargument against this story of the vizier’s accusation of murder and alternative insights into his mysterious death, see S. Boustany, “Ibn al-Rūmī” in Bearman et al., Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, accessed November 12, 2013. 8. Īliyā Salīm Ḥāwī, Ibn al-Rūmī: Fannahu wa Nafsiyyatuhu min Khilāl Shiʿrihi, 2nd ed. (Beirut: Maktabat al-Madrasa wa Dār al-Kitāb al-Lubnānī, 1980), 195. 9. I rely on Ḥusayn Naṣṣār’s edition. Dīwān Ibn al-Rūmī (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat Dār al-Kutub wa al-Wathāʿq al-Qawmiyya, 2003), 2:762–5. 10. Hamori, “Love Poetry (Ghazal),” 212. 11. Ibid. 12. Ghazal no. 872, Dīwān Ibn al-Rūmī, 3:1119. The use of the masculine pronoun here does not necessarily point to the gender of the beloved. It is not uncommon to use masculine pronouns even if the poem is indeed about a woman. The choice was sometimes made because of the meter and the intended musicality of the poem. 13. McKinney, The Case of Rhyme versus Reason, 171. 14. Ibid., 168. 15. Ibid., 433. 16. Ḥāwī, Ibn al-Rūmī, 185. 17. See, for instance, Abī Ṭāhir Muḥammad b.  Ḥaydar al-Baghdādī, Qānūn al-Balāgha fī Naqd al-Shiʿr wa al-Nathr, ed. Muḥsin Ghayyāḍ ‘Ujayl (Beirut: Mu’assasat al-Risāla, 1981), 116ff. 18. Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad b. ‘Abd al-Raḥmān al-Khaṭīb al-Qazwīnī, al-Īḍāḥ fī ‘Ulūm al-Balāgha, ed. Bahīj Ghazzāwī (Beirut: Dār Iḥyā’ al-ʿUlūm, 1998), 392. 19. Abū Bakr b.  ‘Alī b.  Ḥijja, Khizānat al-Adab wa Ghāyat al-Arab, ed. ‘Iṣām Shiqyū (Beirut:  Dār wa Maktabat al-Hilāl, 1988), 1:30. See also Aḥmad b. ‘Abd al-Wahhāb al-Nuwayrī, Nihāyat al-Arab fī Funūn al-Adab, ed. Mufīd Qamḥiyya et al. (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2004), 7:110ff. 20. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1957), 250. Cf. Bauer and Neuwirth, “Ghazal as World Literature,” 10. 21. Abū Manṣūr al-Thaʿālibī, Fiqh al-Lugha (Cairo:  Maṭbaʿat Muṣṭafā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, 1938), 171. Cf. al-Alūsī, Rūḥ al-Maʿāni fī Tafsīr al-Qur’ān al-ʿAẓīm (Beirut: Dār Iḥyā’ al-Turāth al-ʿArabī, n.d.), 12:227, where he explains this in the context of the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife’s feelings for him. 22. Al-Thaʿālibī, Fiqh al-Lugha, 171. 23. See Ioana Feodorov, “Is Love Gradable?” Romano-Arabica Journal no. 1 (2002): 48–54. 24. Aḥmad b. Yaḥyā Ibn Abī Ḥajala, Dīwān al-Ṣabāba, ed. Muḥammad Ibrāhīm al-Dusūqī (Cairo: Maktabat Ibn Sīnā li al-Nashr wa al-Tawzī‘, 1994), 21. 25. See Hans Hinrich Biesterfeldt and Dimitri Gutas, “The Malady of Love,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 104, no. 1 (1984): 21–55.

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Writing to the End of Love 26. Ibn Ḥazm, Ṭawq al-Ḥamāma, ed. Iḥsān ‘Abbās (Beirut:  al-Mu’assasa al-ʿArabīyya li al-Dirāsāt wa al-Nashr, 1987), 90–102. 27. Ibid., 103–14. 28. Ibid., 104. 29. Another way of reading this line is reading hya in “tudhību al-qulūba wa hya ḥadīdu” in reference to Waḥīd and so the line would read, “Though she has melted hearts, hers is as hard as iron.” This matches the icy persona of Waḥīd portrayed throughout the poem. Both readings are grammatically correct. But it is more polite and appropriate to ghazal as a genre that “she would melt hearts.” It appears that Ibn al-Rūmī might have played on the ambiguity of hya referring to both hearts and Waḥīd, and the double entendre would certainly be noted by the reader. 30. Ibn Ḥazm, Ṭawq al-Ḥamāma, 103. 31. Dīwān Ibn al-Rūmī, 3:1041. 32. Cf. Ḥāwī, Ibn al-Rūmī, 185. 33. “But We said, ‘Fire, be cool and safe for Abraham.’ ” Q. 21:69. 34. For several uses of the metaphor in Arabic poetry as well as prose, see also Muḥammad b.  Shākir al-Kutubī, Fawāt al-Wafayāt, ed. ‘Alī Muḥammad b.  Yuʿawiḍ Allāh and ‘Ādil Aḥmad ‘Abd al-Mawjūd (Beirut:  Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2000), 2:338; Abū al-Ḥasan al-Shantarīnī, al-Dhakhīra fī Maḥāsin Ahl al-Jazīra, ed. Iḥsān ‘Abbās (Beirut: Dār al-Thaqāfa, 1997), 3:211 and 7:217; al-Ḥamawī, Muʿjam al-Udabā’ (Beriut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1991), 4:446; ‘Alī b.  Ẓāfir al-Azdī, Badā’iʿal-Badā’ih, ed. Muḥammad Qaṭṭah al-ʿAdawī (Cairo: Dār al-Ṭibāʿa al-Mīrīyya, n.d.), 153. 35. Abū Manṣūr al-Thaʿālibī, Thimār al-Qulūb fī al-Muḍāf wa al-Mansūb (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, n.d), 43. 36. Hamori, “Love Poetry (Ghazal),” 204. 37. Osama A. Tashani and Mark I. Johnson, “Avicenna’s Concept of Pain,” Libyan Journal of Medicine 5 (2010): 5253. 38. Ibn Rashīq, al-ʿUmda fī Maḥāsin al-Shiʿr wa Ādābihi, ed. Muḥammad Muḥyī al-Dīn ‘Abd al-Ḥamīd (Beirut: Dār al-Jīl, 1981), 2:74. 39. Ibn Ḥazm, Ṭawq al-Ḥamāma, 107 (my translation). 40. Ibid., 111. 41. Ibid. 42. Hamori, “Love Poetry (Ghazal),” 205. 43. ‘Alī Shalaq, Ibn al-Rūmī:  fī al-Ṣūra wa al-Wujūd (Beirut:  al-Mu’assasa al-Jāmiʿiyya li al-Dirāsāt wa al-Nashr wa al-Tawzīʿ, 1982), 343. 44. See Ruqayya Yasmine Khan, “On the Significance of Secrecy in the Medieval Arabic Romances,” Journal of Arabic Literature, 31 no.  3 (2000):  238–53. For more on secrecy, see also Khan, Self and Secrecy in Early Islam (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008). 45. Khan, “On the Significance of Secrecy,” 238.

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures 46. ‘Abd al-ʿAbd ‘Atīq, ‘Ilm al-ʿArūḍ wa al-Qāfiya (Beirut:  Dār al-Nahḍa al-ʿArabiyya, 1987), 12. 47. Ibid. 48. The meter al-khafīf is the fifth most popular meter after al-ṭawīl, al-baṣīṭ, al-wāfir, and al-kāmil. It was rarely used in pre-Islamic times but became popular since the Abbasid period. See Muṣṭafā Ḥarakāt, Awzān al-Shiʿr (Cairo: al-Dār al-Thaqāfiyya li al-Nashr, 1998), 131. 49. For more on the khafīf structure, see Ibn Jinnī, al-ʿArūḍ, ed. Aḥmad Fawzī al-Hayyib (Kuwait:  Dār al-Qalam, 1987), 127ff; see also Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī, Dīwān Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī, ed. Karam al-Bustānī (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, n.d.), 618ff. 50. ‘Alī Shalaq, al-ʿAql al-Ramzī fī al-Islām (Beirut: Dār al-Ijtihād, 1995), 141. 51. This term was first introduced and coined into Arabic by the Arab grammarian Aḥmad b. Fāris (d. 1004 CE) in his al-Ṣāḥibī fī Fiqh al-Lugha. Ibn Fāris stressed the distinctive features of Arabic and its importance in the preservation of Arab-Islamic values and culture. 52. See Kamāl al-Dīn Maytham al-Baḥrānī, Uṣūl al-Balāgha, ed. ‘Abd al-Qādir Ḥusayn (Cairo:  Dār el-Shurūk, 1981), 37–44 and Fakhry Muḥammad Ṣāliḥ, al-Lugha al-ʿArabiyya: Adā’ wa Nuṭq wa Imlā’ wa Kitāba (Cairo: Dār al-Wafā’ li al-Ṭibāʿa wa al-Nashr wa al-Tawzīʿ, 1987), 21. 53. For more on this, see Ṣāliḥ, al-Lugha ‘Arabiyya, 22ff, for example of gum letters (thā’, dhāl, ẓā’). 54. Ṣāliḥ, al-Lugha al-‘Arabiyya Adā’ waNuṭq, 35–9. 55. Ibid., 38. 56. Hamori, “Love Poetry (Ghazal),” 205. 57. For more on the qāfiya, see ‘Abd al-‘Azīz ‘Atīq, ‘Ilm al-‘Arūḍ wa al-Qāfiya (Beirut: Dār al-Nahḍa al-‘Arabiyya, 1987), 133–96. See also Ḥusnī ‘Abd al-Jalīl Yūsuf, Mūsīqa al-Shiʿr al-ʿArabī (Cairo:  al-Hay’a al-Miṣriyya al-ʿĀmma li al-Kitāb, 1989), 139–60. 58. Muḥammad al-Nuwayhī, al-Shiʿr al-Jāhilī, quoted in Ḥusnī ‘Abd al-Jalīl Yūsuf, Mūsīqa al-Shiʿr al-ʿArabī (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Miṣriyya al-ʿĀmma li al-Kitāb, 1989), 184. 59. This is the highlight in one of the anecdotes of Abū al-Aswad al-Du’alī (d. 688 CE), who is reputed to have been the first to put the letters’ movements (movement and case endings) to the Qur’an. It was not until he heard a man reciting/ reading Q. 9:3 (al-Tawba [Repentance]) with incorrect case endings in a loud voice and read the following verse, “wa adhānun mina Allāhi wa rasūlihi ila an-nāsi yawma al-ḥajji al-akbari inna Allāha bari’un mina al-mushrikīna wa rasūlih.” The last word in the āya should not be in the I case (rasūlihi) because if it is in the I case, then the meaning would be “God disowns the disbelievers and the prophet,” as it conjoins the prophet with the disbelievers grammatically when in reality the word is in the U case (rasūluhu) because it is a delayed

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Writing to the End of Love disjunctive of a conjunction  – “God disowns the disbelievers and [so does] his Prophet” – but the mentioning of the prophet was delayed in the sentence, which is a normal rhetorical strategy in the stylistics of the Qur’an. Al-Du’alī was clearly disturbed by the ramifications of this meaning and the illogical reading  – because of poor grammar  – so he decided to put movements on the letters. See Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī, al-Durr al-Manthūr (Beirut: Dār al-Fikr, 1993), 4:129–30. The story of al-Du’alī and the letter movements – whether he did it himself or was assigned to do it – vary in most sources but they almost all agree on the mentioning of this verse and the errors in reading and al-Du’alī’s reaction to it. 60. Ebrahim Moosa, “Textuality in Muslim Imagination,” Acta Academia Supplementum 1 (1995): 58. Moosa refers to pre-Islamic poets, but this could also be extended to later poets as well. 61. McKinney, The Case of Rhyme versus Reason, 226. 62. Geert Jan van Gelder, “The Terrified Traveller:  Ibn al-Rūmī’s Anti-Raḥīl,” Journal of Arabic Literature 27, no.  1 (1996):  37. Cf. McKinney, The Case of Rhyme versus Reason, 226. 63. McKinney, The Case of Rhyme versus Reason, 24. 64. ‘Izz al-Dīn Ismāʿīl, al-Tafsīr al-Nafsī li al-Adab, quoted in Ḥusnī ‘Abd al-Jalīl Yūsuf, Mūsīqa al-Shiʿr al-ʿArabī (Cairo:  al-Hay’a al-Miṣriyya al-ʿĀmma li al-Kitāb, 1989), 24; see also Bauer and Neuwirth, “Ghazal as World Literature,” 9–31. 65. ‘Izz al-Dīn Ismā‘īl, al-Tafsīr al-Nafsī li al-Adab, quoted in Ḥusnī ‘Abd al-Jalīl Yūsuf, Mūsīqa al-Shiʿr al-ʿArabī, 25. 66. Qays b. al-Mulawwaḥ, Dīwān Qays b. al-Mulawwaḥ, ed. Yusrī ‘Abd al-Ghanī (Beirut:  Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1999), 122; cf. Dīwān Majnūn Layla, ed. ‘Abd al-Sattār Aḥmad Farrāg (Cairo: Maktabat Miṣr, 1963), 227. 67. Ibid. 68. Bauer and Neuwirth, “Ghazal as World Literature,” 27.

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures ‘Atīq, ‘Abd al-ʿAzīz. ‘Ilm al-ʿArūḍ wa al-Qāfiya. Beirut: Dār al-Nahḍa al-ʿArabiyya, 1987. al-Azdī, ‘Alīb.  Ẓāfir, Badā’iʿ al-Badā’ih. Edited by Muḥammad Qaṭṭah al-ʿAdawī. Cairo: Dār al-Ṭibāʿa al-Mīriyya, n.d. Badawi, M. M. “Abbasid Poetry and Its Antecedents.” In Ashtiany et al., ‘Abbasid Belles Lettres, 146–66. al-Baghdādī, Abū Ṭāhir Muḥammad b.  Ḥaydar. Qānūn al-Balāgha fī Naqd al-Shiʿr wa al-Nathr. Edited by Muḥsin Ghayyāḍ ‘Ujayl. Beirut:  Mu’assasat al-Risāla, 1981. al-Baḥrānī, Kamāl al-Dīn Maytham. Usūl al-Balāgha. Edited by ‘Abd al-Qādir Ḥusayn. Cairo: Dār al-Shurūk, 1981. Bauer, Thomas. Liebe und Liebesdichtung in der arabischen Welt des 9.  und 10. Jahrhunderts: Eine literatur- und mentalitatsgeschichtliche Studie des arabischen Gazal. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1998. Bauer, Thomas, and Angelika Neuwirth, eds. Ghazal as World Literature I: Transformations of a Literary Genre. Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2005. ——— “Ghazal as World Literature.” In Ghazal as World Literature I: Transformations of a Literary Genre, eds Thomas Bauer and Angelika Neuwirth, 9–31. Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2005. Bausani, A. “Ghazal.” In Bearman et al., Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. Bearman, P., Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W. P. Heinrichs, eds. Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. Leiden: Brill, 1960–2005. Biesterfeldt, Hans Hinrich, and Dimitri Gutas. “The Malady of Love.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 104, no. 1 (1984): 21–55. Boustany, S. “Ibn al-Rumi.” In Bearman et  al., Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. Bürgel, Johann Christoph. “The Mighty Beloved:  Images and Structures of Power in the Ghazal from Arabic to Urdu.” In Ghazal as World Literature I: Transformations of a Literary Genre, eds Thomas Bauer and Angelika Neuwirth, 283–309. Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2005. Earp, Brian D., Olga A. Wudarczyk, Anders Sandberg, and Julian Savulescu. “If I  Could Just Stop Loving You:  Anti-Love Biotechnology and the Ethics of a Chemical Breakup.” American Journal of Bioethics 13, no. 11 (2013): 3–17. Feodorov, Ioana.“Is Love Gradable?” Romano-Arabica Journal 2 (2002): 48–54. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1957. Gelder, Geert Jan van. “The Terrified Traveller: Ibn al-Rumi’s Anti-Raḥīl.” Journal of Arabic Literature 27, no. 1 (1996): 37–48. Gruendler, Beatrice. Medieval Arabic Praise Poetry:  Ibn al-Rumi and the Patron’s Redemption. London: Routledge, 2003. Guest, Rhuvon. Life and Works of Ibn Er Rûmî. London: Luzac, 1944.

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Writing to the End of Love al-Ḥamawī, Yāqūt b. ‘Abdallāh. Muʿjam al-Udabā’. 5  vols. Beirut:  Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1991. Hamori, A. “Love Poetry (Ghazal).” In ‘Abbasid Belles-Lettres. Cambridge History of Arabic Literature, eds Julia Ashtiany, T. M. Johnstone, J. D. Latham, R. B. Sergeant, and G. Rex Smith, 202–18. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Ḥarakāt, Muṣṭafā. Awzān al-Shiʿr. Cairo: al-Dār al-Thaqāfiyya li al-Nashr, 1998. Ḥāwī, Īliyā Salīm. Ibn al-Rūmī: Fannahu wa Nafsiyyatuhu min Khilāl Shiʿrihi. 2nd ed. Beirut: Maktabat al-Madrasa wa Dār al-Kitāb al-Lubnānī, 1980. al-Ḥillī, Ṣafī al-Dīn. Dīwān Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī. Edited by Karam al-Bustānī. Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, n.d. Ibn Abī Ḥajala, Aḥmad b. Yaḥyā. Dīwān al-Ṣabāba. Edited by Muḥammad Ibrāhīm al-Dusūqī. Cairo: Maktabat Ibn Sīna li al-Nashr wa al-Tawzīʿ, 1994. Ibn Fāris, Aḥmad. al-Ṣāḥibī fī Fiqh al-Lugha. Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Mu’ayyad, 1910. Ibn Ḥazm, ‘Alīb. Aḥmad. Ṭawq al-Ḥamāma fī al-Ulfa wa al-Ilāf. Edited by Iḥsān ‘Abbās. Beirut: Al-Mu’assasa al-ʿArabiyya li al-Dirāsāt wa al-Nashr, 1987. Ibn Ḥijja, Abū Bakr b. ‘Alī. Khizānat al-Adab wa Ghāyat al-Arab. Edited by ‘Iṣām Shiqyū. 11 vols. Beirut: Dār wa Maktabat al-Hilāl, 1988. Ibn Jinnī, Abū al-Fatḥ ‘Uthmān. Al-‘Arūḍ. Edited by Aḥmad Fawzī al-Hayyib. Kuwait: Dār al-Qalam, 1987. Ibn Khallikān, Abū al-‘Abbās Aḥmad b. Muḥammad b. Ibrāhīm b. Abī Bakr. Wafayāt al-Aʿyān. Edited by Iḥsān ‘Abbās. 7 vols. Beirut: Dār al-Thaqāfa, 1968. Ibn Rashīq al-Qayrawānī, al-Ḥasan. al-ʿUmda fi Maḥāsin al-Shi‘r wa Ādābihi. Edited by Muḥammad Muḥyī al-Dīn ‘Abd al-Ḥamīd. 2 vols. Beirut: Dār al-Jīl, 1981. Ibn al-Rūmī. Dīwān Ibn al-Rūmī. Edited by Ḥusayn Naṣṣār. 6 vols. Cairo: Maṭbaʿat Dār al-Kutub wa al-Wathā’iq al-Qawmiyya, 2003. Khan, Ruqayya Yasmine. “On the Significance of Secrecy in the Medieval Arabic Romances.” Journal of Arabic Literature 31, no. 3 (2000): 238–53. ——— Self and Secrecy in Early Islam. Columbia:  University of South Carolina Press, 2008. Kuntze, Simon. “Love and God:  The Influence of Ghazal on Mystic Poetry.” In Ghazal as World Literature I: Transformations of a Literary Genre, eds Thomas Bauer and Angelika Neuwirth, 157–80. Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2005. al-Kutubī, Muḥammad b. Shākir, Fawāt al-Wafayāt. Edited by ‘Alī Muḥammad b. Yuʿawiḍ Allāh and ‘Ādil Aḥmad ‘Abd al-Mawjūd. 2 vols. Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyya, 2000. McKinney, Robert C. The Case of Rhyme versus Reason: Ibn al-Rūmī and His Poetics in Context. Leiden: Brill, 2004. Moosa, Ebrahim. “Textuality in Muslim Imagination:  From Authority to Metaphoricity.” Acta Academia Supplementum 1 (1995): 54–65. al-Nuwayrī, Aḥmad b. ‘Abd al-Wahhāb. Nihāyat al-Arab fī Funūn al-Adab. Edited by Mufīd Qamḥiyya et al. 33 vols. Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2004.

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2 Sexual Displacement in Season of Migration to the North Asaad Alsaleh

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. Rumi

Abstract In this chapter, I analyze the sexual relationships between Mustafa Saʿeed and his English mistresses in Season of Migration to the North (1966), a novel by the acclaimed Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih (1928–2009). This novel pairs up a Middle Eastern beloved with European subjects, connecting them through intriguing sexual experiences that take place during the colonization of Sudan. The text also demonstrates what I  call “displaced sexuality,” by which I mean the presence of complex sexual relations that shift from the body of the sex partner to what he or she symbolizes:  a highly sexualized Orient. The Oriental identity of the protagonist, Mustafa Saʿeed, creates disruptive relationships in which subjects reveal a desire to fulfill fantasies that go beyond the desired body. Such desires are rooted in the dynamics of power that motivate control over and possession of the other, and the reaction against such dynamics. The chapter re-examines the

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures novel’s sexually misconceived encounters, tensions, and fantasies through the paradigm of a dominating West and a dominated Orient, showing how sexual bodies and personal interactions are perceived and embodied within an artistically designed erotic framework.

Introduction When thrown in the sea of fundamental conflict caused by cultural misunderstanding, tendencies for control, and the emergence of the beloved as a scheming impostor, the concept of the beloved becomes obscure. In some literary works, the beloved may represent a trope, stripped of all romance and left seeking the fulfillment of a desire not purely sexual but rather rooted in a fantasy of control over what the body stands for. Tayeb Salih navigates this aspect of carnal relationships as he turns our attention to the gap between imagination and practice set within the world of fictional characters that care more about dominance than love. The morphing of sexual desire in his text reflects “undesired” cultural consequences as the beloved takes advantage of being highly romanticized due to his Oriental origin. When applied to this text, postcolonial theory allows us to see that women can be sexual aggressors toward men, and that their aggression is culturally (as well as politically) motivated. It also enables us to see how the presuppositions of sexual dominance or vulnerability, which are based on the dichotomy of West and Orient, prove to be damaging to both sides. Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (henceforth, Season) opens up multilayered postcolonial discussions as well as other theoretical approaches. It problematizes the theme of sexuality and the characters that embody it, reversing, in the process, certain stereotypes related to East-West divisions. The text illuminates how sexuality between Western and Eastern bodies can be entangled with more than bodily desires, unveiling various dynamics of power rooted in such sexuality. Season employs a thrilling narrative, with foreplay that delays fulfillment of the reader’s desire to know why Mustafa or his mistresses are entrapped in such bewildering sexual relationships. In this text, partners are not seeking sexual satisfaction through body-to-body contact; instead, they are looking for the Orient  – and all the symbols, meanings, and signs associated with 42

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Sexual Displacement in Season of Migration to the North it – through such contact. It is noteworthy in this regard that feminization of the East is either purposefully absent or is contested by the masculinized East, which is a recurring pattern in Season as it deals with several complicated sexual partnerships. In all of these encounters, the African body is everything but normal, always sought after, even if it is apparently the active seeker for a Western body. A Sudanese who had been a student in England for seven years and just returned to his small village in colonized Sudan narrates the novel. Expressing a personal affiliation with his town, the narrator remarks how the seven-year absence made him long deeply for the company of the local people, who were always in his dreams and memory. While reestablishing his connection with them, he becomes increasingly curious about a new villager, a man named Mustafa Saʿeed. The narrator recognizes that there has been always an air of mystery surrounding Mustafa, who came from the vicinity of Khartoum five years ago, bought a piece of land, and got married to Hosna one year after his settlement. The narrator finally meets Mustafa, whose appearance is unmistakably that of a handsome man, and he is impressed with Mustafa’s remarkable ability to recite poetry in fluent English. The narrator’s search for Mustafa’s identity leads him to discover bits and pieces about his past as the only child of a Khartoum-based family, with a mother whose husband died before he was born. Then, through Mustafa’s own recollections, the novel reveals more about this character. After showing an outstanding performance at school – thanks to a mind “like a sharp knife, cutting with cold effectiveness”1  – Mustafa’s English mentors provide him with scholarships to continue his studies, and he goes to Cairo and then to Oxford in England. In Egypt, then also under British colonial rule, he admits that he is aroused by and attracted to his English mentor’s wife. After being introduced to Mr Robinson, the headmaster of Mustafa’s high school, Mrs Robinson embraces him and kisses him, leaving Mustafa with this flash of realization: At that moment, as I stood on the station platform amidst a welter of sounds and sensations, with the woman’s arms round my neck, her mouth on my check, the smell of her body – a strange European smell  – tickling my nose, her breast touching my

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures chest, I felt – I, a boy of twelve – a vague sexual yearning I had never previously experienced. I felt as though Cairo, that large mountain to which my camel had carried me, was a European woman just like Mrs. Robinson, its arms embracing me, its perfume and the odour of its body filling my nostrils (25).

This sexual awakening is the beginning of Mustafa’s pattern of preying on European women, a pattern which even leads to extreme behavior motivated by a desire for revenge and destruction, set within the context of his awareness of what the European man had done in Africa. In London, Mustafa plays an eccentric role in the already tense relationship between the West and its Oriental “subjects,” targeting women from all classes and ages. These women become sexually obsessed with him, ensnared by his world and the fabricated images of the Orient – the images that he magnifies, embodies, and destructively reverses. He coldly drives three of them to suicide before serving a prison term, returning to his country, getting married to a woman from his village, and leaving the mystery of his life and death for the narrator to explore. Some critics see in Mustafa’s sexuality an adaptation of the same European tactics of domination, essentialism, and sexual conquest of the vulnerable. He either demonstrates “interracial sexuality that takes the form of revenge by the colonized on the colonizer,” according to Shadi Neimneh, or becomes involved in reversing the politics of sex and colonialism by adopting “an Oriental persona to his conquests of Englishwomen in order to avenge the ways in which the South/East has been penetrated and possessed by the North/West,” as Brian Gibson maintains.2 Other critics see in Mustafa’s sexual entrapment a failure “to resolve the injustices consistent with the colonial encounter [that] ends disastrously with Mustafa’s jail … [and a failure] to achieve a difference in the project of African freedom and liberation.”3 Mustafa drives his mistresses to commit suicide, because neither he nor they could achieve their fantasies. Sex and the Orient are mutually constituted, the former extremely intensified by the latter. Fantasies are drawn from hierarchical power relations, and are so powerful that they do not vanish but rather transform the actors involved into a different state of being. In this novel, fantasies seek more fulfillments through imagined rather than real bodies before facing a devastating dead-end. Together with 44

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Sexual Displacement in Season of Migration to the North sexual deception, violent sexual interaction demonstrates how power in the hands of the Oriental object is used to inflict pain on his or her prey, reversing the abuses of power inherent in colonization and imperialism. Taking possession of an Eastern body symbolizes, in the novel, the colonization of an Eastern territory: though temporarily claimed, neither the body nor the territory will be fully obtained.

Displaced Sexuality In order to analyze the relationships in Season, one must examine, yet again, the complexity of sexuality. The English women in Season are sexually oriented toward a lover from the East, whether Mustafa or someone else. They find in Mustafa’s body the sexual personification of the Orient they desire. He plays the role of the beloved, who can be tough, primitive, and repellent, but remains an object of desire for the English women, who take the risk of exploring him as their Oriental adventure. The beloved here is deeply enamored with relationships and self-serving practices that embody revenge and the reversal of politicized sexuality. Mustafa is involved in displaced sexuality, where a desired object (the Orient) and a desiring person (the English woman) become conditioned not by sexual desire but by the pleasure of obtaining the East as it is incarnated in the body of its agent. This theoretical frame, I believe, is very appropriate to understand this complex novel, where sexuality cannot be understood as body-based, but rather a state of mind (mis)informed by the project of colonialism. Whenever the Orient is present, a set of expectations, built on biases and assumptions, is ready to emerge. The following description of Ann Hammond’s frenzied infatuation with the symbolically significant Mustafa shows how he manipulates this attitude: “When she saw me, she saw a dark twilight like a false dawn. Unlike me, she yearned for tropical climes, cruel suns, purple horizons. In her eyes I was a symbol of all her hankerings. I am South that yearns for the North and the ice.” (30) Yet, Mustafa’s Oriental body – which is automatically expected to be submissive to her longing, as if he were an agent for an imagined tour she wants to take to the East – becomes closely associated with an imperialistic perception. Thus, Salih explores a symptom similar 45

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures to Ivan Petrovich Pavlov’s theory of conditional reflexes, where there is a connection between the responses spurred by external stimuli and previous experiences. The body of Mustafa triggers a desire for the Orient, for an intimate connection with an Oriental sex partner. This Oriental body stands as the embodiment of the Orient, and hence cannot resist or deny access to it by any power-seeking, body-desiring Western partner. However, submission is reversed here, as the Oriental body forces its lovers into compliance, fully subordinating them, since they have no control over their own desires. Once a desire becomes displaced, the body expressing such a desire becomes easily controllable, a condition that Mustafa is aware of and repeatedly manipulates. As is evident in the interaction between the characters, Season unveils a Western public taste and imagination that desires to have the whole Orient in its bed. While entertaining such a fantasy, the European characters try to live in their Orientalized worlds with partners they mistake for lovers. Because displaced sexuality converts the public image of an essentialized object (the Orient) into a private desire, there remains always a conflict between these spheres. When sexuality involves Western and Eastern partners who have colonial interactions and disruptive images of each other, the private (the sexual) becomes dependent on (and derived from) the public (the imagined Other). Power mechanisms and sexuality operate with the same roles in public and in private. Mustafa attracts women who are ready to disregard their cultural norms of same-race sexuality. But because they surrender to the conflicting historical presuppositions of feminizing the Orient or exaggerating its masculinity, they fall victims to falsehood and destruction in their private affairs. Relying on disoriented intimacy, or the lack of a love relationship, Mustafa subverts these presuppositions, re-conceptualizing the role of the beloved and denying the possibility of mutual love. Not only do his mistresses fail to keep their culturally motivated sexuality under control, they also end up denouncing it or serving as examples of its destructive consequences. The text demonstrates how sexuality, or attitudes about it, becomes a deeply rooted dimension of an imagined East-versus-West world. The body of Mustafa or any other Oriental body loses both its distinctive identity and emotional balance and becomes a representation of the entire Orient. In displaced sexuality, differentiation does not exist: Mustafa is dealing with 46

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Sexual Displacement in Season of Migration to the North the Orient-obsessed English women as sex objects because they entered his world through an act of sexual objectification. For example, Sheila Greenwood does not consider him a human being, but a fetish that mysteriously led to her death: “She would lick my face with her tongue and say ‘Your tongue’s as crimson as a tropic sunset.’ I never had enough of her nor she of me. Each time she would gaze at me as though discovering something new. ‘How marvelous your black colour is!’ she would say to me – the colour of magic and mystery and obscenities. She committed suicide.” (138–9) This exoticization of Mustafa’s body is the result of assigning fixed sexual roles derived from his Oriental identity. It is drawn from Sheila’s imagination, which twists Mustafa’s image into the one seen in her own mind. As Mustafa admits here, he internalized this rather imposed identity, using it to draw her deeper into her obsession with the exotic Orient. Sheila died because she could not handle a reality she encountered later, as Mustafa radicalized her obsession to such a degree that she would rather die than live without him. As such, his European lovers see Mustafa as an exaggerated figure of Orientalism. In the very act of submitting themselves to this essentialist view of the Oriental body, they invest in imagined sexuality, mapped onto Mustafa as a sensual body, which is perceived as uncivilized, deviant, and unexplored. He is not seen as having a submissive and shy personality, which makes him a desirable mysterious person. The Orient he stands for is also a mystery  – or it should remain so, always waiting for demystification at the hands of the Western experts. While Mustafa employs his seductiveness and sexuality as a self-serving beloved taking advantage of his mistresses, he unpredictably and mysteriously leads them to death, giving them his body only partially and temporarily, while their desires go far beyond this body. Given such a presupposed mystification of the Orient, Mustafa could entangle his partners in the enigmatically mysterious worlds that they initially created. In Mustafa’s case, the Oriental person has morphed into the irresistible beloved that represents the Oriental world. His mistress Isabella Seymour asks him: “Are you African or Asian?” (38). The problem of Mustafa and his narrator, as Saree Makdisi suggests, is that he is “neither black nor white, but grey; neither wholly Eastern nor wholly Western, neither completely European nor completely Arab … they [Mustafa and the narrator] 47

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures are trapped between cultures.”4 Yet, even if Mustafa is grey in the eyes of the critic, he is still a black sex machine in the eyes of his female partners. According to this Western perception, Mustafa is merely an Oriental body because he qualifies for, even by defying, the essentialized views, fantasies, and cultural fixtures imposed on him. The Orient in this case is sexually fixed, a pleasure-giving place, where the pleasing effect intensifies with the increasing submissiveness and surrender to those claiming it as their identity. That is why Mustafa is hardly treated as a human being while he is outside Africa. Rather, he fits Edward Said’s description of how the Orient is imagined: “feminine, its riches as fertile, its main symbols the sensual woman, the harem, and the despotic  – but curiously attractive  – ruler.”5 Mustafa’s mistresses refuse to distinguish between Mustafa the person and the exaggerated image of their infatuation, mixing reality with imagination (because the difference does not exist in their mind). He is reduced to a prototypical body, regardless of his social status, education, and apparent manipulation of his power as an object of desire. While Mustafa seems loath to entrust anybody with love, he tantalizingly gives his body to his English mistresses only to control their own bodies, to instill in them an ever-increasing desire for him. It is this resistance – the unwillingness to completely consummate a desire, supposedly mutual between him and his sex partners – that drives his mistresses to crave more satisfaction from the entire Orient, a satisfaction that cannot be reached by consuming Mustafa’s body alone. He takes advantage of previously formed perceptions about the Orient, adds his own about the West, and (in what seems as highly, but daringly, experimental) explores the result of these perceptions when they meet fantasies. He plays a sex game of desires that are mentally constructed, culturally aroused, but, when the bodies meet, dangerously denied. The emerging result is a series of conflicting relationships between the Orient and the West: the Orient seduces, the West falls in the trap, then the Orient wakes up and moves away, leaving the maddened West irrevocably entangled, unable to detach. The root of all these irrational behaviors is the displacement of sexuality. The European characters’ desire cannot be satisfied through a sexual encounter with an Oriental body in whose arms they seek that fulfillment. All Mustafa offers after the game ends is sexual torture and the depressing realization of how deluded it all is. He uses English women’s sexual illusions as a 48

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Sexual Displacement in Season of Migration to the North powerful tool to complete the seduction, which the conjuring of the Orient started, and only Mustafa can finish: ‘Then you live on the banks of the Nile?’ ‘Yes. Our house is right on the bank of the Nile, so that when I’m lying on my bed at night I put my hand out of the window and idly play with the Nile water till sleep overtakes me.’ ‘Mr. Mustafa, the bird has fallen into the snare. The Nile, that snake god, has gained a new victim. The city has changed into a woman … You, my lady, may not know, but you … have been infected with a deadly disease which has come from you know not where and which will bring about your destruction.’ (39)

Lying to Isabella Seymour about the Orient, a place that could never be built on truth, facilitates Mustafa’s plan: to create a displaced fantasy where she believes she possesses the Orient by giving her body to him. In response to her question about his home, Mustafa fabricates stories about deserts of golden sands, jungles of non-existent animals  – elephants, lions, and crocodiles – all set in a fantastic land. He is aware of how his self-delusional partner has developed a deep desire for the Orient and is ready to believe anything he says: “Curiosity had changed to gaiety, and gaiety to sympathy, and when I stir the still pool in its depths the sympathy will be transformed into a desire upon whose taut strings I shall play as I wish.” (38) He also recognizes how to stimulate her deepest longing for the unknown, making her and the other English mistresses ready for a journey led by a misleading guide. The destination of this journey is the Orient, but it is undertaken through the body of Mustafa, who refers to himself, more than once, as a camel – an animal able to stay alive for an astoundingly long time without water, without quenching its thirst or satisfying its desire. The reference to the camel in the novel is associated with Mustafa’s movement from one place, or body, to another: “[I]‌saddled my camel and continued my travels” (24), he says at one point, and later, “My camel carried me.” (25) When the English mistresses want to find relief from their desire for the Orient by completely giving their bodies to one of its representatives, this same Oriental figure, Mustafa, proves to them that such diseased desire is irremediable and the only solution is death. This might explain why, in his reading of Salih’s novel, Christopher S. Nassaar recognizes it as 49

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures “a devastating absurdist denunciation of life,” a view that suits sexual displacement and validates its dynamics.6 As soon as Mustafa tries to escape the role of representing the collective identity of the Orient and become an individual instead, this beloved starts to powerfully shock his women. Each one of them begins to feel she is already broken, just like the fantasy itself – and that is what Ann Hammond, Sheila Greenwood, and Jean Morris experience after their love affairs with Mustafa come to an end. Season centralizes the mastery and mystery of the Orient by creating a public image that is incongruous with a real identity. When Mustafa gives a lecture at Oxford University about the Abbasid poet Abū Nuwās, he confirms what many critics saw as a European tendency to see the East as always suffused with mysteries.7 Mustafa reads Abū Nuwās’s poetry “in a comic oratorical style which [he] claimed was how Arabic poetry was recited.” (143) To his surprise, the audience takes these lies as sublime truths and encourages him to lie even more. Therefore, he manipulates their receptiveness towards distorted and exaggerated views of an Orient that is always fascinating in their imagination, an opportunity of which he cunningly takes advantage. More surprisingly, among his audience are Orientalists and officials from the Colonial Office and the Middle East section of the British government. Mustafa illustrates how such Orientalist perspectives are embraced by knowledge centers and government officers, as well as by individuals with putative expertise who are ready to validate such misrepresentations of the Orient. After Mustafa finishes his public lecture, he proceeds to the private sphere, a space where he invents another appealing Orient for pleasure-seeking women. Due to their displaced sexuality, these women fall in love with their conception of an already created, ecstatic, and fixed Orient, which Mustafa magnifies and embodies. Eventually, the Orient becomes bigger than what the English mistresses could consume or consummate.

Sexualizing the Orient In the established discourse of Oriental sex, which is based on the Western imagination, sex is not taboo. Historically, the European gaze on the East had many agents, including authors, travelers, diplomats, and explorers. These agents often tended to draw on their own imagination when 50

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Sexual Displacement in Season of Migration to the North reporting about the Orient. Moreover, once they were in the Orient they departed from the norms and ethics of their homeland to take advantage of the remoteness of the East, where they became less restrained sexually. Historian Juan Cole gives an example from the French expedition to Egypt, where there was “French dalliance with Egyptian women,” which, while it was normalized for the French, became “a source of humiliation and friction for the Cairo populace.”8 In Ronald Hyam’s Empire and Sexuality, in which he surveys the sexual indulgences of British officers among the people they ruled, he borrows a telling statement from the French writer Gustave Flaubert. In an uninhibited confession, Flaubert declares that some of the Europeans traveling to Oriental lands  – while using government funds – went too far in their carnal explorations. They could elaborately tell of their sexual affairs and thus provide sex education even to those most knowledgeable in sex manners. Such an assertion was predicated on the association of the Orient with excessive and unrestrained sexuality. In his own words, Flaubert discloses, “Here … one admits one’s sodomy. We have considered it our duty to indulge in the form of ejaculation.”9 Additionally, the English poet Lord Byron openly reported sodomy in Turkish baths,10 contributing to the assumption that the Orient is a land without norms or strictures against any kinds of sex. Another result of these attitudes, which are based on always taking Europe as the normalizing referential, is the depiction of Islam as a promiscuous religion based on its marriage laws. A curious European must for that reason alone find the Orient a liberating place that allows all kinds of sexual practices. Conversely, in Salih’s novel, Mustafa becomes a messenger of the East; the European protagonists did not need to go to the Orient, as long as its representative could be brought to Europe. Instead, they want to visit the East with their imagination, and so the Oriental figures needed to conform to this imagined Orient and make themselves available for European lovers to explore and possess, as they unleash deep and even devastating desires. By crafting a text in which sexual encounters are inflamed by Oriental misconceptions, Salih challenges the discourse of masculine Europe. He aesthetically presents dynamics of sexuality and power, evoking Michel Foucault’s analysis in The History of Sexuality. Foucault contends that psychiatric investigations, together with medical and pedagogical knowledge and the repression of sexuality, “function as mechanisms with a double 51

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures impetus: pleasure and power.”11 Linked to the notion of power, sexual practices reflect social hierarchies. Foucault also argues that for the past three hundred years, sexuality has been repressed as something dangerous and taboo, confined to the private domain of husband and wife or between “a superior and a subordinate, an individual who dominates and one who is dominated, one who commands and one who complies.”12 The sexuality embodied in Salih’s text reveals relationships that reverse the exercise of power. Mustafa has an empowering self-awareness about being a desired Oriental object. His partners perpetuate the fight for bodily control by imagining they are in a love game with the East itself. In the end, nobody wins the object of their desire. The beloved proves to be an imported idea, traveling from the East to the West amidst ignorance of the East while insisting on possessing it. Western curiosity about the East, refracted through the perspectives of writers, soldiers, and statesmen, creates “lenses through which the Orient is experienced, and they shape the language, perception, and form of the encounter between East and West,” according to Edward Said.13 Additionally, if Foucault’s discourse on the intricate correlation of sexuality and power is a pair of eyeglasses, then the English sex partners of Mustafa seem to never have taken off such misleading tools of perception. Mustafa continuously employs the same approach to seduction, Orientalizing himself even more than he is already Orientalized by the women he encounters: “London was emerging from the war and the oppressive atmosphere of the Victorian era. I  got to know the pubs of Chelsea, the clubs of Hampstead, and the gatherings of Bloomsbury. I would read poetry, talk of religion and philosophy, discuss paintings, and say things about the spirituality of the East. I would do everything possible to entice women to my bed. Then I would go after some new prey.” (29) He knows how to invoke the displaced sexuality that lies under the mask of appreciating arts, discussing religious matters, and exchanging opinions across geographical and cultural boundaries. All these intellectual communications pave the way to his bed, which transforms the innocent Ann Hammond, a 20-year-old student at Oxford, “into a harlot” whose letter to him before she kills herself charges, “Mr. Saʿeed, may God damn you.” (27) She also fell in love with an image of the East conveyed to her by books and lectures. This perception, as Salih’s text demonstrates, becomes more 52

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Sexual Displacement in Season of Migration to the North dangerous than the Oriental person himself. Images and subjects that enter the world of sex through the imagined body of the East initially invoke displaced sexuality here. The illusion of possessing power over a desired object is culturally constructed, but Mustafa fiercely rejects and reverses these power dynamics, transforming those who want to taste the Orient through him into pathetic persons incapable of distinguishing between a genuine Orient and an imagined, deceptive one. The case of the female protagonists in Season echoes Eugenia Zuroski’s study of the eighteenth century as a stage for pre-Orientalism. Zuroski shows how “Chinese things became ideal objects of the English imagination.”14 She notices that the taste for Chinese objects preceded the actual possession of them through trade. Such taste produced China-crazed people who domesticated the country as a result of their longing for and perception of anything Chinese. Mustafa’s mistresses are unable to satisfy their fantasy without being provoked by an Oriental object of desire  – domesticated, fetishized, and stereotyped. This colonial self-authorization over the Orient, stereotyped as a desired object that evokes pleasure and fear, reverberates through Said’s critique of the Orientalists who conjure up metaphors of degrading sexuality as they allegedly study the Orient in a scientific way. For example, when the British Orientalist Bernard Lewis discusses the concept of revolution, he selectively points out an Arabic etymological root meaning “to rise up (e.g., of a camel), to be stirred, to be excited,” a choice that Edward Said rightly critiques.15 Mustafa’s identity, according to Wail Hassan, is given to him by the British, “by overt racists who see him as a black savage, by infatuated lovers for whom he is a ‘pagan god.’ ”16 Hassan postulates that Mustafa also “has played the fool” by assuming the role of someone who is liberating Africa and colonizing the North.17 That is why we should not overlook how Salih uses Mustafa to invoke, and then to subvert, such a colonial discourse by revealing through the reversal of power that the supposedly rootless and powerless beloved can be a deceptive and dangerously seductive one. Furthermore, the text suggests that Mustafa has a disturbed relationship with place. He lacks “a sense of home or belonging to a group; the duality of his English identity contorts place-sense. Thus, he has constructed a simulacrum of Africa for his English home.”18 He gets “wild” only when he is outside Africa, and there is a marked difference between his sexuality in 53

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures Africa and in England. Sexuality in this text is determined in no small part by place, shifting taste, scope, and tension, based not on choice of partner but, instead, on location. Hence it is displaced and evasive, stimulated by a specific body due to an imagined association between this body and its larger representation. By reconsidering the varied sexual and textual implications of Season, displaced sexuality enables us to refine our understanding of Orientalism. The East is transformed into a desire invoked by Western imagination, and this desire cannot, or should not, be sated. Salih’s text presents how the Orient never has a body, and that all apparent embodiments are illusions, including Mustafa’s own embodiment of the Orient. In response to the colonial discourse, the protagonist becomes the stereotyped person that can manipulate power because he recognizes and chooses not to reject his status as a stereotype. Rather, Mustafa plays the role to the point that the stereotype reveals its own structural flaws, its inability to satisfy the perverse sexual desire of the English women. The Orient is there in the body that stands for it, but it is always deferred, like meaning in the poststructural model. The Orient is suspended beyond the body that seems to initially represent it. Thus, sexual displacement reveals the impossibility of embodying such an imagined, desired, and unattained Orient.

Rewriting Sexuality Frantz Fanon once stated that “white and black represent the two poles of a world, two poles in perpetual conflict,” and the Oriental body in a dominant Western culture can easily be seen as a representative of another inferior culture.19 Season presents sex as an area of conflict – even under the bedcovers – similar to the one noted by Fanon, but it is a conflict that is more cultural than racial in nature. In this conflict, the Oriental beloved becomes an imagined body capable of oversatisfying desiring European bodies. Their desires are not completely satisfied as they are fulfilled by a partner who is allegedly less human than a partner belonging to the West. Because the body is not Western, imagination will attribute to this body supernatural capacities, making it superior to a Western body, even if only in the realm of sexual fantasy. Power-oriented cultures are indeed the place that situates sexual displacement aptly; sexual manners here imply that 54

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Sexual Displacement in Season of Migration to the North desires are being motivated, modified, and even displaced according to who is sleeping with whom and whether they come from a “superior” or “inferior” culture. The sexual displacement of the characters in the novel is based on a displaced Orient, an Orient that belongs neither to the West nor the East – an Orient created by Western imagination, expectations, and assumptions. Edward Said’s discussion is relevant here as to show how the written discourse about the Orient is nowhere close to its reality. Said argues that “the written statement [about the Orient] is a presence to the reader by virtue of its having excluded, displaced, made supererogatory any such real thing as ‘the Orient.’ Thus, all of Orientalism stands forth and away from the Orient: that Orientalism makes sense at all depends more on the West than on the Orient.”20 Mustafa’s mistresses are all in one way or another readers, or recipients, of written images about the Orient. Their fantasies about it belong to a culturally constructed misperception of what it means or how it feels to be sexually attached to the Orient. If we take Said’s critical warning that there is no text separate from its culture and that culture and (political) power sometimes reinforce each other, then we understand why Said insistently asks his readers to look at literature through a historical investigative gaze with the aesthetic appreciation it deserves. Said believes that the “realities of power and authority – as well as the resistances offered by men, women, and social movements to institutions, authorities and orthodoxies – are the realities that makes texts possible, that deliver them to their readers, that solicit the attention of critics.”21 Salih reveals the colonial, imperialistic, and Orientalist rhetoric by reversing the narration and action and allowing his protagonist to carry an Eastern agency and activity, but only after problematizing preconceived images and showing that they are hardly grounded in reality. Salih dramatically reverses the imperialist cultural view of the Oriental object as inferior, rewriting the narrative through his position of authority as an author. As he points out: “In Europe there is the idea of dominating us. That domination is associated with sex. Figuratively speaking, Europe raped Africa in a violent fashion. Mustapha [Saʿeed], the hero of the novel used it to react to that domination with an opposite reaction, which had an element of revenge seeking. In his violent female conquests he wants to inflict on Europe the degradation, which it had imposed upon his people. He wants 55

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures to rape Europe in a metaphorical fashion.”22 Yet, we can see that, with all the artistic tension built in the text, Salih’s work is not a typical postcolonial piece of writing intent only upon delegitimizing the imperial era. Revenge is not performed in a predictable manner, as the English mistresses are not raped or even deceived into sexual relationships. They choose to end their lives when their beloved leaves them, and they keep behaving as genuinely in love. Still, they have dubiously motivated desires that target the embodiment of the Orient in lieu of the body. In his discussion of Shakespeare and the postcolonial, Reed Way Dasenbrock points out how postcolonial theory presents a critical stance on the European colonial past. He also argues that Shakespeare is considered part of this past in literary and cultural senses. Dasenbrock rightly notes that “the purest example of writing back against Shakespeare is not found in Anglophone literature, but rather in the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, which is a chilling retelling of Othello written in Arabic and set in contemporary England and the Sudan.”23 Indeed, Salih takes an “intimate” topic matching the sensitive yet complex relationship between the East and the West. Apart from sexual displacement, he shows that love can happen between the East and the West. Yet, more often than not, this love is surrounded by political consciousness, cultural alertness, or selfish motivations, making betrayal a strong possibility. As we see when Mustafa returns to Africa, he has a private room where he cherishes the memories of his mistresses from the North. Does he regret the deception or the revenge? Is he still in love with the North? It is hard to know the answer to these questions since we are facing a transformed Mustafa, a person who is now secretive, quiet, and no longer interested in life, just like some of his mistresses in the last stage of their agonizing love for him. Their displaced sexuality is over, and that is when they become close to death.

Conclusion Season represents and contributes to new dimensions of problematizing and reversing colonial narratives. Love relationships are presented in a way that the partners are obsessed with ideas about bodies rather than carnal needs. Colonization (Western dominance) is indirectly blamed for 56

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Sexual Displacement in Season of Migration to the North destroying these relationships, as it takes on the Orient as an exciting project of scientific appropriation, along with geographical, economic, and cultural incursions; human relationships in this text replay such controlling roles, as I showed through displaced sexuality. The Oriental body is desired for its embodiment of the Orient at large, and having a greater desire for the representation than for the body itself challenges fantasies about passionate fulfillment. Whether this body is English or Mustafa’s, what I  have called sexual displacement demonstrates that such a desire drives partners to be involved in deceptions and manipulations typical of the Orientalized East-West relationship. The Orient obviously was only in the minds of the female characters, a difficult realization to accept, and even more difficult to understand than the concept of death. Such exotic, perverse sexual relationships stem from a colonial discourse and are converted by Salih into a postcolonial narrative responding to European imagination, colonization, and narration about the Orient. As an object of desire, the Oriental body incapacitates these Western women, preventing them from seeing or feeling how it is gradually enslaving them, almost killing them in the process of achieving such a radical, displaced desire. The sexually displaced characters (or partners) planned, imagined, and believed that by sleeping with one Oriental individual, the whole Orient would be in their bedrooms.

Notes 1. Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North, tr. Denys Johnson-Davis (Oxford: Heinemann, 1969), 22 (further page references will be given parenthetically in text). 2. Shadi Neimneh, “Cultures, Identities, and Sexualities in Leslie Silko’s Ceremony and Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North,” Teaching American Literature 5, no. 2 (2012): 3. Brian Gibson, “An Island Unto Himself? Masculinity in Season of Migration to the North,” Jouvert 7, no. 1 (2002). 3. James Tar Tsaaior, “Geo-spatial Politics And The Trope of Migration in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North,” Journal of North African Studies 14, no. 2 (2009): 231. 4. Saree S. Makdisi, “The Empire Renarrated: Season of Migration to the North and the Reinvention of the Present,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 4 (1992): 811. 5. Edward W. Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Cultural Critique 1 (1985): 103.

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures 6. Christopher S.  Nassaar, “Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Salih’s Season of Migration to the North,” The Explicator 56, no. 2 (1998): 106. 7. Roger Owen, “Studying Islamic History,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 4, no. 2 (1973): 231. 8. Juan Cole, Napoleon’s Egypt:  Invading the Middle East (New  York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 187. 9. Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality:  The British Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 2. 10. Ibid., 92. 11. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, tr. Robert J. Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 45. 12. Ibid., 215. 13. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 58. 14. Eugenia Zuroski, “Chinese Things, British Identity, and the Pre-history of Orientalism in the Long Eighteenth Century” (PhD diss., Brown University, 2006), 50. 15. Even though Lewis records what a classic Arab lexiconist might use when explaining this word, Said is right to point out how the selection of such phrases is not apt for describing the modern sense of the word revolution, a word used in modern times as a reference to a political, social, and economic activity – utterly not related to the classical meaning of a camel rising up. 16. Wail S.  Hassan, Tayeb Salih:  Ideology and the Craft of Fiction (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 108. 17. Ibid., 110. 18. Mike Velez, “On Borderline between Shores:  Space and Place in Season of Migration to the North,” College Literature 37, no. 1 (2010): 190–203. 19. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, tr. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967), 44. 20. Said, Orientalism, 21–2. 21. Edward W. Said, The World, the Text and the Critic (London: Vintage, 1983), 5. 22. Constance E. Berkley and Osman Hassan Ahmed (eds and trans.), Tayeb Salih Speaks: Four Interviews with the Sudanese Novelist (Washington, DC: Embassy of the Democratic Republic of Sudan, 1982), 15–16. 23. Reed Way Dasenbrock, “Imitation versus Contestation: Walcott’s Postcolonial Shakespeare,” Callaloo 28, no. 1 (2005): 104.

Bibliography Berkley, Constance E., and Osman Hassan Ahmed (eds and trans.). Tayeb Salih Speaks: Four Interviews with the Sudanese Novelist. Washington, DC, Embassy of the Democratic Republic of Sudan, 1982.

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Sexual Displacement in Season of Migration to the North Cole, Juan. Napoleon’s Egypt:  Invading the Middle East. New  York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Dasenbrock, Reed Way. “Imitation versus Contestation:  Walcott’s Postcolonial Shakespeare.” Callaloo 28, no. 1 (2005): 104–13. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove, 1967. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1, An Introduction. Translated by Robert J. Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990. Gibson, Brian. “An Island unto Himself? Masculinity in Season of Migration to the North.” Jouvert 7, no. 1 (2002), available at http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v7is1/gibson.htm. Accessed March 28, 2014. Hassan, Wail S. Tayeb Salih: Ideology and the Craft of Fiction. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003. Hyam, Ronald. Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. Makdisi, Saree S. “The Empire Renarrated: Season of Migration to the North and the Reinvention of the Present.” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 4 (1992): 804–20. Nassaar, Christopher S. “Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Salih’s Season of Migration to the North.” The Explicator 56, no. 2 (1998): 105–9. Neimneh, Shadi. “Cultures, Identities, and Sexualities in Leslie Silko’s Ceremony and Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North.” Teaching American Literature 5, no. 2 (2012): 1–31. Owen, Roger. “Studying Islamic History.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 4, no. 2 (1973): 287–98. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1994. ——— “Orientalism Reconsidered.” Cultural Critique 1 (1985): 89–107. ——— The World, the Text and the Critic. London: Vintage, 1983. Salih, Tayeb. Season of Migration to the North. Translated by Denys Johnson-Davis. Oxford: Heinemann, 1969. Tsaaior, James Tar. “Geo-spatial Politics and the Trope of Migration in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North.” Journal of North African Studies 14, no. 2 (2009): 221–34. Velez, Mike. “On Borderline between Shores: Space and Place in Season of Migration to the North.” College Literature 37, no. 1 (2010): 190–203. Zuroski, Eugenia. “Chinese Things, British Identity, and the Pre-history of Orientalism in the Long Eighteenth Century.” PhD diss., Brown University, 2006.

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3 The Seduction of Fayrū z Baḥrī: The Affective Dimensions of Cultural Politics in Gamāl al-Ghīt ạ ̄nī’s Ḥ ikāyāt al-Khabī ’a (2002) Benjamin Koerber

When the figure of the lūṭī (“sodomite”) has made an appearance in the modern Arabic literary canon, he has been anything but “beloved.”1 The term itself is polemical, in contrast with the more neutral expression mithlī or mithlī jinsiyyan (“homosexual”), and its enunciation implies the distanced perspective of a critic upholding a norm, not the compassionate exchange of dialogue between mutually respecting peers. Typically, it is not merely an individual that is so incriminated, but an entire civilization: as Hanadi Al-Samman has argued, homosexuals in modern Arabic literature often “function as revolting metaphors of personal and national dispossession, of social and political decadence.”2 In the most extreme cases, the lūṭī is reduced to the role of the rapist, whose sexual penetration of a male protagonist signals nothing less than the economic, cultural, and political exploitation of the Arab world by foreign powers or local autocrats. Where the lūṭī is, love is not. Upon a casual read, Gamāl al-Ghīṭānī’s 2002 novel Ḥikāyāt al-Khabī’a (Tales of the Treasure Trove) would appear to be no exception to this trend.3 The novel dramatizes the rise to prominence of Fayrūz Baḥrī, a so-called lūṭī whose proximity to the executives of an unnamed “foundation” provokes 60

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The Seduction of Fayrūz Baḥrī overwhelmingly negative reactions among fellow employees, ranging from unease and disappointment to panic and disgust. Yet while Fayrūz repels, he also attracts. As this chapter demonstrates, the lūṭī is an agent in a game of seduction, where polemic exists alongside passion and the boundaries between “lover” and “beloved” are not so easy to determine. Several of Fayrūz’s male rivals, as they obsessively accumulate his secrets and target him with slander, betray a highly emotional attachment to him that, while not sexual in the strict sense, constitutes a species of desire. This desire, I  argue, is the result of Fayrūz’s playful oscillation between absence and presence, which kindles his rivals’ predisposition to fetishize and seek out the putatively unusual and valuable secrets of his private and professional selves. Furthermore, Fayrūz is able to attract others by playing on their fears of a vast homosexual conspiracy – an image of power that mirrors, in reverse, these others’ own ideal of masculinist hegemony. After bringing into view the affective bonds that tie characters within the text to Fayrūz Baḥrī, I show how the author extends this very game of seduction to the reader. By alternating between transparency and obscurity in his description of uncannily familiar personalities – including the use of character names that rhyme or echo with those of members of Egypt’s cultural and political elite  – al-Ghīṭānī constructs a roman-à-clef that seduces readers into digging up secrets behind the text and “cracking its code.” While this act of seduction limits the range of interpretations open to the reader, it allows the novel to yield rare and valuable insights about Egyptian cultural politics at the turn of the millennium, in particular their much-overlooked affective dimensions. Specifically, Ḥikāyāt al-Khabī’a dramatizes the public feud between the author, Gamāl al-Ghīṭānī, and Egypt’s long-standing minister of culture, Fārūq Ḥusnī (whose name is echoed by “Fayrūz Baḥrī”). While ostensibly a matter of cultural policy, this historical feud reveals itself in the novel to be suffused with the visceral panics and pleasures of its literary counterpart. My contention is that the rivalry, and subsequent reconciliation, between al-Ghīṭānī and Ḥusnī owed as much to the dynamics of seduction as to the principles and procedures of cultural politics as traditionally understood. Thus, more broadly, I aim to contribute to recent scholarship that has privileged affect over ideology in understanding the political in Egypt and beyond. 61

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The Seduction of the Lū ṭī : Between Panic and Pleasure Ḥikāyāt al-Khabī’a is in fact the sequel to, or second part of, Gamāl al-Ghīṭānī’s Ḥikāyāt al-Mu’assasa (Tales of the Foundation), which was published in 1997, five years earlier.4 The two novels share not a common plot or cast of characters, but a topos, namely, “the Foundation” or al-mu’assasa, a veritable behemoth with its hands in just about everything but nothing entirely specific: unnamed technological innovations, the latest in corporate managerial schemes, national and international politics and espionage, and the queer acronyms of globalization like COMESA, FIFA, FAW, and Benelux. The long-deceased “Founder” (al-mu’assis) whose presence haunts the two books is the object of nostalgic reverence for some, and of negligence and apathy for those who have managed, or yet desire, to occupy his office through intrigue and corruption:  a group of mostly technocrats, bureaucrats, prostitutes, and freaks. By the beginning of the second novel, Ḥikāyāt al-Khabī’a, the simple, paternalistic vision that had guided the Foundation through its early days has been all but erased by a wave of young professionals whose business sense is decidedly neo-liberal, and whose actions fall behind an increasingly thick veil of obscurity. In this context there is whisper of one “Fayrūz Baḥrī.” Who is Fayrūz Baḥrī? His name first appears amidst much noise, as the latest in a series of secretive figures promoted to sensitive positions during the term of the fourth and current chief executive. In the middle of Ḥikāyāt al-Khabīʾa, he is appointed “Head of the Fuyūḍāt Sector”: it is a nonsensical phrase, one among the many new position titles that parody the illegible and disorienting signscape of the technocratic sublime. While fuyūḍāt lacks any meaning in Modern Standard Arabic, it is a derivation of the root f-y-ḍ, which denotes “excess,” “abundance,” “fluidity,” or “flood.” Quite appropriately, then, Fayrūz is a figure that is always over the top, but also fluid in his seductive elusiveness: he can never quite be pinned down. Moreover, his position makes him responsible for the “Treasure Trove” (al-khabī’a) of the novel’s title: a labyrinthine vault of artifacts and artworks that are as priceless as they are nameless, located beneath the ground floor of the Foundation’s central building. 62

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The Seduction of Fayrūz Baḥrī Fayrūz’s entrance is through rumor:  “A single sentence, nearly uniform in content, was whispered and pronounced in secret and in the open: ‘There’s a sodomite [lūṭī] in the new administration’. ” (150–1) It is rumor, too, that translates this character to readers for the length of the novel. We, along with the Foundation’s employees, are treated to precise details about the types of boys he likes (168, 209), the ribald sex parties he calls “freeing the reigns” (250; iṭlāq al-‘anān), and – if there were any doubt remaining about the nature of his “deviance” – rumors of accounts of leaks of direct audio and visual recordings made of Fayrūz in bed with his partner. (244, 248, 260) There are of course allegations of corruption and mismanagement, too, but it is gossip of a sexual nature that dominates. These murmurings that introduce Fayrūz are, on the whole, pronounced in a register of fear and disgust. What Eve Sedgwick has called “homosexual panic” – an affective structure that renders men, especially those in high-powered professional settings, paranoid about being taken advantage of, or blackmailed by, homosexuals5  – takes shape in its classic form. Scattered signs of a general homosexual panic erupt at random points throughout the novel, even before the appearance of Fayrūz Baḥrī, and may be read as the affective-semiotic foreshocks of the panic proper. The Foundation’s chief executive is an early conduit for these signs. It is said that “His Excellency” – this is the chief executive’s recurring epithet – had the habit of curling up like a ball in the back seat of his car and, invisible to the rearview mirror, would pose strange questions to his driver. Once, out of the blue, he is said to have asked, “Can a man become a sexual deviant late in life?” A second version of this question is reported: “Can a man, who has not known sexual deviancy in his entire life, suddenly find his desire strengthen in the opposite direction, and strive for a man to penetrate him?” Yet a third version of the question is circulated: “Can a man turn into a sexual deviant after fifty?” (76). We do not know the driver’s response, and the question is as bewildering to the reader as it is to the employees of the Foundation. The chief executive is known to have a wife and children, as well as numerous mistresses. There is no context to cause us to expect this question, apart from the appearance of a “well-groomed” chauffeur who suffers from one of the chief executive’s notoriously capricious and unexplained grudges. This same anxiety finds other outlets for 63

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures expression, such as an equally random and unexpected warning, which several parents issue to their children. In one instance, a stepmother cautions her adopted son “not to take off his clothes in front of anyone, not to play English leapfrog, and not to let anyone touch his rear” (164). This echoes an earlier incident in the novel’s prequel, in which a secretary, caught in traffic, lets her mind wander to concerns about her two sons. Of the youngest, she expresses “her constant fear that someone will play a trick on him, as she had also feared for his older brother. She has tried … to warn them against playing games in which a boy must bend over, or in which boys jump over each other.”6 The appearance of Fayrūz Baḥrī, midway through the novel, effects a sudden increase in the volume of these phobic reverberations. While many employees in the Foundation are content to pass on the rumors of his “sexual deviance” without comment, others are driven totally mad by the alleged impropriety and exert no effort to conceal their opinions. These include a newspaper editorial warning of the dangers of “this type” taking office (154), a website that digs up salacious reports on Fayrūz’s “deviant” activism (218–19), and an older employee who bursts out into the hallway shouting “anything but this sodomite!.” (200) As the supervisor of the Treasure Trove becomes more intimate with the chief executive, and especially one of his mistresses, a number of the Foundation’s erstwhile powerbrokers grow increasingly incensed. But is panic the only motive for their protestations? Reading more closely, one can detect that, besides loathing, the lūṭī inspires love of a particular kind. Fayrūz is a “beloved,” I contend, not in the sense that he arouses the desires of the flesh – though this element is surely not lacking entirely – but because of the manner in which he is able to seduce Foundation employees into fixating on him endlessly. For Jean Baudrillard, “[seduction] does not consist of a simple appearance, nor a pure absence, but the eclipse of a presence. Its sole strategy is to be-there/ not-there, and thereby produce a sort of flickering, a hypnotic mechanism that crystallizes attention outside all concern with meaning. Absence here seduces presence.”7 Whether or not it is a conscious strategy, and whether or not its effect is to “crystallize attention outside all concern with meaning” – meaning of a specific kind is what is desired – the ostentatious disappearance (or discrete appearance) of Fayrūz Baḥrī seduces spectators with 64

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The Seduction of Fayrūz Baḥrī the prospect of hidden knowledge and value. It is the dominant preoccupation of the Foundation’s employees to access this hidden knowledge, these secrets, and this they manage through the sundry tactics available to them: speculation, rumor, and constant, technologically mediated voyeurism. The desirous relationship between subjects within hierarchies of power and knowledge was remarked upon by al-Jāḥiẓ (776–869) in his Risāla fī Kitmān al-Sirr wa Ḥifẓ al-Lisān (Epistle on the keeping of secrets and holding the tongue), where he observes how frequently people delight in “spying for the news of kings, and publishing their faults, and sanctifying slander [about them].”8 He suggests that such behavior springs from “the general population’s envy [nafāsa] of kings, who are a gloomy sky to which their eyes are fixed, to which their hearts are attached, and to which their desires and fears are devoted.”9 According to this view, “kings” – or for that matter, any leadership class – are a looming, yet obscured, presence over their subjects. Together with the weather (“a gloomy sky”), they are the most observed, examined, and overexamined objects of common attention; like the weather, they naturally inspire all manner of speculation, prediction, and legend. So it is too with the Foundation’s employees, who are seduced into a habit of vigilant scanning, appraisal, and blame. Fayrūz’s very name mimics the principle strategy of seduction as proposed by Baudrillard:  the oscillation between absence and presence, between seen and unseen. In Arabic, fayrūz is “turquoise,” a gemstone to be unearthed; baḥrī or baḥarī may occur in the phrase ‘a-l-baḥarī, meaning “on display” or “open for all to see,” often with meretricious connotations. Thus Fayrūz Baḥrī is at once a rare, secret stone and a show which bares all; he is once seen, then unseen. He is, moreover, supervisor of the “Treasure Trove”: the word in Arabic is al-Khabī’a, which in Egypt has connotations of archaeological digs and Pharaonic artifacts, but more generally implies something that is hidden, concealed, or kept secret. In this role, he stays true to this name. Many of his actions at the Foundation are ‘a-l-baḥarī, including his flashy television appearances, his projects for the renovation and display of the Treasure Trove, his proposal to make a film fictionalizing the life of the elusive chief executive (180–1), and his organization of what critics claim is celebration for the sake of celebration (254–5). It is even said that Fayrūz “takes pride in displaying his condition” (214) – that is, 65

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures his sexuality. At the same time, however, he remains just as obscure as the Foundation’s other major power brokers. It is decided, after the whispering has become too loud, that Fayrūz Baḥrī and his suspected partner shall be officially included among the officials “whom it is forbidden to observe, whose movements are not to be watched, and whose calls are not to be recorded” (261). The challenge of the seduction is too much to resist. In the Foundation, there is no shortage of those with the prurient desire to expose Fayrūz’s secrets; one employee, however, is more seduced than the rest: his name is ‘Abdu al-Namarsī, the pimp. He is a grotesque figure who boasts of his ability to seduce any woman and transfer her desires to one of his wealthy clients. Throughout the novel, the reader hears him recount the sordid details of the audio and video recordings he has made of his clients in the bedroom, which he desires one day to publish – not necessarily with the aim of destroying reputations, but rather to satisfy his interest in a recondite form of scientia sexualis. The essence of his practice, or “gift” as it is called (214), is the discernment of hidden knowledge. He is driven by “a curiosity stimulated by the attempt to discern what the senses cannot detect” (226). Accessing this secret sexual knowledge serves a double function: the delight immanent to voyeurism and analysis, and the ability to control and manipulate the person whose secrets he has found. When Fayrūz Baḥrī appears, he pushes al-Namarsī’s voyeuristic abilities into overdrive, seducing him with the flickering prospect of even rarer (homo) sexual knowledge. Al-Namarsī is used to thinking that it is he who seduces others; he still appears to think this. But as Baudrillard has argued, the dialectics and directions of seduction are not so easily framed: in seducing, one is also seduced.10 Fayrūz seduces al-Namarsī, though the latter believes it the other way around. We only know this because it is al-Namarsī’s thoughts that we hear, and never those of Fayrūz: the latter is an object closed to narrative empathy and comprehensibility, and may only be accessed by wild speculation, rumor, and the illusion of seduction. The pimp quickly declares his task: “Fayrūz’s condition and behavior astonish al-Namarsī, and he is absorbed in anticipation of what he will show next. Despite his aversion to such types, his curiosity is yet stronger … From now on, he will attempt to discern the details of the likes of Fayrūz” (168). Everywhere Fayrūz Baḥrī leaves a trace, ‘Abdu al-Namarsī eagerly gropes about for the hidden meaning. He begins, 66

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The Seduction of Fayrūz Baḥrī as always, with a reading of surfaces: Fayrūz’s rear is thin, he observes, as opposed to his partner’s “full” rear (169; muktanaza – it is full of kunūz or “treasures”). Over the course of several chapters, al-Namarsī builds a more and more complete narrative, shot through with a poésie fabuleuse, of Fayrūz’s sex life, emotional attachment to his partner “Farīḥ,” and intimate relation with “al-Glādiyūs,” a “whore” who has the ear of the chief executive. The more he discovers, it seems, the more he is seduced forward. This process is captured neatly in a single phrase: “Fayrūz is taken to, but does not give” (167; Fayrūz yu’tā wa lā ya’tī). The phrase is to be read, first, as a euphemism for the passive position in sexual intercourse (Fayrūz receives anal penetration, he does not penetrate). This is in itself a salacious detail in which al-Namarsī finds pleasure. But it also describes the seduction of secret knowledge: the phrase “Knowledge must be taken, it does not come by itself ” (al-‘ilm yu’tā wa lā ya’tī) is attributed to Imām Mālik, the founder of one of the four main schools of Sunni jurisprudence.11 Thus knowledge of Fayrūz must be sought after, for it does not yield itself. It is a seductive challenge that al-Namarsī takes up in total obsession. It is not long before the pimp must begrudgingly admit to himself that Fayrūz Baḥrī is not merely an enemy or rival, but a challenger who attracts him in a positive sense. “Al-Namarsī always likes a nice game, even if he is against it” (181), and indeed, when faced with Fayrūz, “he cannot ignore that hidden sense of admiration that flows through him” (217). This sense, this seductive pull, strengthens every time he hears about Fayrūz’s new schemes and projects for the Foundation. It is hardened into jealousy when he hears that Fayrūz is beating him at his own game: the custodian of the Treasure Trove is able to woo others with his uncanny ability to reveal hidden knowledge. “The breadth of his knowledge is amazing, from color dyeing to the interpretation of dreams, in addition to urban planning, the design of gardens, and all so many civilized matters and sublime affairs” (243). This leads his friend and sponsor al-Glādiyūs to exclaim repeatedly:  “You know everything!” (245). It becomes clear that against such a penetratingly intelligent figure, whose “gift” is greater than his own, al-Namarsī can do little but surrender with a smile. It is, perhaps, more than coincidence that a figure such as Fayrūz appears on the scene equipped with the very gifts that al-Namarsī values most highly. These gifts include not only occult knowledge, but also occult 67

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures power:  al-Namarsī, along with other scattered voices, perceives Fayrūz precisely as “a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman – sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving … [who possesses] some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he directs the public mind through ‘managed news’; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction.”12 Thus does Richard Hofstatder describe the enemy as conjured up by the conspiracy theorist in his seminal account of the “paranoid style” in American politics. Much of the gossip surrounding Fayrūz does indeed have the feeling of conspiracy theory: sudden changes around the Foundation are described as mudabbar (managed, pre-arranged) and mukhaṭṭaṭ (planned, plotted) by him (205), and he is implicated in a nefarious network made up of other “deviants” (shawādhdh; read: homosexuals), the Russian mafia, and international pedophiles (211). These conspiratorial representations reach their climax in a scene when al-Namarsī thinks he has finally caught Fayrūz. He sends him an envelope containing sexually explicit photographs captured of him with his partner. But he is already outmaneuvered: “In what newspaper or magazine would you like them published?” Fayrūz asks his would-be blackmailer (261). Al-Namarsī is shocked and thrown off balance by the realization that “sexual deviants” control the press. It is a glimpse, delivered in a dramatic fashion, of the hidden hands that manipulate the order of things in this strange, post-industrial era. The enemy described by the conspiracy theorist, in Hofstatder’s account, is typically an exaggerated reflection of the theorist’s own ambitions and desires.13 So it is with al-Namarsī, too, when his uncanny nemesis emerges from obscurity and appears to beat him at his own game. Just as al-Namarsī holds magical sway over a shadowy network of pimps and prostitutes, so does this phantom Fayrūz command a shadowy conspiracy of sodomites: the two fantasies mirror each other and exert a seductive pull on their subjects despite their partly illusory nature. And though we have little if any insight into the mind of Fayrūz Baḥrī that is not already polluted by the speculation of others, it is easy to imagine that such a conspiracy theory would be just as seductive to him: the fantasy of his magical control gratifies his own ambitions and projects an image of authority to which others, wittingly or unwittingly, submit. For the pimp, in any case, these 68

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The Seduction of Fayrūz Baḥrī conspiracy fantasies carry as much pleasure as they do paranoia. After his final encounter with Fayrūz, he is frustrated, but no less seduced: he fades into the background, and the last we hear of him, he cannot stop himself from expressing fascination and surprise (308). Homophobia, homosexual panic, and paranoia provide seductively simple explanations for the pull that the lūṭī exerts on others in the modern mu’assasa. What I hope to have demonstrated thus far is that this particular “sexual deviant,” at least, is the focal point of subtly expressed desires and fantasies that draw in even – or especially – some of his fiercest opponents. Where agency in this game of seduction resides is, however, a question that may be deferred endlessly: often, it would seem that Fayrūz intentionally plays hide-and-seek with his opponents in order to draw them in; just as often, it seems that al-Namarsī is predisposed to play this hide-and-seek, whether because of some inborn curiosity or, more likely, because of the hermeneutical habits and hobbies he has accumulated through his own occult occupation of pimping and scandalmongering. Thus the revelations that al-Namarsī claims to have made about Fayrūz are as much revelations about his own interior proclivities, and reflect less the truth about his rival than the artful, if tastelessly graphic, work of his imagination. In this respect, one cannot fail to mention, al-Namarsī is not alone:  the reader, too, is caught up in the seductive hide-and-seek, and motivated to fill in the gaps regarding all these characters that do not fully reveal themselves to one’s comprehension. This is especially so when we take into account the historical context in which the novel was written.

The Seduction of the Reader When it was published in 2002, Ḥikāyāt al-Khabī’a inspired literary critic Fārūq ‘Abd al-Qādir to coin the term adab al-talsīn (“slander literature” or “the literature of [malicious] gossip”).14 Having “made quite a bit of noise” upon its publication, the book deserved this label for daring to enter “a territory that had been previously restricted to gossip sessions and the chattering in the coffeehouse”; its author, one of the most revered in Egypt’s republic of letters, stood accused of “settling personal scores” under the transparently absurd pretext of disinterested literary work.15 These “tales” (ḥikāyāt) of Gamāl al-Ghīṭānī, as ʿAbd al-Qādir went on to say in his 69

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures scathing review, were in fact more akin to “the prattles of old pensioners in their cafés” than to any respectable form of literature.16 Such remarks might very well shock readers of Arabic literature outside of Egypt, mostly because, compared to other works by al-Ghīṭānī, Ḥikāyāt al-Khabīʾa has attracted little if any critical interest internationally. The novel is, certainly, much less known than other Egyptian novels of the same period that might be deemed “scandal literature,” such as ‘Alā’ al-Aswānī’s ‘Imārit Ya‘qūbiyān (The Yacoubian Building) (2002), which Fārūq ‘Abd al-Qādir included in his account, or Ibrāhīm ‘Īsā’s Maqtal al-Rajul al-Kabīr (The Murder of the Big Man) (1998). Yet, however shocking or polemical ʿAbd al-Qādir’s assessment may be, his reading is not wholly invalid: Ḥikāyāt al-Khabīʾa strikes even the most naïve reader as an obviously – even inelegantly – crafted roman-à-clef, with pointed words cast at particular members of Egypt’s cultural and political elite.17 For those familiar with these personalities, I  suggest, the novel contains a seductive pull that mimics the affective bond between Fayrūz Baḥrī and ‘Abdu al-Namarsī. Such readers are drawn by al-Ghīṭānī’s narrative strategy of hiding/revealing into a desire for more secrets and gossip behind the text. ‘Abd al-Qādir unwittingly testifies to the effectiveness of this strategy in his scathing review of the novel and its prequel. “The main problem with this work,” he complains, “is its vacillation between showing and hiding, between expressing and insinuating, between what the narrator wants to say and what he is able to say.”18 He goes on to describe this process as “winking at the reader, seducing him to complicity [ighrā’ bi al-tawāṭuʿ].”19 Can one have a better description of seduction’s “sole strategy,” the oscillation between presence and absence, “to be-there/not-there”?20 The symptoms irrupt immediately on the critic’s own tongue: in the following sentences, he is seduced by the aura of secret knowledge, and proceeds to indulge himself with an enumeration of the many points of comparison between the novel and modern Egypt. The novel’s prequel, Ḥikāyāt al-mu’assasa, he tells us, caricatures the Akhbār al-Yawm Foundation – the media conglomerate where al-Ghīṭānī had begun his journalistic career, and whose literary pages, Akhbār al-Adab, he headed for nearly two decades. The absent Founder (al-mu’assis), mentioned in this prequel, is none other than the media tycoon Muṣṭafā Amīn, whose death roughly coincided with the novel’s publication. Thus ‘Abd al-Qādir is drawn into 70

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The Seduction of Fayrūz Baḥrī reproducing the very gossipy discourse he has denounced; he cannot resist, such is the hypnotic enigma of Gamāl al-Ghīṭānī’s prose. Yet, with respect to Ḥikāyāt al-Khabī’a, he refrains from mentioning specific names, with the exception of the author’s, who seems to repel/attract the critic as much as the novel’s other celebrities. What ʿAbd al-Qādir describes as the novel’s “vacillation between showing and hiding” is not an idiosyncratic observation. It is plainly manifest, firstly, in the various species of speculation and hearsay that constitute the narrative stuff of the novel. Such formal techniques, common to many of al-Ghīṭānī’s literary works, have often been recognized as resolutely “dialogic,” “metafictional,” or “polyvocal,” in keeping with the author’s general ontological concerns, or perhaps his specifically Sufic obsession with pondering the hidden meanings of a fundamentally enigmatic universe.21 In Ḥikāyāt al-Khabī’a, however, these gestures toward narrative open-endedness are interspersed with just enough hints of familiarity to compel a reading of the novel as, indeed, “slander literature,” or a ḥikāya of something outside the text.22 The key to all of this is, of course, Fayrūz Baḥrī. Who is Fayrūz Baḥrī? The unusual name has the same syllable structure as “Fārūq Ḥusnī,” Egypt’s culture czar for over two decades. His tenure as the flamboyant minister of culture, from his appointment by President Mubarak in 1987 until the revolution of January 25, 2011, was marked by periodic scandals – some of which, it was rumored, had been ingeniously orchestrated by the minister himself. These include the display of his own rather mediocre paintings in Egyptian museums, the alleged leasing or sale of Pharaonic artifacts to foreign museums and collectors in exchange for personal benefits, a deadly fire at one of the ministry’s theaters in Beni Souief in 2005, derogatory remarks he made about the hijab in 2007, his expensive and unsuccessful bid to become Director-General of UNESCO in 2009, and the theft of a Van Gogh painting from a ministry of culture museum in broad daylight in 2010. In addition, his private life has been the subject of gossip and crude innuendo in the corridors of power, the national press, and the taxis of Cairo – much of which centers on his alleged homosexuality or “sexual deviance.” The rumors are usually embellished with details that the minister keeps a palace full of handsome male servants, exploits his office to engage in loud orgies, maintains a flirtatious relationship with 71

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures the president’s wife and son, and enjoys close ties to the security services and European organized crime.23 All of these details are woven into the character Fayrūz Baḥrī, the “supervisor of the Treasure Trove,” in Ḥikāyāt al-Khabī’a. The more one discovers, the more one is driven on. As soon as Fārūq Ḥusnī reveals himself behind Fayrūz Baḥrī, the reader is drawn to the novel’s other characters, who flash seemingly significant details like clothing, distinguishing features, and improbable names, and the text unfolds as a web of interconnected puzzles. Al-Namarsī, the pimp and major rival of Fayrūz Baḥrī, “clicks” seductively with the father-son pair Mamdūḥ al-Laythī (1937–2014) and ‘Amr al-Laythī (b. 1970), both rumored to be “procurers” and rivals of Fārūq Ḥusnī within the cultural establishment.24 The father, Mamdūḥ al-Laythī, one of Egypt’s most famous scenarists and movie producers, had often attempted to dispel rumors about his alleged habit of blackmailing actresses with sexual secrets and turning them into spies. In the novel, the two are hounded by charges of nepotism, and their names often confused (149, 156), just like their historical counterparts. The name al-Laythī, furthermore, resembles al-layth, “the lion,” just as al-Namarsī shares the same root as al-nimr, “the tiger.” The prequel’s unflattering physical description of the father, finally, bears a remarkable resemblance to that of his real-life counterpart.25 The ḥikāyāt have more to tell us. Who, the reader may ask, is Zahrān al-Ḥusnī, the character who serves as a stepping stone for Fayrūz Baḥrī and is later moved to work in the Cairo suburb of Giza (185)? Isn’t he Zāhī Ḥawwās (b. 1947), former chief inspector of the Giza pyramids plateau and a caricature of himself in fact as well as in fiction? More than anything, we want to know who is al-Nabrāwī, a capricious figure who vocally protests the ascension of Fayrūz Baḥrī on account of his sexual deviance (154–5), but then suddenly reverses his position at a packed meeting of a major cultural club (158–9)? Al-Nabrāwī rhymes with ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sharqāwī (1920–87), author of the novel al-Arḍ (Earth, 1954)  and one of the most revered littérateurs of twentieth-century Egypt. Indeed al-Sharqāwī vocally opposed Fārūq Ḥusnī’s appointment as minister of culture in 1987, before scandalously reversing his position for unknown reasons and passing away a few months later.26 The 72

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The Seduction of Fayrūz Baḥrī novel reveals about al-Nabrāwī/al-Sharqāwī “what no one else has discovered” (171): an elaborate story of a lost will, which is thought to prove al-Nabrāwī’s ownership of the entire Alexandrian shoreline, unfolds over the next several pages. Somehow, Fayrūz Baḥrī promises to help with the legal difficulties so that al-Nabrāwī gets his land back (171–6). But before anything else is revealed, al-Nabrāwī dies of “an overdose of Viagra” (321), and our sense of curiosity is overwhelmed. We are still seduced: who is the chief executive? And who is Frédéric, the Frenchman fluent in Arabic who is encountered sifting through old gramophone records near al-‘Ataba Square as he is preparing a doctoral dissertation on antique Egyptian music (278–9)? Seduction is duplicitous, however: while the reader is led to ascertain these apparent truths, many of the putative correspondences between the text and the world are more likely to be distorted products of the reader’s own interpretive enthusiasms. One may draw, for example, any number of improbable connections between the novel’s “al-Glādiyūs” and Egypt’s former First Lady, Suzanne Mubarak:  glādiyūs may be a corruption of glādiyūlus (gladiolus), which is a flower of the iris (sawsan) family (sawsan resembles “Suzanne”). Just as al-Glādiyūs delights in the company of Fayrūz Baḥrī, who charms her with his knowledge of all things beautiful and sublime, so was Suzanne Mubarak rumored to be responsible for the rise of Fārūq Ḥusnī, who allegedly assisted in the selection of her wardrobe. Such hidden links, however, are tenuous at best. This uncertainty plagued the seduction of ‘Abdu al-Namarsī too, as his lustful quest for knowledge of Fayrūz turned up as much “truth” as it did personal fantasy. On the one hand, for readers unfamiliar with the novel’s historical intertexts, all these sordid details may have the feeling of just so much trivia. On the other hand, for those called out by the seduction of the author’s gossip and innuendo, Ḥikāyāt al-Khabīʾa attains another level of significance. In this way, al-Ghīṭānī’s text offers to enrich our understanding not only of the dynamics of personal and literary seduction, but of the affective background of cultural politics in Egypt during the time of the text’s composition. In particular, the text brings into view the emotional, even erotic, motives behind the author’s public feud with Fārūq Ḥusnī, to which I now turn. 73

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The Seduction of Fā rū q Ḥ usnī: From Engagement to Engouement “Fārūq Ḥusnī’s management of the Ministry of Culture has been no less disastrous for Egypt than the Naksa of 1967.”27 Gamāl al-Ghīṭānī is alleged to have uttered these words, comparing the reign of President Mubarak’s longest-serving minister to the most traumatic political, military, and cultural defeat suffered by Egypt in the twentieth century. The statement was the most dramatic made by al-Ghīṭānī in his decade-long campaign against the minister, which unfolded in the form of virulent polemics and investigative reports published in Akhbār al-Adab, the weekly cultural journal he had run since 1993. This campaign, which had begun sometime in the late 1990s and continued into the new millennium, was fueled, ostensibly, by the scandals that repeatedly flared up around Fārūq Ḥusnī, as enumerated above. Yet despite these ample motives, al-Ghīṭānī’s own assault on the minister remained, in its manner, frequency, and tone, something of a puzzle to many observers. What had pushed the author to the point of declaring all-out war? Was this just one more battle of letters waged in the name of iltizām (engagement)? Or was there something personal, something that could not be articulated directly? In 2007, asked by reporters what al-Ghīṭānī’s problem was, Ḥusnī responded coolly, “Don’t ask me, ask him.”28 Just as puzzling as al-Ghīṭānī’s vitriol was when, in the same year, he accepted a literary award from the Ministry of Culture with remarkable alacrity – an event that marked a sudden reversal in the author’s position towards the minister.29 Seemingly overnight, feud had become friendship, and not long afterwards television reporters caught al-Ghīṭānī smiling approvingly at one of Ḥusnī’s personal art exhibits in Cairo.30 Gamāl al-Ghīṭānī’s quarrelsome, then cordial, relationship with Fārūq Ḥusnī would pass as little more than a curiosity if it were not for the way in which the discourse traded between the two men effectively fashioned “cultural politics” – its terms and tropes, ironies and intensities – as it was waged in Egypt at the dawn of the third millennium. At least for consumers of Cairo’s cultural press and rumor mills, the author-critic and the “artist-minister” appeared to hold a monopoly on defining the major issues, drawing the lines of debate, and posing problems and solutions, albeit from opposing sides.31 It would appear all the more significant, then, that behind 74

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The Seduction of Fayrūz Baḥrī the highly formalized veneer of principles and partisanship that ostensibly bound together these two men there persisted some personal – and even emotional, erotic  – motive of equal potency. This much is suggested by the equal intensity of al-Ghīṭānī’s attack and retreat, a nearly inexplicable change of position on the face of it. Samia Mehrez offers valuable insight into this and other quarrels between Ḥusnī and Egyptian writers in her book Egypt’s Culture Wars: Politics and Practice (2008). The minister’s heavy-handed dealings with artists and intellectuals, she argues, exacerbated a much older tension between the cultural and political “fields” in modern Egypt. While focusing on cultural politics in the late Mubarak years, Mehrez’s study thus includes an important historical dimension. Mehrez notes that littérateurs, and intellectuals more generally, have maintained fraught alliances with the “political field” since Muḥammad ‘Alī’s sponsorship of secular civil servants in the early to mid-eighteenth century. A defining feature of this “cultural field,” as Mehrez calls it (following Bourdieu), is its dependence upon, and manipulation by, the state. If artists and intellectuals have depended on state funding, the state, for its part, has sought to sponsor or control this secular cultural field in order to counter the parallel power structure of religious groups and institutions. As Mehrez puts it, “cultural producers maintain the most ambiguous relationship with the state that is at once their patron and their persecutor.”32 The terms of this relationship have shifted, but not radically changed, over the course of the twentieth century: Nasser’s establishment of the Ministry of Culture reaffirmed this relationship; Sadat’s sidelining of the cultural field led to a resurgent Islamism; Mubarak’s renewed engagement with the cultural field found its boldest expression in his constant support for Fārūq Ḥusnī. As minister of culture, Ḥusnī sought to radically reaffirm the state’s role in culture through ambitious and costly projects and campaigns and by seducing many artists and intellectuals into the government’s “pen” (ḥaẓīra, a common characterization). While Mehrez’s study helps explain some of the intensity of Egyptian cultural politics generally, and the al-Ghīṭānī–Ḥusnī feud in particular, it risks abstracting human agency to a level far removed from the emotionally charged relationships between embodied individuals. Affect and emotion, rather than being marginal aspects of human character, have been of 75

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures increasing interest to scholars in the humanities and social sciences seeking to expand on traditional theories of politics and culture.33 Panic, paranoia, and, indeed, seduction, play as much a role in the formation of literary subjectivities, political ideologies, and interpretive strategies as do conscious decision making and calculated postures and positions. In other words, cultural politics is as much engouement (infatuation) as engagement (commitment or iltizām). Ḥikāyāt al-Khabī’a, I contend, licenses a reading of the relationship between Fārūq Ḥusnī and Gamāl al-Ghīṭānī in these terms. For followers of cultural politics in Egypt, it can be tempting to read the relationship between al-Namarsī and Fayrūz Baḥrī as the relationship between al-Ghīṭānī and Fārūq Ḥusnī. Mona Zaki, in her brief review of the novel’s prequel, argues that al-Ghīṭānī “portrays al-Namarsī in the way he would like to present himself: a pimp with a personal philosophy on his ‘art’, a connoisseur of the female species, an assessor of beauty, an opportunist.”34 Al-Namarsī is not al-Ghīṭānī – more likely, as I have speculated above, he caricatures Mamdūḥ and ʿAmr al-Laythī – but the psychological identification is close: he is the only character who plays a prominent role in both Ḥikāyāt al-Khabī’a and its prequel, and one of the few who are given any subjective complexity beyond their caricatural shells. And their seduction by Fayrūz Baḥrī/Fārūq Ḥusnī is comparable. Like Fayrūz Baḥrī, Fārūq Ḥusnī has been an elusive figure, always managing to escape the grasp of his critics – even after the revolution of January 25, 2011, he was one of the few former ministers of the Mubarak regime to escape trial or imprisonment. And his flashy appearance in the public eye can very well be described as having a “hypnotic” effect on some spectators, to use Baudrillard’s word: book fairs, television interviews, cultural festivals, new museums, and so forth have contrasted conspicuously with his evasion of numerous legal and financial debacles. Fayrūz Baḥrī’s seduction of Abdu al-Namarsī (or vice versa) may explain the desirous, indeed obsessive, elements of al-Ghīṭānī’s verbal challenge to Fārūq Ḥusnī. There had always been scattered hints in the press and gossip cafés that there was more to the novelist’s attacks against the minister than matters of cultural policy. As early as 2005, as al-Ghīṭānī was still penning away at his challenger with allegations of corruption, a former media advisor to Ḥusnī released an “exposé” of the Ministry of Culture in which he deemed the conflict between the two men to be nothing but a big “joke.”35 76

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The Seduction of Fayrūz Baḥrī Interviewed in 2007, the minister himself declared that he did not harbor any bad feelings towards the author, and that his critiques were all just part of “the cultural game.”36 In other words, we might say, the two were engaged in an exchange of challenges, a game of seduction, each attempting to claim the role of seducer and not that of the seduced. Or perhaps it was only al-Ghīṭānī himself who was seduced, obsessed with a man who had no interest in taking up what he deemed a pathetic challenge. To register the affective pull of this seduction, I believe, goes some way towards explaining the abrupt shift that occurred in the relationship later in 2007, as animosity turned to admiration and the two men appeared to regard each other as friends. It offers an interpretation  – based on affect and emotion, rather than ideology or reason – of the legendary struggle, which underwrote cultural politics in Egypt at the turn of the millennium. More generally, and despite the risks of social and political reductionism, an investigation into “scandal literature” offers important contributions to the study of cultural politics. It can reveal the much-overlooked narrative intertexts, and affective dynamics, that frame and motivate political action for authors, critics, ministers, and academics, however much work is done to rationalize and reduce this action to the principles of engagement and critique. Still, the claims submitted along this avenue of investigation, if generalizable, are not meant to be comprehensive, for “cultural politics” is not one domain of action, nor are the “cultural field” and the “political field” to be defined exclusively by the men whose claims to represent them are noisiest. Outside of these fields, there stretches an expanse of corners, crenels, capillaries, and encrustations of culture and politics where the seduction of Fārūq Ḥusnī and the echoes of homosexual panic have little resonance.

Notes 1. For an overview of the “less-than-complimentary representations” of homosexuals in modern Arabic literature, see Al-Samman, “Out of the Closet”: 270–310. Al-Samman notes exceptions, such as Hoda Barakat’s Ḥajar al-ḍaḥk (1990), and Ilhām Manṣūr’s Anā hiya anti (2000), where “homosexuals” are represented in a more sympathetic light. For approaches to homosexuality in modern Arabic literature that move beyond questions of representation, see the articles in “Queer Affects,” ed. Hanadi al-Samman and Tarek El-Ariss, special issue, International Journal of Middle East Studies 45, no. 2 (2013).

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures 2. Al-Samman, “Out of the Closet,” 271. 3. All translations from the Arabic are mine unless otherwise noted. 4. According to the author’s colophon, the twin novels were written over a period of eleven years (1990–6 and 1998–2001, respectively), yet they were most likely meant to be published as one book. Al-Ghīṭānī underwent heart surgery in the period between the two novels, preventing him from writing them in tandem. To my knowledge, they have not been the object of any critical attention, with the exception of Al-Musawi, who briefly discusses the first novel, and ‘Abd al-Qādir, whose review of both novels is brashly polemical, probably as the result of a longstanding feud with the author. Al-Musawi, The Postcolonial Arabic Novel, 302–5; ‘Abd al-Qādir, Fī al-Riwāya al-ʿArabiyya al-Muʿāṣira, 145–83. See also Mona Zaki’s English translation of one chapter from Ḥikāyāt al-Mu’assasa (which she translates as The Stories of the Establishment) in Banipal 13 (2002): 11–16. 5. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2008) 20–1, 185. 6. Al-Ghīṭānī, Ḥikāyāt al-Mu’assasa, 143–4. As noted above, the two novels (Ḥikāyāt al-Mu’assasa and Ḥikāyāt al-Khabī’a) were originally intended to be published as one. The two incidents cited here would appear to echo in turn a motif deployed by al-Ghīṭānī in previous works such as “Wa fīmā yalī mā jarā li al-ḥalabī,” in Risālat al-Baṣā’ir fī al-Maṣāʾir (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Miṣriyya al-ʿĀmma li al-Kitāb, 1995), 446–8. 7. Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, Translated by Brian Singer (Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1990), 85. 8. Abū ‘Uthmān al-Jāḥiẓ, Rasā’il al-Jāḥiẓ, 101. 9. Ibid., 100. 10. “The cycle of seduction cannot be stopped. One can seduce someone in order to seduce someone else, but also seduce someone else to please oneself. The illusion that leads from one to the other is subtle. Is it to seduce, or to be seduced, that is seductive? But to be seduced is the best way to seduce. It is an endless refrain. There is no active or passive mode in seduction, no subject or object, no interior or exterior: seduction plays on both sides, and there is no frontier separating them. One cannot seduce others, if one has not oneself been seduced.” Baudrillard, Seduction, 81. Baudrillard’s penchant for bold proclamations is fed by inexhaustible reservoirs of the counterintuitive. Still, Fayrūz’s seduction of al-Namarsī is more apparent than the reverse. 11. Italics are my own. The saying occurs in a number of sources. See, for example, the Tafsir of al-Suyūṭī, al-Durr al-Manthūr fi al-Tafsīr bi al-Ma’thūr (sura 4:95). 12. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, 31–2. 13. Ibid., 32. 14. ‘Abd al-Qādir alternatively calls this genre “the literature of ‘you know who, dear neighbor’ ” (adab iyyāka aʿnī fa ismaʿī yā gāra), that is, “innuendo.” Fī al-Riwāya al-ʿArabiyya al-Muʿāṣira, 176.

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The Seduction of Fayrūz Baḥrī 15. Ibid., 147. 16. Ibid., 176. 17. Such a reading returns the novel to the older meaning of the word ḥikāyāt (tales, stories) in its title, namely, popular oral performances, as opposed to “higher” or more canonical forms, a meaning which for medieval littérateurs like al-Jāḥiẓ (776–868) held connotations of mimicry and miming. See Ch. Pellat, A. Bausani, P. N. Boratav, Aziz Ahmad, and R. O. Winstedt, “Ḥikāya,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, ed. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W. P. Heinrichs (Brill Online, 2012), accessed December 20, 2012. 18. ‘Abd al-Qadir, Fī al-Riwāya al-ʿArabiyya al-Muʿāṣira, 148. 19. Ibid., 152. 20. Baudrillard, Seduction, 85. 21. For “dialogic” see Samia Mehrez, Egypt’s Culture Wars, 64, and Al-Musawi, The Postcolonial Arabic Novel, 44. For “metafictional,” see Al-Musawi, The Postcolonial Arabic Novel, 265–72, and Aida O. Azouqa, “Gamāl al-Ghīṭānī’s Pyramid Texts and the Fiction of Jorge Luis Borges”, 1–28. 22. Generally speaking, the novel and its prequel may be read as a behind-the-scenes accounts of the painful structural transformations endured by many “foundations” or institutions in the postcolonial world over the last 60 years, as the charisma and paternalism of nationalist leaders like “the Founder” gave way to the confused frenzy of military rule, which was in turn undercut by the displacements and disparities brought by neoliberal globalization. Such structural changes have occurred at the level of the state – it might be said that Maṣr mu’assasa (“Egypt is a foundation,” i.e., too big to fail) – as well as at the level of the various organizations that in Egypt are called mu’assasāt (foundations), from publishing houses and charities to public and private corporations. 23. In a tell-all interview with the state-owned newspaper al-Ahrām, Ḥusnī pointedly denied the rumor of his homosexuality, along with other accusations. “Fārūq Ḥusnī li Bawwābat al-Ahrām:  Lastu shādhdhan wa Ṣafwat al-Sharīf warā’ al-shā’i’a,” Bawwābat al-Ahrām, June 16, 2011, available at http://gate. ahram.org.eg/News/83576.aspx. The rumors concerning his “sexual deviance” can be traced back to his appointment to the Ministry of Culture in October 1987. On October 18, 1987, the novelist and journalist Tharwat Abāẓa (1927–2002) published an article in al-Ahrām entitled “Wujūm,” in which he lamented his inability to speak “an honest word,” or even to expound “through symbolism” (al-ramz), about the “recent news” he had received – a subtle reference to Ḥusnī’s appointment and that which [he would] “dare not speak its name.” More explicit was an article published in the same issue by Rajab al-Bannā entitled “Bidāyat maʿaraka jadīda,” in which the author passes

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures innuendo about the “negative” (al-salbiyya) personality types and “parasitic” (al-ṭufayliyya) characters that have recently “spread and jumped to prominence.” Many of the rumors about Fārūq Ḥusnī were the topic of an installment of ‘Ādil Ḥammuda’s sensationalist television program Kull Rijāl al-Ra’īs, broadcast on August 17, 2011, and available at http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=drmN-NmZN4k. 24. On these rumors, see, for example, Fady Salah, “New Libel Charges against Controversial Salafi Preacher,” Daily News Egypt, December 25, 2012 (available at http://www.dailynewsegypt.com/2012/12/25/new-libel-charges-againstcontroversial-salafi-preacher/), and Magdī al-Gallād’s interview with Mamdūḥ al-Laythī on the program Anta wa ḍamīrak, which aired August 1, 2011 (available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5EpP6ShJAQ). 25. Al-Ghīṭānī, Ḥikāyāt al-Mu’assasa, 141. 26. Al-Sharqāwī’s reconciliation with the minister is recounted in “Kursī al-thaqāfa wa ghaḍab al-mustawzirīn,” Rūz al-Yūsuf, October 26, 1987, 47–8. Al-Sharqāwī passed away on November 10, 1987. 27. Huwayda Ṣāliḥ, “Faḍā’iḥ ‘Wikileaks’ wa ‘Kleenex’ al-Ghīṭānī,” al-Yawm al-Sābiʿ, December 25, 2010. 28. Ibid. 29. “Al-Ghīṭānī: Jā’izat al-dawla la tamnaḥuhā al-wizāra,” al-Maṣrī al-Yawm, June, 28, 2007. 30. With a sideways smirk, al-Ghīṭānī told television reporters that he had “been following the works of the artist Fārūq Ḥusnī since the 1980s” and that he could notice “a development in the use of colors and in the manifestation of form.” The interview is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAtPzr Z9d3Q&feature=related. 31. Himself a painter, Fārūq Ḥusnī was often referred to in the press as “al-wazīr al-fannān” (the artist-minister). 32. Mehrez, Egypt’s Culture Wars, 6. 33. For a recent and innovative approach to these issues in Arabic literary and intellectual culture, see Tarek El-Ariss, Trials of Arab Modernity. 34. Mona Zaki, “Excerpt from the Novel To the Presidential Floor,” 14. 35. ‘Abd al-Wāhid, Muthaqqafūn taḥta al-Ṭalab, 319. 36. Saliḥ, “Faḍā’iḥ ‘Wikileaks’ wa ‘Kleenex’ al-Ghīṭānī.”

Bibliography ‘Abd al-Qādir, Fārūq. Fī al-Riwāya al-ʿArabiyya al-Muʿāṣira. Cairo: Dār al-Hilāl, 2003. ‘Abd al-Wāḥid, Muḥammad. Muthaqqafūn taḥta al-Ṭalab. Cairo:  Dār Gharnāṭa, 2005.

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The Seduction of Fayrūz Baḥrī El-Ariss, Tarek. Trials of Arab Modernity:  Literary Affects and the New Political. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. Azouqa, Aida O. “Gamāl al-Ghīṭānī’s Pyramid Texts and the Fiction of Jorge Luis Borges:  A  Comparative Study.” Journal of Arabic Literature 42, no. 1 (2011): 1–28. Baudrillard, Jean. Seduction. Translated by Brian Singer. Montreal:  New World Perspectives, 1990. Al-Ghīṭānī, Gamal. Ḥikāyāt al-Khabī’a. Cairo: Dār al-Shurūq, 2002. ——— Ḥikāyāt al-Mu’assasa. Cairo: Dār al-Shurūq, 2002. ——— Risālat al-Baṣā’ir fi al-Maṣā’ir. Cairo:  al-Hay’a al-Miṣriyya al-ʿĀmma li al-Kitāb, 1995. Hofstadter, Richard. “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays, 3–40. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Al-Jāḥiẓ, Abū ‘Uthmān. Rasā’il al-Jāḥiẓ: al-Rasā’il al-Adabiyya. Edited by ‘Alī Abū Malhim. Beirut: Dār wa Maktabat al-Hilāl. 1987. Mehrez, Samia. Egypt’s Culture Wars: Politics and Practice. London: Routledge, 2008. Al-Musawi, Muhsin. The Postcolonial Arabic Novel:  Debating Ambivalence. Leiden: Brill, 2003. Pellat, Ch., A. Bausani, P. N. Boratav, Aziz Ahmad, and R. O. Winstedt. “Ḥikāya.” In Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, edited by P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W. P. Heinrichs. Brill Online, 2012. Al-Samman, Hanadi. “Out of the Closet:  Representations of Homosexuals and Lesbians in Modern Arabic Literature.” Journal of Arabic Literature 39, no. 2 (2008): 270–310. ——— and Tarek El-Ariss, eds. “Queer Affects.” Special issue, International Journal of Middle East Studies 45, no. 2 (2013). Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2008. Zaki, Mona. “Excerpt from the Novel To the Presidential Floor with Translator’s Note.” Banipal 13.

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4 Satan as the Lover of God in Islamic Mystical Writings Ali-Asghar Seyed-Gohrab

In Islamic mystical texts, Iblīs (Satan) is sometimes presented as the lover of God in a loving relationship that started before the creation of mankind. He regarded Adam as a rival and was even ready to accept God’s eternal curse in order to preserve his position as God’s lover. In such mystical writings, Satan is commonly presented as an angel.1 Sufis have an ambivalent attitude towards the angels and especially towards Satan, who was originally one of the four angels of propinquity (malak al-muqarrab). According to several mystics, angels are not capable of perceiving and cherishing love, but others, such as Ḥusayn Manṣūr Ḥallāj (executed 922), ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt (executed 1131), and Rūzbihān Baqlī (1128–1209), emphasize that Satan is God’s lover par excellence. At the same time, Satan is held responsible for deceiving man and leading him away from the right path. Satan not only refused to bow down before man; he was also responsible for Adam and Eve’s banishment from the Garden of Eden.2 Mystic leaders therefore advise their followers to banish Satan from their hearts through ascetic training. Sufis refer to different Qur’anic verses in which the Creator summons the angels, including Satan, to bow down before Adam. Iblīs stirs up a discussion with God, refusing to bow down. There are about ten references in

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures the Qur’an. I refer to the following Suras: 7:11–18, 17:61, and 15:30–40. In the first Sura we read: So, the angels – all of them – fell down in prostration, except Iblīs; he refused to join those who prostrated. The Lord inquired: “Iblīs! What is the matter with you that you did not join those who prostrated?” He said:  It does not behoove me to prostrate myself before a human being whom You have created out of dry ringing clay wrought from black mud. The Lord said: Then get out of here; you are rejected, and there shall be a curse upon you till the Day of Recompense. Iblīs said: My Lord! Grant me respite till the Day when they will be resurrected. Allāh said: For sure you are granted respite until the day of a known time. Iblīs said: My Lord! In the manner You led me to error, I will make things on earth seem attractive to them and lead all of them to error, except those of Your servants whom You have singled out for Yourself. (7:11–18)3

Shortly after, God wants to send him away but Iblīs asks Him to postpone his decision: “Grant me respite till the Day when they [mankind] will be resurrected.” As a reward for his thousands of years of prayers, Iblīs asks God to give him respite and the ability to deceive man from the right path, saying: “Because You have sent me astray, surely I will sit in wait against them on Your Straight Path. Then I  will come to them from front and behind, from their right and from their left, and You will not find most of them as thankful ones.” God then expelled him from His presence, and the first act that Iblīs undertakes is to seduce Adam and Eve into eating from the “Tree of Eternity.” (2:34; 20:120) At first sight, Iblīs commits two sins: pride and disobedience. He makes an analogy (qiyās) between the substances from which he and Adam were created. Iblīs was created from fire, while mankind was crafted from clay. According to medieval philosophy, the entire material creation is made out of the four elements: fire, earth, wind, and water. Fire is superior to clay and Iblīs argues that it is therefore inappropriate for him to prostrate himself before an inferior, clay-born creature. Many mystics consider Iblīs’s reasoning a reflection of his inability to perceive the inner essence of mankind and understand why God created Adam. Iblīs recognizes only man’s outward appearance and has no access to his inner world. He lacks any 86

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Satan as the Lover of God in Islamic Mystical Writings knowledge of the moral qualities granted to man by God. Iblīs looks at Adam in a rational if superficial way, relying on analogy to understand God’s creation of Adam as the first human being. Because of this basically logical perspective, mystics consider Iblīs a symbol of the intellect. The relationship between man and Satan is also elaborated upon in many Islamic traditions. One entails the belief that Satan flows in the blood of man. This implies that Iblīs is lurking every moment to misdirect man from the right path. One of the reasons for Muslims to pronounce God’s name before, during, or after any act they undertake is to prevent Iblīs from striking, especially around twilight, when Iblīs is believed to be specially potent. Pious Muslims therefore recite the Qur’an and other prayers during sunrise and sunset in order to thwart him.4 In addition, ascetic acts such as vigils, fasts, the repetition of God’s names, and so on, are ways to keep Iblīs outside the heart. Mystics have long pondered why Iblīs disobeyed God and refused to prostrate himself before Adam. One of the mystics who wrote extensively about the creation and the role of the angels is Najm al-Dīn Dāya (1177–1256). He argues that when God wanted to create mankind he told the angels, “I am about to create a man from clay” (38:71).5 When the angels heard this, they were astonished and said, “He created the heavens and the earth; didst Thou not create all?” He replied, “There is a distinction here, for I created all else with the command ‘Be,’ and it is; whereas Adam I shall create directly Myself, without intermediary, for I shall conceal within him the treasure of knowledge” (16:40).6 God calls upon the archangel Gabriel to go to Earth and bring Him a fistful of soil. Gabriel descends and as he is taking the dirt to God, the Earth asks him what he is doing. Gabriel replies that he is bringing it to the Presence of God, so that He can create Adam from Earth (2:30). The Earth begs Gabriel not to do so, because it fears God’s nearness. Gabriel returns to God and informs him that the Earth will not allow him to gather it. Consequently, God sends the archangel Michael and after him Isrāfīl. But they cannot convince the Earth to give them a fistful of soil either. Finally, God asks ‘Izrā’īl, the angel of death, to forcibly take the dust. ‘Izrā’īl descends from heaven and collects dust without the Earth’s approval. The angels are astonished that the Earth – the low, abject, and arrogant Earth – is treated with such honor and is brought to the sublime Creator. 87

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures When God notices the astonishment of the angels, He replies, “Truly I know that which ye know not. What know you of the tasks I intend for this fistful of earth, from pre-eternity to post-eternity?” (2:30).7 God kneads the clay for forty thousand years in order to create man in His own image.8 Dāya states that God has placed 1,001 tiny mirrors inside and outside man to reflect His divine attributes in humanity. Angels examine Adam carefully but the more they search the less they are able to detect God’s mysteries in him, remarking, “We see here naught but water and clay. The beauty of vice-regency is not to be observed in him, nor can we remark any worthiness to receive prostration.”9 At this moment, the angels hear the following from the unseen: ‫ جانان مرا به چشم من باید دید‬

‫معشوقه به چشم دیگران نتوان دید‬

The beloved cannot be seen through the eyes of others My beloved has to be seen through my own eyes.10

The angels then stop examining Adam’s exterior and continue searching for the essence that makes him worthy of so elevated a position. They find nothing except the four elements (fire, earth, wind, and water). Since the angels are made out of fire alone, they are astonished that mankind can be comprised of opposed elements. They conclude that mankind will give rise to corruption because of the conflicting elements of his constitution. Once again the angels ask God in astonishment, “Will You place upon earth one who causes corruption therein and sheds blood!” (2:30). The angels are also surprised that mankind is a microcosmic replica of the whole cosmos. Dāya elaborates on this comparison:  Satan enters Adam’s body through his mouth, perceiving the cosmos in a miniature form. For example, Satan sees in Adam’s head seven faculties – “the imaginative, the conceptual, the reflective, the memorizing, the re-collective, and the regulatory faculties, with common senses” – in the same way that seven planets are at work.11 The body of Adam looks like the Earth. Just as on the Earth, there are trees, vegetation, rivers, and mountains, shaping the landscape: hairs are sometimes short, sometimes long, like trees and plants; arteries are like rivers and bones like mountains; and so forth. Just

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Satan as the Lover of God in Islamic Mystical Writings as in the cosmos, where there are four seasons, the human body has also four seasons based on the person’s “nature” (ṭabʿ): heat (ḥarārat), coldness (burūdat), wetness (ruṭūbat), and dryness (yubūsat). This is, in short, how Dāya elaborates upon the human body as a microcosmos. Analogies like this can also be found in other mystical treatises such as Shaykh Maḥmūd Shabistarī’s Mir’āt al-Muḥaqqiqīn and the encyclopaedic works by the Brethren of Purity (ikhvān al-ṣafā) from Basra, in which they give a detailed description of the universe, partly based on Hellenistic, Mesopotamian, and ancient Persian traditions.12 Dāya emphasizes that Satan has access to all parts of the human body except the heart. The heart is a mirror of God in which His secret is placed. Why does He hide so many mysteries in mankind? Why are the angels excluded from these mysteries? Why has God chosen mankind over the angels who have served Him duly for thousands of years? God replies that he is not finished with His creation yet, and when He blows his breath into Adam and makes him His deputy on Earth, the angels are invited to come and observe and admire Adam (15:29, 38:72). As we can see from this short exposition of Dāya’s treatment, the relationship between God and Iblīs became problematic from the moment that God decided to create mankind. All angels accept God’s command to prostrate themselves before Adam – all except Satan.13 Mystics believe that Satan refused out of jealousy. In his theoretical treatise on love, the Savāniḥ, Aḥmad Ghazālī devotes a chapter to jealousy. He explains that jealousy sometimes goes so far that it cuts off the ties between the lover and beloved. The lover becomes separated from the beloved as soon as the beloved finds out that the lover cherishes the beloved more than his own life. At this moment, the only memory of the beloved is love itself. It is love that looms larger and larger in the lover’s mind, directing all his attentions towards love itself. Love becomes an active agent, devouring everything, including the lover and the beloved, so that nothing would remain except love itself. As Ghazālī indicates, love is unaware of knowledge, which stands for rational faculty. Neither the hints of knowledge (‘ilm) nor its phrases reach so far to explain love. Yet the hints of Gnostic knowledge (maʿrifat) can influence love because Gnostic knowledge has no boundary or limit. One end of love is ruin (kharāba), in contrast to ‘ilm whose ends 89

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures are all edifices. Here is the dashing of the waves of the ocean of love. It breaks and returns to itself: O moon, you rose and become illumined;

You are strutting around your own firmament. When you learned you were at a level with [my] life Suddenly you sank and were hidden.14

There are also instances in which Satan, seen as a frustrated lover, wishes that God will not find a lover, as in Maḥmūd Kāshānī’s Kunūz al-Asrār, a verse commentary on Ghazālī’s Savāniḥ: When Satan saw that the firm foundation of his oneness with God Was to tumble down, he swore on God’s omnipotence: I hope that nobody will ever suit you,

O Mighty One.15

Sympathy with Satan as a Lover Mystics such as Ḥusayn Manṣūr Ḥallāj, ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt, and Rūzbihān Baqlī show compassion for Satan, trying to understand why he refused to prostrate himself before Adam and why he accepted God’s eternal curse as a gift from the loving God. The reason for this sympathy with Satan stems from Satan’s predicament following the creation of Adam. Satan regards man as a rival who disturbed his special relationship with God. Satan believes that God’s command to prostrate himself before Adam is a way to test his loyalty towards the only beloved. This is one of the reasons for Satan’s refusal. He did not want to pray in two different directions, to both God and man. Ḥallāj is probably the first mystic who showed sympathy for Satan.16 He treats God’s request of Iblīs from a theological point of view. He states that God gave Satan the choice to prostrate himself before Adam, and that God’s words allowed Satan to refuse this request. Satan chooses not to prostrate himself before Adam in order to show his exclusive love for God. He fails to understand God’s will (irāda) through His command (amr).17 But what are the differences between His will and His command? God’s request that Satan should bow down before Adam must have been God’s will and not His command, as no one can ignore or deny God’s command: if God 90

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Satan as the Lover of God in Islamic Mystical Writings commands “Bow,” this should be obeyed, like His command that “there should be light and there was light.” God invites mankind to act justly and do good, even as He knows that they could and would act unjustly and do evil: God gives mankind the freedom to sin. According to Ḥallāj, Satan was cursed when he had reached individualism (fardāniyyat) and wanted to reach oneness (vaḥdāniyyat, “singularity”).18 God says to him: “Prostrate!” Satan says:  “For no one except You!”19 God replies:  “Even if I  curse you till eternity?” Satan says:  “Nothing less than this!” God replies:  “You are arrogant.” Satan replies: “If I even had spent a second with You, pride and haughtiness would fit me, but I am the one who knows you from eternity. I am better than he [Adam] is.”20 According to Ḥallāj, Satan is an example of unconditional monotheism, a monotheism that he had learned from God, but in practice he was even more monotheistic than God himself would prescribe. It was in this context that Satan tried to prove his devotion to God and so accepted his curse and his eternal exile from the presence of his Beloved. There is a plethora of exegesis on this passage and the rest of Ḥallāj’s Kitāb al-Ṭawāsīn in the work of Rūzbihān Baqlī. For instance, in Sharḥ-i Shaṭḥiyyāt, Rūzbihān posits that Satan did not possess the talent to comprehend what true “understanding” entails. God had placed the divine essence in Adam, but Satan failed to understand this. There were not two beloveds (God and Adam), as Satan interpreted, but only one and the same in different forms.21 Noteworthy in Rūzbihān’s explanation is that God asks the Prophet Muhammad (still in the form of eternal light), who is witnessing the dialogue between God and Satan, to look at Adam. The Prophet also refuses God’s command to look at Adam, looking instead inside himself where he finds the Beloved in his heart.22 As Firoozeh Papan-Matin observes, the difference between Mohammad and Satan is that when Satan looks at Adam, he sees his own love for God.23 This love prevents him from kneeling before Adam. The Prophet Muhammad understands how to perceive the Beloved’s love. In other words, the Prophet sees the unity of mankind and God, while Satan observes duality and is unable to fathom God’s love in Adam. Rūzbihān presents an interesting dialogue between Moses and Satan, in which Satan explains why he did not prostrate: Ḥusayn relays that Moses saw Iblīs at the summit of Mount Sinai. Moses asked him: What prevented you from prostration?

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures Iblīs said:  My claim of worshiping the One. If I  would have knelt down before Adam, I would be like you. They called you once and said, ‘Look at the mountain’ (7:139), you did cast your glance. I  was called a thousand times, ‘Prostrate before Adam’ (2:32), but I did not prostrate. My claim is the same as my ideas [daʿvī-i man maʿnī-i marā]. Moses said: Did you let the Command go? Iblīs said:  It was a trial [ibtilā’] and not a Command.24 Moses said: What happened that your face turned away? Iblis said, O Moses, that was deception [talbīs] and this is Iblīs. One’s state [ḥāl] is not fixed as it changes, while Gnosis is sound as it is permanent, therefore it did not change although the individual [Iblis himself] changes. Moses asked, Do you keep remembering Him? Iblīs said, O Moses, memory is His memory, I recollect His names and he is the One who is recollected.25

Satan’s love is also related to the concept of himmat, which is translated differently in European languages and can also imply “ambition,” “magnanimity,” “meditation,” and “aspiration.” In Savāniḥ, Aḥmad Ghazālī refers to Satan in the context of himmat: Love has [high] aspiration [himmat] so that the lover desires a beloved who has a sublime quality. Thus he does not accept as his beloved just any beloved who may fall in the snare of union. This is why when Iblis was told [by God]: My curse shall be upon you, he responded: I swear by Thy Glory. By this he meant: I myself love this manifestation of Glory from Thee, for no one is worthy of being needed by Thee, nor is anyone suitable for Thee, for if anything (or anyone) were suitable for Thee, then the Glory would not have been perfect.26

As Pourjavady indicates, Satan’s pride is here interpreted as “aspiration,” which is a quality of love that makes the lover love the Beloved to the extreme. At such a state of extreme love, in which the lover is totally immersed in love, the beloved’s curse and praise, grace (luṭf) and wrath (qahr), beauty (jamāl) and awe (jalāl), etc., are identical as they are all derived from the beloved. These are manifestations of the beloved’s opposing attributes. Iblīs’s inability to see the duality of God’s attributes forces him to only perceive God’s attribute of wrath (qahr). Rūzbihān says, 92

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Satan as the Lover of God in Islamic Mystical Writings God summoned Iblīs to behold the eternity of his Wrath. Iblīs saw the Truth covered in Wrath. He winged through the realm of Wrath till he became wrathful. God increased his knowledge of Wrath and he became intimate with Wrath. God taught him the secrets of deception by showing the form of Adam, still without a soul, and commanded Iblīs, Kneel down before Adam! Iblīs only saw the face of Wrath and in reality he became absent from the Truth, because the Truth was donned through the secret of His action [fiʿl] and the light of Attribute in Adam. Iblīs did not recognize the Truth. He could not discern God in the created being. At seeing God’s face he was stuck in Wrath. He only perceived his own individuality [nafs].27

Ghazālī addresses the fact that Iblīs cannot perceive God’s grace in his encounter with God and that God manifests only his Wrath. In the psychology of love, according to Ghazālī, even the “inability to perceive the perceiving is perception.”28 So even while unable to perceive love fully, it is possible to fall in love with one of the beloved’s attributes. He observes that “love is a type of drunkenness and in its perfect form, it obstructs the lover’s sight from seeing the beloved’s perfection.”29 The lover is constantly tested to prove whether he is worthy of being in love. Elsewhere in his Savāniḥ, Ghazālī states that the beloved’s oppression is necessary to test the lover: As for the arrow from the bow of the beloved’s will, it does not matter whether it is the arrow of cruelty or fidelity, since the sense lies in the intent. Shooting the arrow requires a glance at you, and the target is the kiblah of the mystical moment. If the beloved’s face is not entirely turned to you, how can the beloved shoot an arrow at you? In specifically shooting the arrow at you, the beloved must necessarily have expected something from you. Is this not connection enough, that the beloved has chosen you from the multitude? It is on this point that is said:        

       

       

Draw an arrow from your quiver in my name And place it on your stretched bow. If you seek a target, here is my heart: A mighty shot from you and a sigh of joy from me.30

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt, Ghazālī’s student, interprets Satan’s refusal differently. ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt developed a “theory of light” in which Satan has been granted an evident and prominent role. There are two different lights in the divine realm: the light of Satan, which is dark or black, and the light of the Prophet Muhammad, which is radiant and lucid.31 The light of Satan, he suggests, comes from the moon and the light of the Prophet from the sun. These two lights are the opposite of one another. While sunlight is the shadow of God, moonlight is the shadow of sunlight. Sunlight emanates from the Prophet, and moonlight radiates from Satan. In the same vein, ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt argues that God’s names have to be categorized in two specific categories:  first, “Most Gracious, Most Merciful” (al-raḥmān al-raḥīm), and second, “Haughty Suppresser” (al-jabbār al-mutakabbir). While Mohammad is created from His essence of “Graciousness,” Satan is created from His other hallmark, “Haughtiness.” Mohammad feeds himself with God’s mercy and grace, while Satan lives on God’s wrath and rage.32 In this mundane world, ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt claims, belief and nonbelief are the same for the mystic traveler, as both come from the Truth. Therefore the ultimate goal is to reach union with the Beloved. As C. W. Ernst summarizes ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt’s thought, “The lover and the beloved (the witness and the witnessed) are one in the divine reality, but separate on the level of discursive thought.”33 According to ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt’s theory, Satan is a propagandist on the mystical path, who invites people on behalf of God, while Mohammad invites people directly to God. ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt characterizes Satan as a guard watching the “gate of His Divine Majesty.”34 God supposedly had told Satan, “You are our lover, keep out the strangers and all others who want to enter our Presence. Tell them: ‫من   مگذار درون آنکه ندارد سر من‬ ‫در‬ ‫معشوق مرا گفت نشین بر‬ ‫باش  این درخور کس نیست مگر درخور من‬ ‫آنکس که مرا خواهد گو بی خود‬ The Beloved has told me: Stay at my gate, Do not let anyone in who has not come here for me. Tell those who are longing for me, “Be selfless!” For this is the only thing that befits Me and nothing else.35

Satan’s role as a watcher at the gate of God’s court is to mislead the mystic traveler in the last mystical stage, that is, union. In spite of God’s curse, 94

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Satan as the Lover of God in Islamic Mystical Writings Satan remains faithful to God but cannot attain union with Him. According to ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt, when a traveler arrives at the court of God and declares the Islamic creed lā ilāha illā Allāh (There is no God but God), he is mirroring Satan’s phrase, namely the first part of this phrase, lā ilāha (There is no God), which forms a barrier between God and others. ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt states that God purposefully created Satan to block the path of mystics to His Presence. He cites the following prophetic tradition: “If God would have wanted all mankind to be near Him, He would not have created Satan.”36 The idea of blocking the path of the mystic at the final stage of the mystical journey calls to mind Mohammad’s nocturnal journey, and how he divests himself of any material entity until he arrives at sidrat al-muntahā, “the lote tree on the boundary” (53:14).37 This is the point beyond which one cannot pass. It is here that he asks the archangel Gabriel to follow him but Gabriel answers that he has access to all places but God’s private realm. At Sidra, the Prophet gazed upon God. Mystics usually cite Gabriel’s proverbial saying, “If I set one step further, my wings would catch fire.”38 According to ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt, both Satan and Mohammad have committed a sin: Satan’s sin was that he fell in love with God, while Mohammad’s was that God fell in love with him. When God requested the creation to carry his Trust (amāna) – something that the mountains, seas, the angels, and so on, refused to do  – mankind accepted this responsibility. ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt states that even though mankind accepted the amāna, he is characterized as “unjust and ignorant” (33:72), but the Prophet carried the sins of mankind. Probably this is a reference to one of the essential functions of the Prophet, to intercede (shafāʿa) for his people in the hereafter. ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt sees Satan as God’s lover who is disappointed by His decision to choose Adam over him. Such views were contradictory to the Sharīʿa, in which Satan is portrayed as an embodiment of sin and evil. ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt is aware that he has to pay with his life for his arguments and reasoning when he states, “Well, I do not dare to say it. Have you not seen that the Sharīʿa has become the watcher for those who speak about the lordship [rubūbiyyat]? Blood will flow immediately when one starts speaking about lordship.”39 Not only Ḥallāj, but ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt, Suhravardī, Majd al-Dīn Baghdādī, and many others were executed for their “blasphemous” philosophy.40 95

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures Satan is deprived of a loving union with the Beloved. Many mystics, such as Ghazālī, ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt, Ḥakīm Sanā’ī (d. 1131), and Farīd al-Dīn ‘Aṭṭār (d. 1220), describe Satan’s pain of separation in a poetic fashion. In the following poem, Sanā’ī describes Satan’s pain and his nostalgic feelings for the time he spent with the Beloved, depicting several aspects of Satan’s relationship with God. Here we read how Satan cherishes God’s love in his heart and how God set a trap to test his loyalty: by his refusal Satan confirms his unconditional monotheism. Satan is also portrayed as a chivalrous ascetic, who would do everything for love, even if this would lead to his eternal damnation: ‫سيمرغ عشق را دل من آشيانه بود‬ ‫عرش مجيد جاه مرا آستانه بود‬ ‫آدم ميان حلقه آن دام دانه بود‬ ‫كرد آنچه خواست آدم خاكی بهانه بود‬ ‫اميد من به خلد برين جاودانه بود‬ ‫وز طاعتم هزار هزاران خزانه بو د‬ ‫بودم گمان به هر كس و بر خود گمان نبود‬ ‫گفتم يگانه من بوم و او يگانه بود‬ ‫چون كردمی كه با منش اين در ميانه بود‬ ‫كاين بيت بهر بينش اهل زمانه بود‬ ‫صد چشمه آن زمان زد و چشمم روانه بود‬ ‫ره يافتن به جانبشان بی رضا نبود‬

‫با او دلم به مهر و مودت يگانه بود‬ ‫بر درگهم ز جمع فرشته سپاه بود‬ ‫در راه من نهاد نهان دام مكر خويش‬ ‫می‌خواست تا نشانه لعنت كند مرا‬ ‫بودم معلم ملكوت اندر آسمان‬ ‫هفصد هزار سال به طاعت ببوده‌ام‬ ‫در لوح خوانده‌ام كه يكی لعنتی شود‬ ‫آدم ز خاك بود من از نور پاك او‬ ‫گفتند مالكان كه نكردی تو سجده‌ای‬ ‫جانا بيا و تكيه به طاعات خود مكن‬ ‫دانستم عاقبت كه به ما از قضا رسيد‬ ‫ای عاقالن عشق مرا هم گناه نيست‬

My heart was one with him through love and friendship My heart was home of the Sīmurgh of love41 The angels formed an army at my court The mighty Throne was the doorstep of my position He secretly set a trap of His deceit on my path Adam himself was the bait He wanted to mark me with the eternal curse; He did what He wanted to do and Adam was an excuse I was the master of the angels in heaven My hopes were pinned on the eternal paradise Seven hundred thousand years I was obedient I had built up a thousand treasures by my obedience I had read on the Tablet that someone would be cursed I suspected everyone, but never had I thought that I would be the one

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Satan as the Lover of God in Islamic Mystical Writings Adam was made from dirt, while I  was made from God’s clear light I thought that I was the one, but He wanted unity The angels said: “You have not kneeled!” How could I do this when He had planned this already? O Beloved! Come and do not lean on your obedience For this poem is to bring insight to the people of the world Eventually I found out that this was a heavenly decision Hundred spectacles He had shown me, while my tears were flowing O wise people! My love for Him is not without sins Finding a way to His side could not be found without his permission.42

Conclusion Mystics have tried to understand the relationship between God and Satan in various ways. Some mystical poets such as Ḥāfiẓ ascribe to Satan pride and jealousy and see him as man’s rival. Yet other mystics dwell on the position of Satan, God’s dialogue with him, and man’s position as concerns the relationship between God and Satan. Mystics believe that Satan had fully trusted God, thinking that God’s invitation for him to prostrate himself before Adam was a test of his loyalty. Satan’s discussion with God about man’s position and Satan’s refusal to prostrate himself before man show Satan’s doubt as to whether God’s words implied a test. Satan showed his unconditional love by accepting all tribulations, pain, and suffering, including being cursed for eternity. It is this daring aspect of Satan that makes him, in ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt’s words, a javān-mard or “chivalrous man,” who endures all pain for the sake of his love and constancy to the Beloved. Sanā’ī’s poem emphasizes that pride was not the only reason for Satan’s banishment from God’s presence. It also implies that not bowing down before Adam was not Satan’s intention, because it was predestined that God would curse someone. In other words, being forced to disobey, Satan fell victim to God’s will. As Satan stated, “I had read on the Tablet that someone would be cursed; I suspected everyone, but I never thought that it would be me.” Sanā’ī is not the only one who questions Satan’s refusal to 97

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures bow down. ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt notes that all angels heard the voice of God saying, “Bow down before Adam!” while Satan heard God’s voice saying, “Bow down for no other!” ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt states that while God asks the angels to bow down, He secretly tells Satan, from an invisible dimension, to reply, “I will not bow down for a creature created from clay.”43 Mystics present Satan as a victim while contextualizing his pride and disobedience in light of God’s inscrutable secret. It is through Satan’s account that Persian mystics show how mysteriously God’s will (irāda) works and how it remains impenetrable to everyone except Himself. Satan concludes Sanā’ī’s poem by asserting that he has not committed a sin, that he was just a link in the chain of God’s mysterious plan.

Notes 1. Generally speaking, it is not clear whether Iblīs is an angel, a jinn, or a devil. The Qur’an uses the name Iblīs when referring to the creation of the world and of Adam but when Iblīs is presented as the tempter he is called al-Shaytān, “the demon.” See A. J. Wensinck and L. Gardet, “Iblīs,” in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, ed. P.  Bearman et  al. (Leiden:  Brill, 1960–2005). Also see P.  J. Awn, Satan’s Tragedy and Redemption:  Iblis in Sufi Psychology (Leiden: Brill, 1983), 18–56. 2. When Adam begs God for forgiveness, God responds: “Did I not obligate you, O sons of Adam, not to serve Satan” (Qur’an 36:60). J. Pedersen, “Ādam,” in Bearman et al., The Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. 3. In another place, Iblīs emphasizes: “I am better than he. You created me from fire, and him You created from clay.” (7:12) 4. Awn, Satan’s Tragedy and Redemption, 53–4. 5. Najm al-Dīn Rāzī, Mirṣād al-ʿIbād, ed. M. A. Riyāḥī (Tehran: ‘Ilmī va Farhangī, 1992), 68; translated by H. Algar as The Path of God’s Bondsmen from Origin to Return, Persian Heritage Series 35 (New York: Caravan Books, 1982), 97. (Page numbers given hereafter for both original and translated texts.) 6. Ibid., 68, 97. 7. Ibid., 71, 99. 8. Ibid., 74, 102. 9. Ibid., 79, 107. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 75–7, 104. 12. See for instance S. H. Nasr, An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993).

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Satan as the Lover of God in Islamic Mystical Writings 13. Awn, Satan’s Tragedy and Redemption, 169ff. Also see N. Pūrjavādī, Sulṭān-i Ṭarīqat, 45–9; D.  Āshūrī, Hastī-shināsī-i Ḥāfiẓ:  Kāvushī dar Bunyādhā-yi Andīsha-yi Ū (Tehran: Markaz, 1998), 171–80. 14. Ghazâli, Aphorismen über die Liebe, p. 17; For an explanation of the concept of jealousy in combination with malāmat (reproach), see Aḥmad Ghazâli, Aphorismen über die Liebe, ed. von H. Ritter (Istanbul, 1942), fasc. 4. 15. ‘Izz al-Dīn Maḥmūd Kāshānī, “Kunūz al-Asrār va Rumūz al-Aḥrār,” in Shurūḥ-i Savāniḥ, ed. A. Mujāhid (Tehran: Surūsh, 1993), 20. I have treated this aspect of jealousy in Ḥāfiẓ’s poetry in “The Erotic Spirit: Love, Man and Satan in Hafez’s Poetry,” in Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry, ed. L. Lewisohn (London: I.B.Tauris, 2010), 107–21. 16. On Ḥallāj, see C. W. Ernst, Words of Ecstasy in Sufism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 102–10. 17. Firoozeh Papan-Matin, Beyond Death: The Mystical Teaching of ‘Ayn al-Qudât al-Hamadâni (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 151. 18. Rūzbihān Baqlī, Sharḥ-i Shaṭḥiyāt, ed. H. Corbin (Tehran: Ṭahūrī, 1995), 513. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 516. 21. Ibid., 508–9. 22. Ibid. 23. Papan-Matin, Beyond Death, 152–3. 24. The word ibtilā’ also means “being affected with misfortune or becoming indisposed.” 25. Rūzbihān Baqlī, Sharḥ-i Shaṭḥiyāt, 519. Also compare the thirteenth-century author Ibn Qānim al-Maqdisī’s Taflīs Iblīs (The bankruptcy of Iblīs), which is translated by Awn. See Awn, Satan’s Tragedy and Redemption, 107. Both Rūzbihān’s text and Ibn Qānim’s text borrow almost verbatim Ḥallāj’s words. On Moses and Iblīs see also Awn, Satan’s Tragedy and Redemption, 129ff. 26. Ghazâli, Aphorismen über die Liebe, 94–5; N.  Pourjavady, trans., Sawâneh: Inspirations from the World of Pure Spirits: The Oldest Persian Sufi Treatise on Love (London: KPI, 1986), 75. The references to the Qur’an are 38:78 and 38:82. 27. Rūzbihān Baqlī, Sharḥ-i Shaṭḥiyāt, 511. 28. Ghazâli, Aphorismen über die Liebe, 75. 29. Ibid. 30. Ghazâli, Aphorismen über die Liebe, p. 39. 31. For an excellent discussion of this philosophy of light see Papan-Matin, Beyond Death, 150–62; Pourjavady, Sawâneh, 106–7; Ernst, Words of Ecstasy, 77–8; and on ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt, see Hamadānī, Tamhīdāt, ed. A. ‘Uṣayrān (Tehran: Manūchihrī, 1991), 110–15. 32. Hamadānī, Tamhīdāt, 227. For an extensive analysis of this aspect of Satan see Papan-Matin, Beyond Death, ­chapter 4, especially 150–62; also compare Awn, Satan’s Tragedy and Redemption, 136ff.

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures 33. Ernst, Words of Ecstasy, 74. 34. See Pourjavady, Sawâneh, 106. 35. Hamadānī, Tamhīdāt, 228–9. 36. Ibid., 217; Papan-Matin, Beyond Death, 160. 37. See A.  Rippin, “Sidrat al-muntahā,” in Bearman et  al., The Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. 38. For a discussion of the Prophet’s ascension see A.  Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 218–21. 39. Hamadānī, Tamhīdāt, 230. For a touching record of ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt in prison before his trial see Hamadānī, Risāla Shakvā al-Gharīb, ed. A.  ‘Uṣayrān (Tehran: Tehran University Press, 1962). For a translation see A Sufi Martyr: The Apologia of ‘Ayn al-Qudât al-Hamadâni, trans. A. J. Arberry (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969). For an analysis see Dabashi, Truth and Narrative:  The Untimely Thoughts of ‘Ayn al-Qudāt al-Hamadhānī (Richmond, UK: Curzon, 1999), 451–74. Also see Papan-Matin, Beyond Death, 40–5. 40. ‘Alā al-Dīn Muḥammad Khvārazm Shāh ordered that he should be drowned in the Oxus river; this took place in 1131. 41. Sīmurgh is the name of a legendary bird, living in the mythical Mount Qāf. In ‘Aṭṭār’s famous epic The Conference of the Birds, Sīmūrgh is the king of birds. At the end of the journey, the 30 birds (sī murgh) find out that they themselves are the Sīmurgh they seek. 42. Sanā’ī, Dīvān, ed. Mudarris Raḍavī (Tehran: Sanā’ī, 1983), 871–2; also see Awn, Satan’s Tragedy and Redemption, 173–4. 43. Hamadānī, Tamhīdāt, 227.

Bibliography Āshūrī, D. Hastī-shināsī-i Ḥāfiẓ: Kāvushī dar Bunyādhā-yi Andāsha-yi Ū. Tehran: Markaz, 1998. ‘Aṭṭār, Farīd al-Dīn. Manṭiq al-Ṭayr. Edited by S. S. Gowharin. Tehran:  Shirkat-i Intishārāt-i ‘Ilmī va Farhangī, 1989. Translated by D. Davis and A. Darbandi as The Conference of the Birds (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1984). Awn, P. J. Satan’s Tragedy and Redemption:  Iblis in Sufi Psychology. Leiden: Brill, 1983. Bearman, P., Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W. P. Heinrichs, eds. The Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. Leiden: Brill, 1960–2005. Beck, E., “Iblis und Mensch, Satan und Adam. Der Werdegang einer koranischen Erzählung,” in Le Muséon, 89, 1976, pp. 195–244. Dabashi, H. Truth and Narrative:  The Untimely Thoughts of ‘Ayn al-Qudāt al-Hamadhānī. Richmond, UK: Curzon, 1999.

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Satan as the Lover of God in Islamic Mystical Writings Ernst, C. W. Words of Ecstasy in Sufism. Albany:  State University of New  York Press, 1985. Ghazâli, Ahmad. Aphorismen über die Liebe. Edited by von H. Ritter. Istanbul, 1942. Translated by N. Pourjavady as Sawâneh: Inspirations from the World of Pure Spirits: The Oldest Persian Sufi Treatise on Love (London: KPI, 1986). Hamadānī, ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt. Risāla Shakvā al-Gharīb. Edited by A. ‘Uṣayrān. Tehran: Tehran University Press, 1962. ——— A Sufi Martyr:  The Apologia of ‘Ayn al-Qudât al-Hamadâni. Translated by A. J. Arberry. London: Allen and Unwin, 1969. ——— Tamhīdāt. Edited by A. ‘Uṣayrān. Tehran: Manūchihrī, 1991. Kāshānī, ‘Izz al-Dīn Maḥmūd. “Kunūz al-Asrār va Rumūz al-Aḥrār.” In Shurūḥ-i Savāniḥ, edited by A. Mujāhid. 3–30. Tehran: Surūsh, 1993. Nasr, S. H. An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines. Albany:  State University of New York Press, 1993. Papan-Matin, F. Beyond Death: The Mystical Teaching of ‘Ayn al-Qudât al-Hamadâni. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Pedersen, J. “Ādam.” In Bearman et al., The Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. Pūrjavādī, N. Sulṭān-i Ṭarīqat. Tehran: Āgāh, 1979. Rāzī, Najm al-Dīn. Mirṣād al-ʿIbād. Edited by M. A. Riyāḥī. Tehran:  ‘Ilmī va Farhangī, 1992. Translated by H.  Algar as The Path of God’s Bondsmen from Origin to Return, Persian Heritage Series 35 (New York: Caravan Books, 1982). Rippin, A. “Sidrat al-muntahā.” In Bearman et  al., The Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. Rūzbihān Baqlī. Sharḥ-i Shatḥiyyāt. Edited by H. Corbin. Tehran: Ṭahūrī, 1995. Sanā’ī, Ḥakīm Majdūd al-Dīn. Dīvān. Edited by Mudarris Raḍavī. Tehran: Sanā’ī, 1983. Schimmel, A. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1975. Seyed-Gohrab, A. A. “The Erotic Spirit: Love, Man and Satan in Hafez’s Poetry.” In Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry, edited by L. Lewisohn, 107–21. London: I.B.Tauris, 2010. Wensinck, A. J., and L. Gardet. “Iblīs.” In Bearman et al., The Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition.

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5 Reverence for the Beloved as a Religious ̵ Metaphor: A Study of Rajā’a ‘Alim’s Ḥ ubbā (The Beloved) Miral Mahgoub al-Tahawy

‫تماما‬ ‫ فلست اري لحجهم‬، ‫اذا الحجاج لم يقفوا بليلى‬ ‫ على ليلى و تقريها السلما‬، ‫تمام الحج ان تقف المطايا‬ If pilgrims do not stop at Layla’s place, I do not regard their pilgrimage as complete. The perfection of the hajj is to stop the pilgrim convoys at Layla’s [abode] and to salute her with a “Salaam.” Qays b. al-Mulawwaḥ, Majnūn Laylā1

Ḥubbā (The Beloved), a novel by the Saudi Arabian writer Rajā’a ‘Ālim (b.  1970), is arguably among the foremost contemporary Arabic novels to portray female worship and adoration of the beloved as a symbol of the sacred in the Arab cultural tradition. The novel depicts the beloved as a heavenly revelation embodied in the female form, tying this metaphor to the Muslim shrine (al-Kaʿba) which itself, at times, is viewed as a female deity in the Arabo-Islamic collective consciousness. Thus, the novel embarks upon a creative adventure in which the writer attempts to interpret the Islamic pilgrimage rituals, such as ṭawāf (circumambulating Kaʿba) and saʿy (jogging seven times to and fro between Mount al-Ṣafā 102

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Reverence for the Beloved as a Religious Metaphor and Mount al-Marwa, in a gender-sensitive reading of Ḥubbā’s story in light of the taboos in matriarchal pre-Islamic history in the Arabian Peninsula. The text explores how al-Kaʿba at the time was considered a heathen female shrine at which a number of female goddesses were worshipped. Knowledge of this history has been systematically aborted by the Wahabbist and Salafist doctrines, as it challenges their orthodox interpretation of the Islamic scriptures and their monopoly over exegesis. It is, therefore, discredited as belonging to a primitive and uncivilized tradition that needed Islam to refine it. ‘Ālim’s text bravely represents the much-overlooked relationship between love and the worship of the feminine in the Arabian Peninsula. Ḥubbā can be considered a historical novel as it is inspired by the epoch when the Arab tribes migrated to Mecca, which effectively transformed it into a holy city. ‘Ālim delves into this history to draw parallels between the pre-Islamic era that witnessed the deification of the feminine and the mystical trend within Islam that casts the Divine as the embodied femininity of the female beloved. This chapter will examine the relationship between love and worship on the one hand, and the use of the hajj ritual as a metaphor for goddess worship on the other, as represented in Ḥubbā. It will also explore adoration of the beloved as a derivative of the worship of the goddess of love, sexuality, and fertility in Arab culture. The influence of Sufism on representations of the beloved and how the divine essence is conceived of in feminine terms in the Sufi literature will also be discussed. This will include a look at how characteristic Sufi elements such as the highly symbolic language, which indulges mythological and morphological aspects of certain words to convey the fundamental concept that distinguishes Sufi philosophy, namely, love, are employed to map the Sufi spiritual pilgrimage towards the Divine. Reading Ḥubbā within the context of ancient rituals of goddess worship is, I believe, key to understanding the dialectical connection between love and the idolization or deification of the beloved in Arab culture. This is because, firstly, the novel imagines the beloved as a goddess and an object of worship while searching for the source of the beloved Divine throughout the various phases of Arab religions both before and after the emergence of Islam. Secondly, the text falls within the set of feminist works by women writers  – the literary granddaughters of Scheherazade  – who re-read 103

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures history and reinterpret mythology to unearth the goddess model that has been deliberately banished from the female memory. Such attempts aim at reproducing the lost memory of a time when women were pivotal actors in the history of humanity. In Ḥubbā, ‘Ālim does exactly that when she revisits the history of Mecca from a feminist perspective that highlights the prominence of the role of women in the city’s history. This has prompted Saudi cultural critic ‘Abdullāh al-Ghudhāmī to say that in spite of its “complex aristocratic language,” ‘Ālim’s literary project is an exceptional feminist experiment, as it feminizes the creative experience and the Arabic language that have long been monopolized by men.2 ‘Ālim’s work as a whole, particularly Ḥubbā, is characterized by a style of writing that draws upon classical Arabic literature, especially Sufi literature, while simultaneously questioning that same heritage in order to excavate the origins of pagan matriarchal religions and their transformation into monotheism. Thirdly, the novel draws upon the literary motif of idolization of the beloved that is prevalent in classical Arabic poetry, in which poets employed worship rituals to express love and reverence toward the female beloved within the established tradition of ghazal (lyrical romantic love) and ‘udhrī poetry, especially throughout the seventh century CE. These religious elements, which were deployed in the portrayal of the beloved, included images of Muslim worship such as prayer, martyrdom, and pilgrimage. The poet would pray for the beloved, welcome death like a martyr in a holy war where the battlefield became his beloved’s eyes, and perform hajj to the deserted place or ruins (ṭalal) where she used to reside, directing all his worship toward her home, tomb, or shrine.3 This adoption of the phraseology of religious expression is a notable motif that was latent in Arab romance ghazal poetry (‘udhrī) even after the advent of Islam.4 It is a well-known tradition in the history of Arabic love poetry. Throughout the history of Arabic literature many poets representing different eras were able to use the language of worship to describe their beloved, a phenomenon that reached the peak of its symbolic connotation in the Sufi tradition. This tradition expanded to include prominent Sufi philosophers such as Rumi and Ibn ‘Arabī, who found in ghazal and love poetic metaphors an effective vehicle for representing their doctrine of divine love.5 The noted Tunisian scholar Rajā’a bin Salāma has extensively studied religious imagery as a major motif in Arabic romance poetry. Salāma points 104

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Reverence for the Beloved as a Religious Metaphor out that in classical Arabic poetry, from pre-Islamic (Jāhilī) poetry to the ‘udhrī poetic tradition of the Umayyad and Abbasid epochs (661–1258 CE), the poet would frequently imagine himself as a pilgrim journeying towards his beloved, implicitly deifying her.6 The prominence of this metaphor mirrors the prominence of the hajj itself within Arabia. The hajj was one occasion when a lover could see the face of his beloved, during the performance of ṭawāf, for “it was part of the ritual that women who performed the pilgrimage should do so unveiled. It was well known that many women who went on pilgrimage did so not only to fulfill a religious duty, but also in the hope to find a marriage partner.”7 In fact, many of the love stories in Arabic literature take place in Mecca and Medina, where this form of ghazal poetry took shape.8 During the pilgrimage season, the poet could choose to stand at a tomb or other ruins (ṭalal) right next to his beloved, so that their attire might almost touch. He would compare the saliva of his beloved to the ever-fresh water from Zamzam Well or recall her memory during the hajj rituals, as when he jogged between Mount Ṣafā and Mount Marwa.9 Since pilgrimage is a ritual that is linked to space, and its axis is the sacred place sought by the pilgrims, hajj as a metaphor for seeking the beloved’s abode is quite popular in classical Arabic poetry. Some lovers would circumambulate Kaʿba only to seek solace and cure from the loss of the beloved. They pray for the chance to see her indiscreetly during the hajj, a practice that came to be known as “love’s pilgrimage,” which some theologians have even considered to be sacrilegious since the lover’s intention is to jettison a meeting with God for one with the beloved.10 Because this obsession with using religious expression to portray love is a literary phenomenon noted both after and before Islam’s arrival,11 it can lead to controversial conclusions about monotheism (tawḥīd) since it can blur the line between the human and the Divine. While the devotion to one beloved in ‘udhrī poetry reflected a monotheistic outlook, it still bestowed sanctity upon the image of the female, as the poet described his beloved as an unattainable, near-divine entity to whom he was exclusively committed. As al-Ṭāhir Labīb points out, “this glorification of a single beloved was – implicitly – a reference to the pantheon of God being limited to a single deity.”12 Thus, it is possible to say that Arabic poetic imagery commonly represented the female beloved as a goddess who was the object of worship. 105

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures Scholars suggest “the ‘udhrī poet came to regard his love metaphorically as a religion, with the beloved as its deity.”13 Accordingly, the rituals of worship such as prayers, fasting, and pilgrimage can be employed to address and revolve around the beloved. The same goes for the Arabic Sufi tradition, which constantly borrows mystical language and images from religious monoculture to represent ardent attachment to, and being at one with, the beloved or the divine essence, which in Sufi tradition was metaphorically conceived of in feminine terms.14 This image of the divine feminine beloved has remained a perpetual source of inspiration for writers throughout the ages, and especially in modern Arabic literature. The pattern of adopting religious imagery to convey human love is certainly not exclusive to Arabo-Islamic literature and has made its way to different literary traditions. For instance, in French literary history “the use in courtly literature of religious imagery and metaphors is ubiquitous, constant, and deliberate throughout the Middle Ages.”15 The Arabic literary tradition, as demonstrated above, knew this pattern very early on, and many poets diligently employed religious imagery to portray the female beloved, likening her to celestial creatures such as the moon, the sun, or the morning star (Venus). These metaphors were not devoid of worship connotations either. For example, the frequent use of the moon as a symbol for the beauty of the beloved in classical Arabic poetry resorts to mythology that regarded the moon as a goddess, who was widely worshipped in pre-Islamic Arabia.16 Other poets utilized pilgrimage and prayer rituals as vehicles for their ghazal poems. For example, Layla’s Majnūn says: ‫ورائيا‬ ‫اراني اذا صليت يممت نحوها بوجهي واذا كان المصلى‬ ‫وما بي اشراك ولكن حبها كعود الشجا اعيا الطبيب المداويا‬17 When praying, I find myself turning my face towards her Even though the Qibla is behind me. No semblance of disbelief in God lies within me, But my lovesickness has worn out many an experienced doctor.

Or as ‘Urwa b. Ḥizām says: ‫اصلي فابكي في الصلة لذكرها… لي الويل مما يكتب الملكان‬18 I weep in my prayer at her remembrance,

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Reverence for the Beloved as a Religious Metaphor Woe unto me: how will my guiding angels evaluate my prayer in their register?

Examples of how this pattern permeates modern Arabic poetry include the works of Aḥmad Shawqī (1868–1932) and Nizār Qabbānī (1923–98). For example, Aḥmad Shawqī writes about how his beloved is the deity he worships: ‫معبده‬ ‫ناقوس القلب يدق له … وحنايا الضلع‬ ‫وبخال كاد يحج له … لو كان يقبل اسوده‬19 For whom the heart bell tolls And the rib curves serve as temple, I swear by the cheek mole that could become a pilgrimage site If its blackness could be kissed [like Kaʿba’s Black Stone].

Here, Shawqī clearly evokes the popular belief among Muslims that the Black Stone that is part of the body of Kaʿba descended directly from heaven and paying special tribute to the stone by kissing and touching it during the hajj is a treasured honor that pilgrims strive to achieve. Shawqī likens the mole on his beloved’s cheek to Kaʿba’s coveted stone. He wishes he can journey to that mole like a pilgrim, but only if he has the honor to caress it. In a similar fashion, Rajā’a ‘Ālim incorporates rituals of worship into the lexicon and acts of romantic love by deploying metaphors such as prayer in the shrine of the beloved or being martyred in the beloved’s defense and so forth. Furthermore, ‘Ālim amplifies some of these classical metaphors to personify Kaʿba as a kidnapped princess or a venerated beloved whose shrine is sought by lovers. By treating Kaʿba as a symbol for femininity, ‘Ālim traces the genealogy of worship of the female on the Arabian Peninsula. Ḥubbā exemplifies this traditional interplay between love and worship. ‘Ālim revisits the history of Kaʿba and the transformations of the pilgrimage ritual during two eras: before and after the arrival of Islam. She tries to reconstruct the continuum of the worship of female idols around Kaʿba and the veneration of Kaʿba itself as the sacred house of God. Ḥubbā, set in the historical context of Arab pagan religions in Mecca, when it was a hub for the worship of female deities, connects the history of that cult 107

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures of female goddesses to the veneration of the feminine as a symbol for the Divine in Sufi philosophy.

Ḥ ubbā as a Metaphor for a Female Deity or Kaʿba The novel is divided into two stories, one narrated in the main text and the other in the margins. This mechanism begs the question as to what would prompt a writer to write two simultaneous narratives, where the central and the marginal texts run parallel to each other. The author is fully aware that this creates a state of visual and emotional perplexity for the reader – especially since these two narratives are variations of the same story: that of Princess Ḥubbā and her metamorphosis into the sacred. Even though each narrative belongs to a different historical moment, these two stories about the sacred princess are like two sides of the same coin. In the story told in the margins, which is set in the pre-Islamic period the beloved appears in the form of a goddess of fertility, life, and renewal. In the story told in the main text, which is set in the Sufi Islamic tradition, the beloved is figured as a hidden, abstract female entity to which her followers cling with all their hearts. ‘Ālim chooses to mimic the complex text-margin – and antiquated – structure, which was common in classical Arabic literature. Books consisted of the main text and a margin that offered explanations of some of the concepts appearing in the main text, including elaborations from which new narratives emerged. As well as serving this same function in Ḥubbā, the marginal text endows the novel as a whole with an air of obscurity, which some readers viewed as elitism and some critics regarded as the excessive indulgence of a desire to explore and experiment with the possibilities embedded in the way classical texts were constructed. To me, this structure has favorably contributed to the esotericism and illusiveness of the text, for, in spite of the narrator’s keenness to encourage the reader to separate the reading of the text from that of the margin, the readers can often find themselves peeking at the margin and moving from one to the other of the two narratives of the eternally symbolic heroine Ḥubbā. The conscious shift between the main text and the margin as a way of representing the dialectical relationship between the socially celebrated and the marginalized should not be lost on the reader as well. The marginal text 108

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Reverence for the Beloved as a Religious Metaphor can be read as the private space to which female life is confined under patriarchy. In Ḥubbā, however, the female prevails as she occupies both the central and marginal texts. A triumphant celebration of such a marginal space, ‘Ālim’s novel cannot be understood without it. This goes for the history of humanity as a whole, because it is through the perspectives that have been consigned to the margins that a total picture can be captured. At the heart of this margin sits the woman as a goddess before the Arabian Peninsula turned to Abrahamic religions. This narrative structure also allows for many historical references. The marginal story tells the mythical tale of Ḥayyān, who travels from Yemen in search of Ḥubbā. His journey includes details that belong to a time much farther in the past than the one in the central story. The main story centers on Sāriḥ, whose journey seems to be an emulation of Ḥayyān’s quest for the trapped beloved. The road to the hero’s beloved seems to become endless, and only the two male protagonists, who belong to different historical moments, know its end. In her attempt to avoid confusing the reader, ‘Ālim prefaces her novel by saying, “My story (Ḥubbā’s story) will come to you in a flowing main text and a sealed end; the outermost side is new while the innermost, esoteric side, is old.”20 And in the marginal story, we find this advice from the narrator: “We do not advise you, our dear reader, to read the page in its entirety. Instead, we advise you to read the main text separately from the margin, or the margin away from the text” (56). Even though the margin story and the main story may denote the outer and inner layers, the entire novel is a combination of margin and main text whose past explains its new aspects. The marginal text is a fable that narrates the mythical birth of Princess Ḥubbā. She is – as the writer describes – a mystic heroine and a “veiled female,” her body associated with fertility. The night she reaches puberty is an exceptional one, exuding desire, for there are “hissing snakes, the pleasures of fire exhumed from her quartz” (7). It is a night in which dogs howl, which means that the tribe is about to lose their princess, because the holy king Ṭā-sīn has chosen her.21 “Ṭa-sīn is mysterious and unseen, as the most magnificent holy king whose animosity is a dire and unending catastrophe” (31). Thus is the king of the underworld described by the narrator as he sends Ḥubbā a young 109

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures colt that is likened to the Birds of al-Nuʿmān, with a saddle “tailored from the skin of golden white gazelles,” asking for her hand in marriage.22 The tribe realizes that it cannot afford to reject the suitor, the king of all kings of the underworld, and that the only way out of the drought and poverty that had beset the tribe is to surrender Ḥubbā to that colt, which leads her to the pastures of jinn. The princess rides the colt, which takes her among hidden meadows, and on the road she meets her grandmother, “the first soothsayer, Ṭarifa, who controls the tribe by telling fortunes and reconciling the temper of humans to the moods of the underground dwellers [spirits and jinn].”23 Ḥubbā sees her fate in the mirror of Ṭarifa, who teaches the princess the ritual of surrendering to the hidden bridegroom. She shows the princess how her face will change into a silver-laden shroud on which the name Ḥubbā will be engraved in beautiful abstraction, as a square veil, in whose heart lies a black grain. On the sides of the shroud are stamps that symbolize the places ready for the revelation of religions (62). In her grandmother’s mirror Ḥubbā also sees her transformation from a female into a stone engulfed in blackness, with sacred inscriptions carved on it. On that stone all the sacred books are engraved. During this tutorial ritual, the soothsayer-grandmother thus displays the shapes and transformations that Ḥubbā will undergo and how the king will change her body into quartz, which engulfs her: “Ḥubbā’s body will be sculpted from marble; then she will rise from her slumber to see an antique silver amulet lying on her chest. Its center is beautifully engraved with the ninety-nine supreme names of God” (64).24 This portrayal agrees with the description of the shape of Kaʿba in various sources.25 In every mention of the structuring of that shrine, the narrator provides its historical characteristics and the chronology of the symbols that were tied to Kaʿba in old tales. The novel describes the steps Ḥubbā will burden in her transformation from a woman into a place, until the point when she finally settles into her rightful position, which is the gem “known as the white ruby which descended after Adam to alleviate the pain of his separation from Eden” (64).26 Symbolic references to the human female, who is converted into a feminine place is rich in allusions to Kaʿba’s shape and history.27 The human princess is first converted into a mythological female from the south, traveling north toward her final destination, where she unites with the Holy 110

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Reverence for the Beloved as a Religious Metaphor King Ṭā-sīn. This is when the body of the female transforms into a sacred place. Ḥubbā takes root in the place and identifies with the position chosen by Ṭā-sīn, for when she wanted to continue her travels, as the story tells us, “she was deeply planted in her place by winds that besieged her from all eight dimensions” (65). By coupling with Ṭā-sīn, her body becomes the earth’s navel. After Ḥubbā settles down on this abandoned desert that has neither water nor plants, this land changes into a valley, “a space for the beasts of the peninsula and its stars and galaxies” (67). On this spot, Ṭā-sīn appears on her body every year in the form of wind and tells her, “Your quartz-engulfed body is light dissolved in a glass. You are on the threshold of a brightly lit planet whose oil would almost glow even if untouched by fire. Your fate is to guide with your radiance travelers near and far, living and inanimate.”28 ‘Ālim discloses the king’s image on Ḥubbā’s body by using the symbolic term banā (literally, “to build”). Banā also means “to marry a woman” (i.e., to have sexual relations with one’s wife for the first time), because Arabs saw in marriage a building on and inhabiting of the earth.29 ‘Ālim uses this multilayered word to describe the revelation of the divine to the sacred woman, the act that will change an arid place into a sacred one. Hence, King Ṭā-sīn beckons the princess and then “builds” in Ḥubbā – meaning he copulates with her – around the place where the earth and sky meet in order for fertility to take place. The holy king Ṭā-sīn brings life to a new earth, and the princess first turns into a black cube, and then into a sacred female. These are the indications that the symbolic connotations all flow back to the land of Mecca, and that the glory of God builds Kaʿba and then resides in its image, which symbolizes a woman clad in silver-embroidered black. She becomes a place, and then this place is the earth’s navel, the center of the world. As the holy king tells Ḥubbā, “Your body is promised construction – for you to be the living and the dead – a building [life] and its annihilation” (74). After Ṭā-sīn appears to and “builds in” the princess, he disappears. “All that Ṭā-sīn built of Ḥubbā was no more than a congealed sandy room with a lonely opening” (74). After that, Ḥubbā dies and her body is converted into a coffin and then into a temple that people visit to perform circumbulation (ṭawāf). Shepherds and delegations of all colors and creeds come to settle around the square room, for water never ceases to flow from the opening whose top is bejeweled Ṭā-sīn’s crescent: “Then came a time when 111

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures the opening was closed with an inscribed ceramic. Curtains were drawn on the ceramic, layer upon layer, for the buried not to be revealed” (81). This remains the case until Ḥayyān, a man from the Duru’a tribe (the ancestors of Ḥubbā), is visited by a vision of asking him to save her body. He loses his mind over this request and so embarks upon a long journey to search for that body. Before leaving his homeland in search of the woman with whom he is smitten and enthraled, he goes to the tribe’s sage, who tells him that Ḥubbā “is buried in an arid valley, and nobody knows which way [he] should take to find this entombed female” (93). Ḥayyān leaves his tribe to search for his beloved. He catches up with a caravan heading north toward his beloved. All of the men in it are moved by a passion for the sacred buried female body. Ḥayyān’s search for Ḥubbā, the kidnapped princess of his tribe, is the journey of a lover to find his lost beloved. His path requires the kind of discipline that can withstand the trials of self-purification and transformation in toto. The novel invariably displays parallels with a mythical hero’s search for a beloved or a mystic’s search for divine light. When he reaches Ḥubbā’s shrine, Ḥayyān realizes that in order to unite with his beloved’s hidden body, he must follow the path of the disciples in order to match the same gnostic perfection possessed by his rival Ṭā-sīn. Ḥayyān also realizes that to achieve human goodness and perfection, he must actualize the divine image within him. To that end, he must traverse the path to self-knowledge and discovery of the secrets of the beloved, namely, the art of love. This is the same as the art of building, for he engages in all kinds of creativity related to architecture, decoration, craftsmanship – serving the holy shrine – such as weaving, dyeing, carpentry, perfumery, candle making, and beading. Ḥayyān moves from one craft to another to discover the secret of love. First, He enters the dyers’ alley and meets Shaykh Qurmuzānī. Ḥayyān delves deeply into the craft of dyeing. He masters the ways and kingdoms of colors. “His maturity peaks when he knows how his body dissolves and lives on in some dyes, how the body of the beloved dissolves and lives on in textile” (132). Ḥayyān is exposed to temptations from the women around him, but his heart has been sealed by his love for Ḥubbā. He pours all his emotions into gaining knowledge, which comes only by following the path that leads 112

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Reverence for the Beloved as a Religious Metaphor to human perfection and learning the crafts of beauty, which he masters to discover the origins and shades of colors. Eventually, his discovery leads him to the origin of the eternal color, “which is no more than a bead hanging from the ‘divine’ throne, and another springing up from the shadow of the beloved’s majestic aesthetic attributes, which encompass the white and black in harmony and unity, in a transparent colorless entity” (153). From the alley of the dyers, Ḥayyān goes to the quarter of the spice dealers to become an apprentice of the master of spice traders – the artists of amalgamations and mixings. He studies under the tutelage of Shaykh al-Kādī and learns how to strip down a perfume to its bare elements. Ḥayyān then goes to the most famous Shaykh, Al-Wardī, who is well known due to “his body [being] made of rosewood.” He explains to Ḥayyān the secret of the vocation: “Living with wood is like the companionship of wind and heat, for without them, no masterpiece can stand straight and complete. Bear in mind that stems can be tricky. The longer the juice lives within them, the more likely they will strike us with their wild, uncontrollable, and unexpected creations” (191). Ḥayyān then attempts to get closer to the soul of his beloved and her cover of wood, color, and musk to build Ḥubbā’s body and her burqas, for which he chose the characteristics of the most ancient of cities, Muqqa. “Ḥayyān would drown in the scents and spirits of the wood, those prepared by the fire for engraving and shaping into a universal unity with formations of gems, their prayers and incantations, what they retain from eternal secrets and revelations” (232). Ḥayyān’s path is marked by the desire to learn the worldly crafts needed to furbish Ḥubbā’s earthly throne. All such crafts are a means of inhabiting the earth by inhabiting Ḥubbā’s shrine, chosen by God (or the holy king Ṭā-sīn) to be the center of the building. The protagonist, who passes through many spiritual stages of self-perfection, knowledge, and overcomes special creative exercises, then receives an unknown holy call: “I am Muqqa, so build me” (232). Following that call, when the moon is full, Ḥayyān begins to proceed toward Ḥubbā’s shrine and starts slaughtering mountain rams for her. Ḥayyān’s evocation was engraved in Ḥubbā’s shrine and in his recreation of her grave “he divides his will and creative energies into three thirds: one third to taming the sciences and secrets required for creation; another for 113

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures subjugating the spirits fighting to possess this female kingdom; and the last for the architecture apparent in the tangible parts of Ḥubbā’s body” (296). Ḥayyān is keen not to make ceilings for the shrine. He prohibits people from entering it at night and keeps its opening facing the sun. He calls the shrine “Ḥubbā’s Palace.” The desirous lovers and passers-by would leave sacrifices at its footstep, but “then the time came when the wall surrounding Ḥubbā’s tomb was itself surrounded by alleys and streets as well as a campus with a curtain and a star, and her shrine became reputable. It attracted lovers like death attracts beings from the moment of birth” (320). Thus goes the story in the margin of ‘Ālim’s text, which chronicles the birth of this sacred city based on the myth of the body of Princess Ḥubbā, who was transformed into a sacred place as chosen by King Ṭā-sīn. This place was then changed by the creative hands of her lover, Ḥayyān, into a magnificent sacred palace surrounded by a sacred territory (ḥaram) that attracts lovers, worshippers, craftsmen, and seekers yearning for perfection. This marginal narrative in Ḥubbā clearly references the history of Mecca and the story of Abraham, its builder. The novel gives Ḥubbā’s tomb the shape and image of Kaʿba as it is portrayed in classical Arabic sources as well as in descriptions of the hajj before Islam as it also depicts how paganism and idol worship came to Mecca (Muqqa).30 Historically, both Mecca and Kaʿba were associated with feminine images. Mecca was a holy site for goddess worshippers, and according to some scholars, Kaʿba was a temple where the mother goddess was worshipped in the indigenous religions that pre-dated Islam. Other scholars, however, believe that ancient Arab religions revolved around astral worship. Sun was known as a female deity throughout the northern Arabic peninsula, while in the south the sun goddess was a temporary idol for the tribes of Sheba. The southern Arabian culture of the Sabeans goes as far back as prior to Solomon and his visit from the Queen of Saba’ (Hebrew Sheba).31 This is when southern Arabian culture had a pantheon of astral deities that included the moon god and the sun goddess.32 Kaʿba was associated with three goddesses, which the Qur’an mentions were worshipped in Mecca before the advent of Islam. They were Manāt, al-ʿUzzā, and al-Lāt, which were collectively known as the “daughters of Allah.”33 Allāt or Alilate, “The Lady,” was the most revered of those associated with Kaʿba. She was stately and commanding. She was not the wife 114

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Reverence for the Beloved as a Religious Metaphor of a god nor is there any unseemly idea connected with her.34 She was worshipped all over the middle and the north of the Arabian Peninsula. Goddess Allāt was most often associated with the planet Venus, the goddess of beauty and fertility. Manāt and al-ʿUzzā were manifestations of Allāt: one as the star of the sky and the other of the morning. There are also manuscripts that mention the name “Madonna.”35 Allāt is described as a square-shaped rock sculpture of a female figure, which represented the sun – and her shape was akin to that of Kaʿba. She was also hailed as the goddess of fertility and destruction, life and death. This goddess dominated pagan Arab religious history until the introduction of patriarchal religions exemplified by the male god of the moon, Sīn or (al-Maqqah). D. Nielsen points out that among the gods that were worshipped in ancient Arab history, the moon-god was king. He was known as al-Maqqah or Sīn.36 The same idea is also discussed by al-Saʿīd ‘Abd al-ʿAzīz Sālim. Ancient Arabs worshipped the same three deities as those worshipped in the Babylonian triangle:  the moon as represented by the god Sīn, the sun represented by Shams, and Venus as represented by the goddess Ishtār. The lunar Sīn, symbolized by a crescent, was the most revered of the group as he was considered the patron of all gods. Those who worshipped Sīn/al-Muqqah comprised the oldest cult. Moon’s other names had in common the article al or ayl prefixed, as in “the” god. He was named “the wise,” “the sacred,” “the honest,” “the just,” “the blessed,” “the helper,” “the protector”  – all names that later became characteristics of Allāh, the Omnipotent in Islam.37 Saʿīd al-Qimānī speculates that there is a link between Al-Muqqah and Mecca and that the name of the city bears its origin in the name of the lunar god.38 Kaʿba was eventually purged of female idols such as Allāt, Manāt, and ‘Uzzā, and the male divine figures started to take over and claim more authority over time. The male god became the paternal deity and the female deities became a part of him and at his service. This change is described by Joseph Chelhod: The god of the sacred house was a male god who is connected to the world of light. Because of his very distinguished position, as the forefather of Allah, he saw and knew everything. He was the god of the sky who directed the elements. He was the giver

115

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures of rain, a distinction that indicated absolute power within the Bedouin context. It is useful to remember that those characteristics in particular were the features of the lunar god.39

With the advent of monotheistic religions, Kaʿba, which historically represented the female deity for a long time, turned into the holy place and abode of the One god. In her novel, ‘Ālim adopts the ancient myths around Kaʿba as a holy place, and depicts the transfer of power from the female Allāt to the male demiurge Allah. She alludes to this history through the deity represented by Princess Ḥubbā, who as said is kidnapped and dominated by the patriarchal god Sīn, who then transforms her body into a holy place. Symbolically, this story represents the usurpation of feminine divinity and power by patriarchal religion after the development of Islam and clearly posits that the ritual of pilgrimage has its roots in goddess worship. Ancient Arabs were accustomed to circumbulation (ṭawāf) of Kaʿba bare-naked.40 This practice finds its roots in the mythical acts of indecency attributed to Isaf and Naila, two shamans whose sexual deviances in Kaʿba led to their being turned into stone, albeit they were worshipped [as stone figures] until the advent of Islam.41 According to some scholars, the Black Stone (al-ḥajar al-aswad), which was once known as the “Old Woman,” was also a deity worshipped by the Semitic peoples.42 There are many feminine connotations associated with the word Kaʿba. In Arabic the words kiʿāb, kāʿibba, or kaʿūb, when combined with the word for “woman,” refer to a woman whose breasts are ripe and grown, hence “a complete female.” In the Lisān al-ʿArab, Kaʿba is translated as “a cube.” The Banū Rabīʿ, a tribe, had its own Kaʿba, and there was more than one in the Arabian Peninsula, indeed almost one for each tribe to circumambulate. In that respect Kaʿba as described in Lisān al-ʿArab, was the Arabs’ first image of a sacred place and one of the forms of pagan temples passed down to Islam. Within the parameters of Islamic cognizance, Kaʿba implies Meccan Kaʿba with links to Abraham and Ishmel – and the purging of pagan Kaʿba.43 According to Islamic tradition, it is where heaven meets earth; hence the idea of “the navel of the earth,” whither the fetus is bound. In folk traditions of Arabia Kaʿba takes on a feminine appearance as well: that of a veiled female in black velvet with a belt of golden embroidery around her chest. Arabic literature and folk songs portray her as a princess 116

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Reverence for the Beloved as a Religious Metaphor in black dress, with everyone yearning just to touch or come close to her sacred territory (ḥaram). As such this image has presented itself as a popular trope, where the Sacred House has taken on a dual role of a beloved and a shelter. For example, Najm-al Dīn al-Dimashqī (ah 603–77) writes: O night of reuniting with the beautiful one, welcome;

O the most desired, most welcome! The time of estrangement from you has been prolonged to no end: My is almost no more and my mind a foregone conclusion: gone! O nights of reunion, time would not deny us another encounter: Blessed is my residence in you, ye goddess of shelter, When the refuge of your love blesses me with your glory.44

Arabic folklore and songs that address the hajj also treat Kaʿba as a celestial bride or a princess for whose majesty they weave an annual wedding dress.45 Every year before the hajj the corners and the floor of Kaʿba are washed amidst rituals of jubilation akin to wedding celebrations. During these rituals the sanctity of the body of Kaʿba is preserved, as it is covered until it is clothed by its new attire as if it is a female whose body should not be seen naked. This female ritual par excellence encompasses a number of images related to Kaʿba and its history as a shrine for a goddess worshipped in pre-Islamic times.

Ḥ ubbā as a Metaphor for the Female Divine in Islamic Mysticism My heart can take on any form:

A meadow for gazelles, A cloister for monks, For the idols, sacred ground, Kaʿba for the circling pilgrim, The tables of the Torah, The scrolls of the Qur’an. My creed is Love; Wherever its caravan turns along the way, That is my belief, My faith.46

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures After dedicating the marginal story in Ḥubbā to Ḥayyān’s quest as he travels from the south to build and embellish the shrine (maqām) of Princess Ḥubbā, ‘Ālim employs a number of narratives, and historical and linguistic images in this part of the novel (Ḥayyān’s story) to describe the characteristics and the shape of Kaʿba. She also employs all these historical elements to link her main story to the female deity, the goddess who was historically associated with Kaʿba as a sacred place. In the second part of the novel, the central text, ‘Ālim relates these images of the beloved Ḥubbā (or Kaʿba) to the mystical image of the divine female as depicted in the Sufi tradition. She employs the heavily gendered Sufi terms to aid the union between the female divine and the Sufi seeker (murīd), who yearns for union with the beloved (the divine Ḥubbā). In the central text of the novel, a revelation comes to the protagonist Sāriḥ in the form of Ḥubbā herself, who appears to him in a dream. As a result, Sāriḥ leaves his tribe on a voyage undertaken by the archetypal besotted Sufi seeker who desires closeness to his beloved:  a common Sufi theme. Sāriḥ arrives at Muqqa seeking Ḥubbā’s palace only to find her shrine surrounded by guards and the city besieged by one of the emirs, who mistreats people and attempts to claim authority over the shrine. He reaches the city right after a flood, entering from Bāb al-Manāsika (the gate of the ritual keepers).47 This “gate was inhabited by those devoted to the shrine that has come to occupy the heart of the city, and which is now the final destination for hearts and caravans. It is that which has always been known as Ḥubbā’s Palace” (7). Worshippers and admirers alike perform the ritual of circumbulation. Meanwhile, Ḥubbā was imprisoned in the palace that became the cornerstone of Muqqa. Sāriḥ remains in the city, attempting to enter Ḥubbā’s palace or its vicinity, which resembles a tomb shaped like a cube (or a camel’s hoof) after King Ṭā-sīn transformed her body into a black stone her lovers longed to touch. The shrine is always under the guardianship of its servants, and whenever Sāriḥ attempts to sneak in, when summoned by the shadow of Ḥubbā, he is unable to, so he keeps circling the tomb. “Ḥubbā is everywhere and nowhere, Her shadow roaming around her throne, around which he, in turn, roams,” until he falls down and the guards carry him away and throw him out of the shrine (16). 118

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Reverence for the Beloved as a Religious Metaphor Sāriḥ then resorts to the nearby houses and takes up residence in the alley of the wailers, where the Kurdish Shakkā, the most famous female wailer (nadāba), takes pity on him and after seeing him faint with fever him in her home. When he recovers, Shakkā entrusts him with the task of collecting rent from the shops she owns. Sāriḥ becomes attracted to Shakkā’s daughter Nūr (whose name means “light”), yet he decides to leave for the fear that Ḥubbā might fade away in his budding love for Nūr. Like a Sufi seeker, Sāriḥ must strive only for the true beloved. To reach her, he must turn his gaze away from anything worldly. Thus, he leaves and resumes circling the shrine, protected from the lashings of the guards by Ḥubbā’s blessing. One day he reaches the graveyard, also a sacred territory belonging to Ḥubbā, where those close to her are buried. There he meets Shaykh al-Qaburjī, who is in charge of Ḥubbā’s graveyard – which surrounds the shrine. That graveyard is designated only to be the burial site for emirs and members of the royal family. Sāriḥ starts working with Shaykh al-Qaburjī in the graveyard. He seeks that job with the hope that it brings him closer to Ḥubbā, and that one day he will be granted entry into the shrine itself. After some time, Sāriḥ goes to work for Shaykh Mullā Ṣīnī, the chief responsible for lighting the holy tomb with candles and lanterns. This way would situate him right beside the shrine. Sāriḥ observes the ruling emir’s visits and supplications to Ḥubbā. He also observes the bloody conflicts between different emirs over control of the shrine. He remains at the shrine until another flood comes to cleanse the city of Muqqa of the bloodshed of the numerous massacres at the hands of the ruling emir. Water erupts all over and the flooding dismantles all of Muqqa’s gates. The wailers emerge, moaning and screaming, as the floodwaters reach the shrine. “The most glamorous females of Muqqa came out from behind their veils to meet the wailers” (209). At this point, the flood lifts him up and drops him in the land of the dervishes of the mystical path (ṭarīq). There, he meets his Sufi Shaykh and his daughter Ghizlān, whom he later marries. He also joins his circle. This cult is devoted to the practice of dhikr, the remembrance of the beloved through the repetitious utterance of the beloved’s name. Floods are an integral part of the Mecca’s history, just as they are an important part of ‘Ālim’s narrative structure. The city’s features change through time, but Ḥubbā’s shrine remains eternally the same. By ending 119

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures the novel with a new flood that sweeps the city away and the shrine withstands flood after flood. ‘Ālim is keen to intensify the use of history, as well as direct symbols, to indicate that Muqqa is in fact Mecca, and Ḥubbā’s shrine is none other than Ka‘ba; however, drawing these parallels are not her only concern. Rather, ʿĀlim deploys religious symbolism to highlight the centrality of the beloved to a doctrine anchored in love, one that is focused on seeking the beloved in the hope of attaining oneness. Ḥubbā is the center of the narrative as well as the axis of existence, a woman whom everybody loves and worships. Ḥubbā, which literally translates as “The beloved,” is a common female name in the Arabian Peninsula.48 The word derives from ḥabba (“love” in Arabic). It also means the heart and or kernel, referring implicitly to the core or the essence of the body. In Arabic, the expressions ḥabbat al-qalb (heart’s kernel) and ḥabbat al-ʿayn (apple of the eye) are terms of endearment for the loved one.49 ‘Ālim chose Ḥubbā for its multiple connotations: the beloved, the heart, and the seed of life. As the “seed of life,” the name symbolically denotes the miracle of fertility, reproduction, and the renewal of life – all characteristics that were linked to the cult worship of a goddess in ancient religions (6). In conclusion, both the central and marginal texts in Ḥubbā are a retelling of the spiritual journey of a seeker toward his sacred beloved (the goddess or divine feminine). The female protagonist is, therefore, an ethereal entity whose locational centrality in the universe  – and whose radiance – attracts worshippers/lovers. Her lovers seek proximity by serving her and devoting their lives to her, longing for the moment of the beloved’s unveiling (revelation). The love sought by her worshippers, her followers, the poor, rich, royal, and the commoner alike does not abide to earthly wants. This love is only concerned with union and oneness with the beloved, even at the cost of self-annihilation (fanā’). Ironically, in the conflict among the emirs over burial beside Ḥubbā, the winner is the one who is buried in her vicinity, thus raising the probability to dissolve totally unto his beloved. In the Sufi tradition, for the seeker (murīd) to reach the sacred goal, he/ she must take a path full of hardship and deprivation through which gnosis is attained. ‘Ālim’s protagonist treads the path of love in both stories. The 120

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Reverence for the Beloved as a Religious Metaphor two paths of truth and love are really one and the same in this story and they are in the form of union with a sacred female. Dhū al-Nūn, a prominent ninth-century Sufi, tells of a woman he met by the seashore and of whom he asked, “Where is the end of love?” She replied by saying:  “O hero, love is endless.” He probed:  “Why?” She said: “Because love has no end, it is the essence of the entity of God, it has no beginning and no end.”50 Chittick discusses the role of love in the Sufi’s progress upon his path (ṭarīq). He points out that a close reading of Sufi literature somehow will reveal sophisticated insights into the soul’s complexity.51 Full disclosure of the Divine to the seeker and his eventual oneness with the beloved is the final station. This highly symbolic path towards the beloved has triggered the creation of a vast lexicon of loaded – and gendered – terms. In her study of gender metaphors in Ibn ‘Arabī’s cosmos, Saʿdiyya Shaikh points out that “Ibn ‘Arabī’s diverse and fluid gender images of God, including sexual metaphors and feminine visages for the divine, might be fruitful for feminists who want to explore alternative symbolic space.”52 The special Sufi diction of love and sensual terms – such as “yearning,” “union,” “communion,” “core,” “revelation,” and “dizziness” – have added a unique and intimate sense to the relationship with the sacred.53 In light of such terminology for expressions of love, it is possible to confirm that woman, in the sense of the beloved in the Sufi faith, “symbolizes creative femininity, the womb of the universe. In this sense, she is the mother of existence, the place in which being takes place.”54 Ḥubbā can be considered a reworking of Ibn ‘Arabī’s concept of the religion of love expressed in a poem earlier quoted where he says: My creed is Love;

Wherever its caravan turns along the way, That is my belief, My faith.

‘Ālim was inspired by many of the concepts in Ibn ‘Arabī’s philosophy: oneness of the universe and the presence of the Divine in women, universal religion symbolized through a female turned shrine for love. The constant yearning for Ḥubbā by Ḥayyān/Sāriḥ coincides with the Sufi 121

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures interpretation of the concept of love and worship. Being a Sufi cannot occur except through love. A Sufi does not reach the truth except through love. Love, in the Sufi teachings, is first and foremost in the Sufi teachings. The novel also depicts the worshippers’ conduct. Regardless of whether the object of worship was a female idol, a tomb, or the shrine of a female princess, Kaʿba or a mosque, the foundation of their faith was love: just as Ibn ‘Arabī advocated. Sufism has paved the way for a new view of women and femininity. Its tenets have inspired a positive view of women as complete beings, thus making it acceptable for the female to become a symbol of the sacred. A woman is able to attain access to Allāh and is no longer a distraction to men on their path to God. Scholars differ in their assessments of the position of Sufism with respect to women, especially in terms of Ibn ‘Arabī’s philosophy. They also question how that tradition has fared in the face of the more orthodox approach to women in Islam. The idea that Sufism has restored the long-lost sacredness of the feminine is a contentious point of discussion. However, we can safely say that at times Sufi rhetoric is able to assert the sacredness of women and to free them from the restraints of the orthodox interpretations of the scriptures. Many Arab writers have described the female beloved as a sacred being; some have gone as far as depicting the beloved as an entity worthy of worship through the metaphorical use of religious terms and rituals like prayer, martyrdom (jihād), and pilgrimage. The Arabic poetic heritage, especially ‘Udhrī love poems, is full of religious expressions, conflating the image of the lover and that of the deity. Devotion to the beloved is evident in Sufi literature that symbolized the divine though female imagery. In the Arab Sufi tradition, the female takes on the image of the creator, the manifestation of God on earth and his ultimate mystery. That is how the image of the beloved, whether man or woman, is reflected in the works of the two prominent Sufi poets, Rūmī and Ibn ‘Arabī.55 It is important to keep in mind, however, that these gendered Sufi metaphors are not an anomaly in the Arabic literary history, but are part of a tradition in which the feminine and the Divine were at times synonymous, as I have highlighted in this essay, and this is exactly what ‘Ālim traces and recreates as the primary theme of her Ḥubbā. 122

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Reverence for the Beloved as a Religious Metaphor ‘Ālim’s symbolisms serve as a backdrop to the universe she creates. Her metaphors draw a parallel between Kaʿba and the female body, on the one hand, and the ḥajj and the rituals of love on the other. This is a unique approach to the sacred in modern Arabic literature. She manages to re-feminize the Arab memory and to bring it back into the arms of the Sacred Mother. She also reconciles the views of both the pre-Islamic (jāhilī) and Sufi traditions in their celebration of the feminine, the female, and the woman. Even though ‘Ālim’s novel daringly deals with a number of taboos in the Arab culture, interestingly enough, the novel has never been banned nor has it stirred any controversy. Ḥubbā was first published in Beirut. It was neither marketed in Saudi Arabia, nor was it celebrated in Arab literary circles. The latter criticized ‘Ālim’s works as complicated in their structure and elitist in their extensive symbolism, and alienating to the lay reader. Some even accused her of drowning the potential reader in obscure narratives.56 Perhaps the extravagant symbolism and poetic language can render the text inaccessible except for the dedicated reader. This is especially true since ‘Ālim experiments with dividing the novel into two separate, yet parallel, narratives. This might have given some readers the impression that they are reading an old manuscript. This complexity might also have been the means by which the writer eluded social and religious censorship. She has deliberately created an obscure, inaccessible text that is multi-layered and laden with symbolic Sufi language and historical references. In Ḥubbā, ‘Ālim successfully interprets and decodes historical texts pertaining to the pilgrimage to Kaʿba, demonstrating that the pagan roots of that ritual still exist in one form or another in the Muslim world today. Ḥubbā not only uses Kaʿba as a metaphor for femininity, but also traces the history of female-sacrifice in Arab culture, making reference to worshipping women for centuries. In Ḥubbā, the beloved is the female deity and great goddess; she is also the great mother, the queen of light, the navel of the earth and the center of the world. She is – as the Sufis say  – the creator and the one who holds the divine attribute of jamāl (beauty): Allāh’s beauty. 123

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Notes 1. Qays b. al-Mulawwaḥ, Dīwān Majnūn Laylā, Edited by ʿAbd al-Sattār Aḥmad Faraj (Cairo: Maktabat Miṣr, n.d.), 200. 2. Tamī Al-Sāmirri, “Rajā’ ‘Ālim:  Ru’ā Naqdiyya,” al-Riyadh newspaper, June 14, 2011. 3. Ṭalal refers to the remains of walls of residence and/or places of worship. See Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, The Mute Immortals Speak: Pre-Islamic Poetry and the Poetics of Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 66. 4. Andras Hamori, On the Art of Medieval Arabic Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 45. 5. See, William C.  Chittick, “The Spiritual Path of Love in Ibn al-’Arabi and Rumi,” Mystics Quarterly 19, no. 1 (March 1993), 4–16 6. Rajaa Bin Salama, Al-ʿIshiq wa al-Kitāba (Cologne:  Al-Kamel Verlag, 2003), 380. 7. Robert Irwin, ed., Night and Horses in the Desert:  An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature (New York: Overlook, 2000), 29–30. 8. To read more about martyrs of love in Arabic poetry in the city of Mecca, see Raymond Farrin, Abundance from the Desert:  Classical Arabic Poetry (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011), 93. 9. Al-Ṣafā and al-Marwa are two small mountains located in Mecca. Muslims jog to and fro between them seven times as part of the ritual pilgrimage of the hajj in a reenactment of what Hājar (Abraham’s second wife) did when she and her infant son Ishmael were abandoned in the desert of Mecca. Tradition has it that Hājar frantically ran between both mountains looking for water while her son cried out of thirst. After running seven times back and forth between the mountains, a well burst with fresh water under her son’s feet: this was the Zamzam well. 10. An example of “love pilgrimage” is the poetry of ‘Umar b. Abī Rabīʿa in the Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, ed. Julie Scott Meisami and Paul Starkey (London: Routledge, 1998), 1:281. 11. Farrin, Abundance from the Desert, 100. 12. Tahar Labib Djedidi, Susiyūlūjiyā al-Ghazal al-ʿArabī:  al-Shiʻr al-ʻUdhrī Namūdhajan, trans. Muṣṭafā al-Masnāwī (Beirut: Dār al-Ṭalīʿa, 1981), 100. 13. Ibid., 11. 14. To read more about this image, see Maria M. Dakake, “ ‘Guest of the Inmost Heart’: Conceptions of the Divine Beloved among Early Sufi Women,” Journal of Comparative Islamic Studies 3, no. 1 (2007): 72–97. 15. Simon Gaunt, Love and Death in Medieval French and Occitan Courtly Literature: Martyrs to Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 3. 16. For more on the sacredness of women in Arabic poetry, see Fu’ād Yūsuf Ismāʿīl. “Al-Qamar fī al Qasīd al Jāhilī.” MA Thesis, al-Najah University, 2010. 17ff.

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Reverence for the Beloved as a Religious Metaphor 17. Abū al-Faraj Al-Iṣbahānī. Kitāb al-Aghānī. Edited by Muḥammad Abū al-Faḍl Ibrāhīm (Cairo:  Al-Hay’a al-Miṣriyya al-ʿĀmma li al-Kitāb.1992), 2:68. See also, Qays b.  al-Mulawwaḥ, Dīwān Majnūn Laylā, Edited by Yusrī ‘Abd al-Ghānī (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmīyya, 1999), 129. 18. ‘Urwa b. Hiẓām, Dīwān ‘Urwa b. Hiẓām, Edited by Anton Muheisen (Beirut: Dār al-Jīl, 1995), 51. 19. Ahmed Shawqī, Al-Shawqiyyāt: Shiʻr al-Marḥūm Aḥmad Shawqī (Beirut: Dār al-Awdah, 1988), 2:123. 20. Rajā’a ‘Ālim, Ḥubbā (The beloved) (Beirut:  Al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-ʻArabī, 2000), 17. (All quotes from the novel are my translations; further page references will be given parenthetically in the text.) 21. Ṭā and sīn are letters that open some chapters of the Qur’an. Many scholars have attempted to explain their connotations; some have indicated that they are some of the names of Allah. 22. It is commonly known that golden-white gazelles were found buried by the Kaʿba. The young colt is an allusion to al-Nuʿmān b.  al-Mundhir, king of al-Ḥīra. “Birds of Nuʿmān” are a breed of sacred camel in the Arabian Peninsula. 23. The name Ṭarīfa might be a reference to Yemen’s first soothsayer, who foretold the collapse of the Dam of Ma’rib and advised her people to escape to Mecca, saying, “Take the strong-boned cow, slaughter it, and tarnish it with blood until you reach the land of Garham.” See Wahb b. Munabbih. Kitāb al-Tījān fī Mulūk Ḥimyar wa al-Yaman. Cairo: Al-Hayʼa al-ʻĀmma li Quṣūr al-Thaqāfa, 1996. 290. 24. The holy names of Allah are embroidered on the covering of Kaʿba. 25. Kaʿba is “built of layers of the grey stone produced by the hills surrounding Mecca. It stands on a marble base ten  inches high … The four walls of al-Ka’ba are covered with a black curtain (kiswa) which reaches to the ground and is fastened there with copper rings … At two-thirds of its height a gold embroidered band (ḥizām) runs around, which is covered with verses from the Qur’an in fine calligraphy.” For more information about the shape of Ka‘ba, see F. E. Peters, The Hajj: The Muslim Pilgrimage to Mecca and the Holy Place (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 3–38. 26. The ruby alludes to the Black Stone, which is popularly believed to have descended from heaven to remind Adam of the primal home. 27. For more on the building of Kaʿba, see Gaye Strathearn and Brian M. Hauglid, “The Great Mosque and Its Ka‘ba as an Islamic Temple in Light of Lundquist’s Typology of Ancient Near Eastern Temples,” in The Temple in Time and Eternity, edited by Donald W.  Parry and Stephen D.  Ricks (Provo, UT:  Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies at Brigham Young University, 1999), 20–31.

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures 28. ‘Ālim uses the descriptions of Allah from the Qur’anic words that describe the holy king Ṭā-sīn. See the translation of Yusuf ‘Ali, 24:35, “Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth.” For the parable of His light to describe her heroine, see ‘Ālim, Ḥubbā, 70. 29. See Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-ʿArab, edited by Muḥammad Aḥmad Ḥasab Allāh and Hāshim Muḥammad al-Shazlī (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1981). 30. To read more about the symbolic and literary images of Kaʿba as it is represented in Arabic literature see, Suād Mahjūb, Waṣf al-Bayt al-Ḥaram fī al-Adab al-ʿArabī (Abu Dhabi: Al-Majmaʿ al-Thaqāfī, 2004) 31. Christine Fielder and Chris King, Sexual Paradox (N.p.: n.p., 2004), 259. 32. I  have discussed the taboo and the holy in the writings of Rajā’a ‘Ālim in another study of the Kaʿba and its image in novel writing. See Miral Al-Tahawy, Muḥarramāt Qabaliyya:  al-Muqaddas wa Takhayyulātuhu fī al-Mujtamaʻ al-Raʾawī Riwāʿīyan, Beirut: Al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-‘Arabī, 2008), 201–58. 33. Peters, The Hajj, 25. 34. Allan Menzies, History of Religion:  A  Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems (London: J. Murray, 1895), 215. 35. See Muḥammed Saʿīd Khayyāṭ, Al-Mar’a wa al-Ulūha (Damascus:  Dār Al-Hiwār, 1984), 76–7. 36. Ditlef Nielsen, Al-Tārikh al-ʿArabī al-Qadīm (The Old Arabian Moon Religion and the Mosaic Tradition), translated to Arabic by Fu’ād Ḥasanayn (Cairo:  Maktaba al-Nahḍa al-Miṣriyya 1958), 184. To read more about the Moon god Sīn from pre-Islamic times, See A. F. L. Beeston, “Saba’ ” in C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W. P. Heinrichs & G. Lecomte, eds, The Encyclopaedia Of Islam, Second edition, 1995, Volume VIII, E. J. Brill: Leiden, 664–5. 37. Saʿīd ‘Abd al-ʿAzīz Sālim. Dirāsāt fī Tārīkh al-ʿArab Qabla al-Islām, al-Hay’a al-ʿĀmma li Quṣūr al-Thaqāfa, Cairo: 2000, 410. 38. Sayyid Maḥmūd al-Qamnī, Al-’Ustūra wa al-Turāth (Cairo: Sīnā li al-Nashr, 1993), 156. 39. Joseph Chelhod, Les Structures du sacré chez les Arabes (Paris:  G.  P. Maisonneuve et Larose, 1965), translated into Arabic by Khalīl Aḥmad Khalīl as Buna al-Muqaddas ‘inda al-ʿArab Qabla al-Islām wa baʿdahu (Beirut: Dār al-Ṭalīʿa,1996), 67. 40. Peters, The Hajj, 52. 41. For more information about female deities in ancient Arab culture, see Annette Lyn Williams, Karen Nelson Villanueva, and Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, eds, She Is Everywhere! Vol. 2:  An Anthology of Writing in Womanist/Feminist Spirituality (Indiana: iUniverse, 2009), 64. 42. See Khayyāṭ, Al-Mar’a wa al-Ulūha, 185. 43. See Ibn Manẓūr. Lisān al-ʿArab.

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Reverence for the Beloved as a Religious Metaphor 44. Khālid b. ʻĪsá Balawī. Tāj al-Mafriq fī Taḥliyat ‘Ulamā’ al-Mashriq, ed. Al-Ḥasan al-Sā’iḥ. Dār al-Kutub, Morocco: 1980, 2:296 45. To read about the folklore of the Hajj, see Gaston Maspero, Popular Stories of Ancient Egypt, ed. Hasan El-Shamy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 46. Ibn al-ʿArabī, Stations of Desire: Love Elegies from Ibn ‘Arabi and New Poems, translated by Michael Anthony Sells (Jerusalem: Ibis, 2000), 71. 47. The Meccan premises had many gates supervised by a number of tribes. 48. Ḥubbā is an old Arabic name that was mentioned in al-Jāhiẓ’s book. He talks of a woman called “Ḥubbā of the Medina” because she lived in the Medina. This might indicate that there was another one who lived in Mecca. It was said that she taught women of the Medina the arts of carnal love. It seems that she was famous because al-Jāhiẓ then tells another story about Ḥubbā’s son, who asked her about the sexual positions that are preferred by men. Al-Jāhiẓ, Kitāb Mufākharāt al-Jawārī wa al-Ghilmān (Beirut:  Dār al-Makshūf, 1957), 3:28. 49. Muʿjam al-Wasīṭ (Cairo: Dār al-Shurūq al Dawliyya). 2003, 151. 50. For more on the concept of love in the Sufi tradition, see Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 55. 51. William C.  Chittick, Sufism:  A  Short Introduction (Oxford:  Oneworld, 2000), 61. 52. Saʿdiyya Shaikh, Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn ‘Arabi, Gender, and Sexuality (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 126. 53. For more details on Sufi terminology, see Naẓlah Aḥmad al-Jubūrī, Nuṣūṣ al-Muṣṭalaḥ al-Ṣūfī fī al-Islām (Dimashq: Dār Nīnawa li al-Dirāsāt wa al-Nashr wa al-Tawzīʿ, 2008). 54. Adonis, Sufism and Surrealism, trans. Judith Cumberbatch (London:  Saqi Books, 2005), 89. 55. See Chittick, Sufism, 61. 56. Ahmed El Zein, “Rajā’a ‘Ālim Bewitches Her Critics,” Al-Hayat newspaper, December 22, 2010.

Bibliography Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said Esber). Sufism and Surrealism. Translated by Judith Cumberbatch. London: Saqi Books, 2005. ‘Ālim, Rajā’a. Ḥubbā. Al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-ʻArabī, 2000. Balawī, Khālid b. ʻĪsā. Tāj al-Mafriq fī Taḥliyat ‘Ulamā’ al-Mashriq, ed. Al-Ḥasan b. Muḥammad al-Sā’iḥ. Morocco: Dār al-Kutub, 1980.

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures Beeston, A. F. L. “Saba’” in C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W. P. Heinrichs & G. Lecomte, The Encyclopaedia Of Islam, Second Edition, E. J. Brill: Leiden, 1995. Bin Salama, Rajaa. Al-ʿIshiq wa al-Kitāba. Cologne: Al-Kamel Verlag, 2003. Chelhod, Joseph. Les Structures du sacré chez les Arabes, (Paris: G. P. Maisonneuve et Larose, 1965), translated into Arabic by Khalīl Aḥmad Khalīl as Buna al-Muqaddas ‘inda al-ʿArab Qabla al-Islām wa Baʿdahu. Beirut: Dār al-Ṭāli‘a, 1996 Chittick, William C. “The Spiritual Path of Love in Ibn al-ʿArabi and Rumi” Mystics Quarterly, 19, no. 1 (March 1993): 4–16 ——— Sufism: A Short Introduction. Oxford: One world, 2000. Dakake, Maria M. “‘Guest of the Inmost Heart’: Conceptions of the Divine Beloved among Early Sufi Women.” Journal of Comparative Islamic Studies 3, no. 1 (2007): 72–97. Djedidi, Tahar Labib. Susiyūlūjiyā al-Ghazal al-ʿArabī:  al-Shiʻr al-ʻUdhrī Namūdhajan. Translated by Muṣtafā al-Masnāwī. Beirut: Dār al-Ṭalīʿa, 1981. Farrin, Raymond. Abundance from the Desert:  Classical Arabic Poetry. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011. Fielder, Christine, and Chris King. Sexual Paradox: Complementarity, Reproductive Conflict and Human Emergence. N.p.: n.p., 2004, available at http://www.sexualparadox.org. Gaunt, Simon. Love and Death in Medieval French and Occitan Courtly Literature: Martyrs to Love. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Hamori, Andras. On the Art of Medieval Arabic Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974. Ibn al-ʿArabī. Stations of Desire:  Love Elegies from Ibn Arabi and New Poems. Translated by Michael Anthony Sells. Jerusalem: Ibis, 2000. Ibn Hiẓām, ‘Urwa. Dīwān ‘Urwa b. Hiẓām, Edited by Anton Muheisen. Beirut: Dar Al-Jīl,1995. Ibn Manẓūr, Jamal al-Dīn Muḥammad. Lisān al-ʿArab. Edited by Muḥammad Aḥmad Ḥasab Allāh and Hāshim Muḥammad al-Shazlī. Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1981. Ibn al-Mulawwaḥ, Qays. Dīwān Majnūn Laylā. Edited by Yusrī ‘Abd al-Ghānī, Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya,1999. ——— Qays. Dīwān Majnūn Laylā. Edited by ‘Abd al-Sattār Aḥmad Farrāj, Cairo: Maktabat Miṣr, n.d. Ibn Munabbih, Wahb. Kitāb al-Tījān fī Mulūk Ḥimyar wa al-Yaman. Cairo: Al-Hayʼa al-ʻĀmma li Quṣūr al-Thaqāfa, 1996. Irwin, Robert, ed. Night and Horses in the Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature. New York: Overlook, 2000. al-Iṣbahānī, Abū al-Faraj. Kitāb al-Aghānī. Edited by Muḥammad Abū al-Faḍl Ibrahīm. Cairo: Al- Ḥay’a al-Miṣriyya al-ʿĀmma li al-Kitāb, 1992. Ismāʿīl, Fu’ād Yūsuf. Al-Qamar fī al Qasīd al Jāhilī. MA thesis, al-Najah University, 2010.

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Reverence for the Beloved as a Religious Metaphor al-Jāḥiẓ, Abū ‘Uthmān Amr b.  Baḥr. Kitāb Mufākharāt al-Jawārī wa al-Ghilmān. Beirut: Dār al-Makshūf, 1957. al-Jubūrī, Naẓlah Aḥmad. Nuṣūṣ al-Muṣṭalaḥ al-Ṣūfī fī al-Islām. Dimashq:  Dār Nīnawa li al-Dirāsāt wa al-Nashr wa al-Tawzīʿ, 2008. Khayyāṭ, Muḥammad Saʿīd. Al-Mar’a wa al-Ulūhā. Damascus: Dār al-Hiwār, 1984. Mahjūb, Suād. Waṣf al-Bayt al-Ḥarām fī al-Adab al-ʿArabī. Abu Dhabi: Al-Majmaʿ al-Thaqāfī, 2004. Mahmūd, Ibrahīm. Taqdīs al-Shahwa. London: Riad El-Rayyes Books, 2006. Maspero, Gaston. Popular Stories of Ancient Egypt. Edited by Hasan El-Shamy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Meisami, Julie Scott, and Paul Starkey, eds. Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature. 2 vols. London: Routledge, 1998. Menzies, Allan. History of Religion:  A  Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems. London: J. Murray, 1895. Muṣṭafā, Ibrāhim. Al-Muʿjam al-Wasīṭ. 4th ed. Cairo: Dār al-Shurūq al-Dawliyya, 2004. Nielsen, Ditlef. Al-Tarīkh al-ʿArabī al-Qadīm (The Old Arabian Moon Religion and the Mosaic Tradition),Translated to Arabic by Fuād Ḥasanayn. Cairo: Maktaba al-Nahḍa al-Misriyya, 1958. Peters, F. E. The Hajj:  The Muslim Pilgrimage to Mecca and the Holy Places. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. al-Qamnī, Sayyid Maḥmūd. Al-’Ustūra wa al-Turāth. Cairo: Sīnā li al-Nashr, 1993. Sālim, Al-Saʿīd ‘Abd al-ʿAzīz, Dirāsāt fī Tārīkh al-ʿArab Qabla al-Islām, Cairo: al-Hay’a al-ʿĀmma li Quṣūr al-Thaqāfa, 2000. al-Sāmirri, Tamī. “Rajā’ ‘Ālim: Ru’ā Naqdiyyah,” al-Riyadh Newspaper, June 14, 2011. Schimmel, Annemarie. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1975. Shaikh, Saʿdiyya. Sufi Narratives of Intimacy. Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Shawqī, Aḥmad. Al-Shawqiyyāt:  Shiʻr al-Marḥūm Aḥmad Shawqī. Beirut:  Dār al-Awda, 1988. Stetkevych, Suzanne Pinckney. The Mute Immortals Speak: Pre-Islamic Poetry and the Poetics of Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Strathearn, Gaye, and Brian M. Hauglid. “The Great Mosque and Its Ka’ba as an Islamic Temple in Light of Lundquist’s Typology of Ancient Near Eastern Temples.” In The Temple in Time and Eternity, edited by Donald W. Parry and Stephen D. Ricks, 23–33. Provo, UT:  Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies at Brigham Young University, 1999. al-Tahawy, Miral. Muḥarramāt Qabaliyya:  al-Muqaddas wa Takhayyulātuhu fī al-Mujtamaʻ al-Raʾāwī Riwāʿiyan. Beirut: Dār al-Bayḍā’; al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-ʻArabī, 2008.

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures Williams, Annette Lyn, Karen Nelson Villanueva, and Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, eds. She Is Everywhere! Vol. 2: An Anthology of Writing in Womanist/Feminist Spirituality. Indiana: iUniverse Inc., 2009. El Zein, Ahmed. “Rajā’ ‘Ālim Bewitches Her Critics.” Al-Hayat newspaper, December 22, 2010.

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6 Individualism and the Beloved in the Poetry of Furū gh Farrukhzād Dylan Oehler-Stricklin

Furūgh Farrukhzād’s conception and treatment of the beloved evolves only gradually through the five volumes of her poetry.1 Her publication of Asīr in 1955 made it clear that a new voice on the subject had emerged: a feminine, autobiographical voice, unique in over a thousand years of Iranian literary tradition.2 Initially conflicted, it would develop parallel to the poet’s perception of the beloved for the rest of her life. The same year she published Asīr, Farrukhzād left her husband and child to become a poet in Tehran. The agony and confusion of the decision are clear in “Khāna-yi Matrūk”: ‫دور‬ ‫دانم اکنون کزآن خانه‬ ‫گرفته‬ ‫شادی زندگی پر‬ ‫زاری‬ ‫دانم اکنون که طفلی به‬ ‫گرفته‬ ‫ماتم ازهجر مادر‬ ‫لیک من خسته جان‬ ‫پریشان‬ ‫و‬ ‫را‬ ‫میسپارم ره آرزو‬ ‫شعر‬ ‫من‬ ‫یار من شعر و دلدار‬ 3 ‫را‬ ‫او‬ ‫میروم تا بدست آرم‬

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures I know now that life’s happiness Has flown from that remote house. I know now that a child weeps, Mourning his distant mother. But I, heart weary and distressed, Set out on the road of hope. Poetry is my companion, poetry is my lover: I go to find it.4

In depicting what she has left behind in order to pursue her life and her identity as a poet, she speaks of poetry as a lover.5 Farrukhzād wrote often on love and various beloveds, and these poems tend to reflect her then-current view of the world and her place in it. In “Khāna-yi Matrūk,” the speaker is suffering, but she has hope and a goal. She is no longer the prisoner of the collection’s title. She’s confused, ashamed, defiant, but resolute; she knows she has to find a way to write, and by extension, to love. Asīr, along with Farrukhzād’s next two collections, Dīvār in 1956 and ‘Uṣyān-i Khudā in 1958, established her as an individual voice, making her anguish and her exultation heard during the process of her self-definition as woman and poet, frequently in the context of a love relationship. Her poems suggest that she wasn’t entirely sure of her identity at this point in her life, but they assign value to her existence as a person independent of any other, with “Pāsukh” from Dīvār, for example, reflecting an increasing sense that love justifies unconventional decisions that benefit an individual and not society. A speaker tells her lover: ‫میزند‬ ‫بر روی ما نگاه خدا خنده‬ ‫ایم‬ ‫هر چند ره به ساحل لطفش نبرده‬ ‫پوش‬ ‫زیرا چو زاهدان سیه کارخرقه‬ ‫ایم‬ ‫پنهان ز دیدگان خدا می نخورده‬ .................................................... ‫میکشید‬ ‫آن آتشی که در دل ما شعله‬ ‫بود‬ ‫گر در میان دامن شیخ اوفتاده‬ ‫عشق‬ ‫دیگر بما که سوخته ایم از شرار‬ 6 ‫بود‬ ‫نام گناهکاره رسوا نداده‬

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Individualism and the Beloved in the Poetry of Furūgh Farrukhzād God smiles on us, However many paths to the shore of his favor We haven’t taken. Because, unlike the evil-doing, robe-wearing fanatics, We haven’t drunk wine hidden from the eyes of God. ............................................................................................ If this fire that blazed in our hearts Had fallen into the Shaykh’s lap, He would not have named us shameful sinners, We, who have been burned by the sparks of love.

In the summer of 1958, Farrukhzād began working for Gulistān Studios. She and her employer, Ibrāhīm Gulistān, began a relationship that was to last until her death, which contributed to the disapproval she encountered from Tehranians. Since Gulistān was married, with children, his time and attention were divided. This may have intensified the isolation that Farrukhzād describes in such later poems as “Vahm-i Sabz” and “Tavalludī Dīgar.” The relationship certainly did nothing to reduce the conflict between Farrukhzād and the critics of her personal life, but Michael Hillmann writes that at this stage of her life (1958 onward), she had reached a “personal resolution of conflicts … between societal expectations and her own predilections. The die was cast, and she was set on living as a poet answerable as an individual to her own personal ethics.”7 “Fatḥ-i Bāgh” and “Maʿshūq-i Man” demonstrate this self-confidence, with the speakers betraying none of the doubt and shame of earlier stages. As both a poet and an unconventional woman, Farrukhzād stands secure at this point, if not always happy. In “Fatḥ-i Bāgh,” the speaker achieves emotional independence through her commitment to an extramarital beloved; although she is acutely aware of society’s disapproval, the poem makes clear that it is essentially irrelevant. The opening immediately establishes the alienation between the speaker and her beloved on one hand, and society on the other: ‫پرید‬ ‫آن کلغی که‬ ‫ما‬ ‫سر‬ ‫از فراز‬ ‫ولگرد‬ ‫و فرو رفت در اندیشه آشفته ابری‬ ‫پیمود‬ ‫و صدایش همچون نیزه کوتاهی پهنای افق را‬ 8 ‫شهر‬ ‫به‬ ‫خبر ما را با خود خواهد برد‬

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures That crow that flew Over our heads, Down through the disturbed thoughts of a vagrant cloud, Whose call crossed the breadth of the horizon Like a short spear, will carry news of us to the city

Outside the city, the couple sees a crow fly rather threateningly over their heads, hurrying toward the city to carry gossip of the lovers.9 As Hillmann notes, “this gossip-mongering is not without danger, either, since the poet compares the crow’s voice to ‘a short spear.’ ”10 Although the speaker understands the situation, she does not seem to be troubled by it: ‫همه میدانند‬ ‫همه میدانند‬ ‫عبوس‬ ‫که من و تو از آن روزنه سرد‬ ‫دیدیم‬ ‫باغ را‬ ‫دست‬ ‫از‬ ‫و از آن شاخه بازیگر دور‬ ‫چیدیم‬ ‫سیب را‬ ‫همه میترسند‬ ‫تو‬ ‫و‬ ‫ اما من‬،‫همه میترسند‬ ‫به چراغ و آب و آینه پیوستیم‬ ‫و نترسیدیم‬ Everyone knows Everyone knows That you and I saw the garden From that cold, grim window, And picked the apple From that playful distant branch. Everyone is afraid Everyone is afraid, but you and I Joined with the lamp and the water and the mirror And we were not afraid.11

Once again, the Farrukhzād speaker places herself in direct confrontation with a disapproving society, with the crow broadcasting ill will like a gossip. But here the speaker’s tone is serene as she describes the first of many contrasts between herself and her lover in nature and society within the 136

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Individualism and the Beloved in the Poetry of Furūgh Farrukhzād city walls: people in the city fear to step outside of convention and into joy (the garden), while the speaker and her lover boldly, unashamedly “pick the apple.” The context of the action further separates the pair from those outside the garden. The stanza before tells us that people are gossiping about the lovers. Then there is the repeated statement that “everyone knows” about what they have done, which by this time is obviously something significantly outside the bounds of what this society considers acceptable. Immediately after, the speaker says that “everyone is afraid,” except for herself and her lover. The plucking of the apple marks the beginning of a process of increasing self-awareness for the lovers in their exploration of the garden, that larger world outside the figuratively closed windows and doors of the city. The lovers begin their journey in the city, still within the boundaries of society. Although their window there is cold and forbidding, it still serves as the opening from which they see the ideal, alternative garden. In life, Farrukhzād would pay for venturing into this garden with the loss of her son and in the criticism she faced from Iranian society. Poems such as “Paranda Murdanīst” reflect her feelings of loneliness and isolation, even of despair. But in “Fatḥ-i Bāgh,” the speaker and her lover have just entered a metaphorical Eden of independent thought. While she is obviously conscious of society’s disapproval, she hardly concerns herself with it, other than to express a mild contempt for a way of life that precludes the joy she has discovered: ‫نام‬ ‫دو‬ ‫سخن از پیوند سست‬ ‫نیست‬ ‫و همآغوشی در اوراق کهنه یک دفتر‬ ‫منست‬ ‫سخن از گیسوی خوشبخت‬ ‫تو‬ ‫با شقایق های سوخته بوسه‬ ‫طراری‬ ‫ در‬،‫و صمیمیت تنهامان‬ ‫و درخشیدن عریانیمان‬ ‫آب‬ ‫در‬ ‫مثل فلس ماهی ها‬ ‫سخن از زندگی نقره ای آوازیست‬ ‫که سحرگاهان فواره کوچک میخواند‬ I am not talking about the feeble joining Of two names, Or embracing in the old pages of a register.

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures I am talking about my fortunate hair With the inflamed poppies of your kiss And the brave intimacy of our bodies And the gleaming of our nakedness Like fishes’ scales in the water. I am talking about the silvery life of a song That a small fountain sings at dawn.

Although specifying that she and her lover are not married (their names aren’t linked in any registry of marriage),12 she describes the significance of their sexual relationship with relish. It represents something more genuine than society’s approved unions, as her contemptuous references to a “flimsy linking of two names” and “embracing in the old pages of a register” make clear. She and her lover revel in their glowing nakedness, but unlike Adam and Eve they continue to enjoy Eden. After entering this new world, they ask the advice of its natives: ‫سیال‬ ‫ما در آن جنگل سبز‬ ‫وحشی‬ ‫شبی از خر گوشان‬ ‫خونسرد‬ ‫و در آن دریای مضطرب‬ ‫از صدف های پر از مروارید‬ ‫فاتح‬ ‫و در آن کوه غریب‬ ‫از عقابان جوان پرسیدیم‬ ‫کرد‬ ‫که چه باید‬ One night in the green flowing forest, We asked the wild rabbits And in that restless cold-blooded sea We asked the shells full of pearls And on that strange victorious mountain We asked the young eagles what should be done.13

They have left established ways of thinking and living behind in the city, and they are exploring the freedom of many possibilities here – hence the vagueness of the question they ask. They ask inhabitants of disparate parts of the earth: rabbits of the forest, shells of the sea, and eagles on the mountain, acquiring perspectives from widely ranging experiences in the process of redefining themselves. They succeed in their endeavor after their consultation with the wild things, as the following stanza indicates. In spite 138

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Individualism and the Beloved in the Poetry of Furūgh Farrukhzād of the fact that, as the speaker reiterates now, “Everyone knows, / Everyone knows”: ‫ایم‬ ‫ ره یافته‬،‫ما به خواب سرد و ساکت سیمرغان‬ ‫کردیم‬ ‫ما حقیقت را در باغچه پیدا‬ ‫گمنام‬ ‫در نگاه شرمآگین گلی‬ ‫و بقا را در یک لحظه نامحدود‬ ‫شدند‬ ‫که دو خورشید به هم خیره‬ We have found the way into the cold, Silent dream of phoenixes We found truth in the garden, In the shy look of a nameless flower And eternity in an endless moment when two suns gazed at each other.

According to Ardavan Davaran, the first line of the stanza refers in part to The Conference of the Birds by Farid-uddin Attar, the famous Persian Sufi poet who died early in the thirteenth century. The book relates the odyssey of 30 birds in search of the phoenix, the unique and perfect bird. The birds traverse many valleys or stages in their search, and finally reach the phoenix whose name, in Persian, is Simorgh. Attar makes use of the pun inherent in the name Simorgh to show that this unique bird is no other creature than “si” (30) – ”morgh” (birds). The phoenix is the embodiment and equivalent of all and each one of the birds. To find the perfect bird, the birds find themselves.14

The couple has traveled throughout the garden in search of the significance they knew society lacked. Each time the speaker says, “I’m not talking about …” and mentions some conventional way of behaving, she describes some aspect of her relationship with her beloved that does have significance. Her inclination is validated by the lovers’ discovery of the dream of the phoenix, a mythical figure that represents the inherent worth of each of them. They have found truth in as small an element of their chosen exile as an anonymous flower. In the garden, the same love that stands between them and society raises them above common human experience as two suns gazing at each other, the experience taking on a sense of eternity in its 139

140

The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures magnitude. In the face of such triumph, indeed of such a conquest, society’s opinion can have little significance. The speaker’s next words confirm this: ‫نیست‬ ‫سخن از پچ پچ ترسانی در ظلمت‬ ‫باز‬ ‫سخن از روزست و پنجره های‬ ‫تازه‬ ‫و هوای‬ ‫و اجاقی که در آن اشیاء بیهده میسوزند‬ ‫است‬ ‫و زمینی که ز کشتی دیگر بارور‬ ‫غرور‬ ‫و‬ ‫و تولد و تکامل‬ ‫ماست‬ ‫سخن از دستان عاشق‬ ‫نسیم‬ ‫و‬ ‫که پلی از پیغام عطر ونور‬ ‫اند‬ ‫بر فراز شبها ساخته‬ I’m not talking about fearful whisperings in the dark. I’m talking about daytime and open windows and fresh air And a stove that useless things burn in And a land fertile with another planting And birth and evolution and pride. I’m talking about our loving hands That have built a bridge across nights From the message of fragrance and light and breeze.

The first two lines of this passage alone argue against the lovers feeling guilt, anxiety, or suspicion. Everyone knows everything that the lovers are doing, because they aren’t physically in a separate place outside the city. The garden is metaphorical, a place of freedom that represents the departure of the couple from society’s constraints in their decision to live as individuals. It is an instance of the individual taking her world with her and interacting with the outside from within that world wherever she is. Since the lovers could not be conducting their relationship more openly, there is no suspicion on anyone’s part; people understand clearly what is happening, and the lovers know they do. As the poem progresses, the speaker becomes increasingly confident in her choice to live as an individual, until at this point she describes her relationship with pride, as a structure of love and accomplishment and progress. The stove is a physical manifestation of their individualistic worldview, burning whatever is irrelevant. Replacing the irrelevant is the land fertile with what they have chosen. As if seeking to broadcast the joy of this state of being and living, she suddenly shifts to 140

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Individualism and the Beloved in the Poetry of Furūgh Farrukhzād the second person, inviting her lover to call to her from a most open place, a meadow: ‫بیا‬ ‫به چمنزار‬ ‫بزرگ‬ ‫به چمنزار‬ ‫ابریشم‬ ‫ از پشت نفس های گل‬،‫و صدایم کن‬ ‫را‬ ‫همچنان آهو که جفتش‬ Come to the meadow, To the big meadow, And call me from behind the breaths of the acacia Just as the deer calls its mate.

Hillmann notes here that “when the poet says ‘Come to the meadow,’ the reader supposes … that she is addressing him or her, and not just the lover – and so she is. We as individual readers are invited to choose a life like the life of the speaker:  a beautiful, simple life, genuine and without concern about others, like the life of a deer and its mate in its complete harmony with nature.”15 The passage rings with joy and assurance in its call to an alternate way of life. The last stanza negates with finality the suggestion that society’s opinions have any relevance: ‫پرده ها از بغضی پنهانی‬ ‫سرشارند‬ ‫معصوم‬ ‫و کبوترهای‬ ‫خود‬ ‫از بلندی های برج سپید‬ ‫به زمین مینگرند‬ The curtains are overflowing with hidden malice And from the heights of their white tower Innocent doves look to the ground.

These lines recapitulate the primary themes of the entire poem: the innocent take their place as part of nature, apart from the malice contained behind the window from which people like the lovers have escaped. The lovers are as much beyond society’s disapproval as the doves are, even though they’re conscious of it. Davaran points out in his discussion of the stanza’s first line: “[It] relates an awareness of the potential danger of those ‘tattle-talers’ who watch and judge from behind their curtains, setting an 141

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures ambush, as it were. The line also relates the attitude of the lovers towards these upholders of the social taboos. Their dismissal is done subtly and effectively. What gloom should be theirs in those dark rooms separated with curtains from the vast, open natural world …”16 Where “Fatḥ-i Bāgh” illustrates the discovery of individuality in the context of a love relationship, as a direct result of a break with the conventions of society, the beloved in “Maʿshūq-i Man” represents an embodiment of a practical form of individuality, constituted by both tradition and rebellion. The development of individuality involves the willingness to examine and reject standards of behavior and being, and making decisions about self-conceptions and interactions with the external world based on individual considerations. But the automatic dismissal of a social expectation or ideal becomes another type of conformity. Introducing one of the premises of his historical analysis of human individuality, Karl Weintraub emphasizes the contrast between “ ‘model’ conceptions of personality and individuality,” and notes that “this heuristic device posits, on one hand, the adherence of men to great personality ideals in which their culture tends to embody its values and objectives – and on the other hand, a commitment to a self for which there is no model … All such ideals share certain formal characteristics. They prescribe for the individual certain substantive personality traits, certain values, virtues, and attitudes. They embody specific life-styles into which to fit the self. They offer man a script for his life, and only in the unprescribed interstitial spaces is there room for idiosyncrasy.”17 While the lack of dependence on models of behavior and personality marks the pursuit of individuality, it’s unlikely that the most fervent individualist could purge traditional elements from her life decisions or from her interaction with the world. An attempt to do so, far from making her more of an individual, would entail a sort of reverse conformity to such models by allowing them to determine her actions and conception of self. “Maʿshūq-i Man” brings these issues out of theoretical considerations of tradition and individuality. With a speaker who exuberantly defies tradition in describing quite traditional elements of her relationship with a heroic beloved who really likes a clothesline, it demonstrates that there is no contradiction between adherence to some aspects of convention on one hand and an embrace of individuality on the other. The sudden change of 142

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Individualism and the Beloved in the Poetry of Furūgh Farrukhzād focus in the last stanza emphasizes that individuality carries risks in the speaker’s environment, just as it does in other Farrukhzād poems such as “Tanhā Sidāst Ka Mīmānad” and “Vahm-i Sabz.” The striking reversal of gender roles in the poem makes it immediately clear that both the speaker and the beloved she celebrates are departing from the patriarchal norm. Farzaneh Milani praises Farrukhzād’s “reversal of gender-bound representation,” noting that at times “the poet represents man as freed from masculine stereotypes and clichés. She portrays him with a distinctive individuality and physical presence … No longer compromised in his capacity for intimacy, Farrukhzād gives this man new life by giving him clearer focus. After centuries of posing as the lover, man finally becomes the beloved.”18 A woman publicly taking the initiative and describing a beloved, especially with a frank current of physical desire as in the poem’s beginning, certainly stands as a radical departure from conventional standards of behavior culturally appropriated for women. The section of the poem where the speaker is flouting convention most thoroughly also happens to be the very same section where the beloved appears at his most (which is not to say totally) traditional. The poem begins: ‫من‬ ‫معشوق‬ ‫شرم‬ ‫بی‬ ‫با آن تن برهنه‬ ‫بر ساقهای نیرومندش‬ ‫ایستاد‬ ‫چون مرگ‬ ‫مورّب‬ ‫خط های بیقرار‬ ‫اورا‬ ‫اندامهای عاصی‬ ‫در طرح استوارش‬ ‫میکنند‬ ‫دنبال‬ ‫من‬ ‫معشوق‬ ‫است‬ ‫گوئی ز نسلهای فراموشی گشته‬ ‫تاتاری‬ ‫گوئی که‬ ‫چشمانش‬ ‫در انتهای‬ ‫پیوسته در کمین سواریست‬ ‫بربری‬ ‫گوئی که‬ ‫در برق پر طراوت دندانهایش‬ ‫مجذوب خون گرم شکاریست‬91

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures My lover, With that naked shameless body, Stands on mighty feet like death. Slanting, restless lines Trace his rebellious limbs In their constant patterns. My lover, Seems to have come from forgotten generations As if in the depths of his eyes A Tartar is always Lying in ambush for a horseman, As if in the vital flash of his teeth, A barbarian Is held rapt by the warm blood of prey.

The speaker exults in her lover’s “naked, shameless body,” admires his power and aggressiveness, and seems to be establishing him as a hero in the tradition of Firdausī’s Shāhnāma, even as she demolishes the model of male-female roles. Even at this point there are a few departures from the completely traditional heroic figure, the lines tracing “rebellious limbs” drawing a contrast with the classical Persian hero who rarely violates the patriarchal order in which the king reigns supreme, usually suffering for it if he does. But for the most part, the imagery reinforces the impression of an all-conquering warrior: the beloved’s mighty feet call to mind those of Rustam, which shook the earth when he walked; his stance is “like death,” irresistible; he comes from the past, as ancient heroes do; and he’s warlike, bloodthirsty. In the next section of the poem, the speaker and the beloved become more complex: ‫من‬ ‫معشوق‬ ‫طبیعت‬ ‫همچون‬ ‫دارد‬ ‫مفهوم ناگزیر صریحی‬ ‫من‬ ‫او با شکست‬ ‫را‬ ‫قانون صادقانه قدرت‬ ‫میکند‬ ‫تاأیید‬

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Individualism and the Beloved in the Poetry of Furūgh Farrukhzād ‫آزادست‬ ‫او وحشیانه‬ ‫سالم‬ ‫مانند یک غریزه‬ ‫درعمق یک جزیره نامسکون‬ My lover, Like nature, has a blunt, inevitable meaning. In conquering me, He confirms The forthright law of power. He is savagely free, Like a healthy instinct Deep in an uninhabited island.

Here, the speaker, who has been reversing sexual roles, presents her lover’s conquest of her as evidence of his masculine prowess, and she seems to savor it no less than any other manifestation of his strength. While she moves toward tradition, though, we begin to see indications that he is far from bound by it. His dominance over the speaker maintains some of the tradition that marks him so strongly earlier in the poem, but the introduction of his association with the wilder aspects of nature breaks away from that model. In this sense, “Maʿshūq-i Man” is consistent with the confrontation that we see in “Fatḥ-i Bāgh”: the development of individuality associated with principles of nature on one hand, and conformity associated with the city on the other. The beloved’s conquest of the speaker conforms to the law of power within nature, not society. The stanza begins by stating that his essence is “like nature,” and the first line of the next stanza elaborates: “He is savagely free / like a healthy instinct / deep in an uninhabited island.” Elements of each of these lines contribute to the sense of pulling back from society and strengthening the connection to nature: savagely free, instinct, and the island with no people. Immediately after, the speaker makes clear that although he seems nearly superhuman at the poem’s opening, he is not a traditional epic hero: ‫میکند‬ ‫او پاک‬ ‫مجنون‬ ‫با پاره های خیمه‬ ‫را‬ ‫ غبار خیابان‬،‫از کفش خود‬

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures He cleans the dust of the street From his shoes With shreds of Majnūn’s tent.

The air of contempt in the action draws the distinction plainly; there is no direct challenge, but Majnūns are simply irrelevant.20 In an interview with Īraj Gurgīn in 1964, Farrukhzād stated, “Our world has nothing to do with the world of Ḥāfiẓ and Saʿdī … We talk about love, about the character of Majnūn, who was always, well, the symbol of constancy and perseverance in love. From my perspective, I’m living a different kind of life, and he’s a completely ridiculous character to me.”21 The beloved bridges this gap between the classical world of Niẓāmī and the present world. Neither bound by tradition nor completely idiosyncratic, he belongs to both the past and the present: ‫من‬ ‫معشوق‬ ‫نپال‬ ‫همچون خداوندی در معبد‬ ‫وجودش‬ ‫گوئی از ابتدای‬ ‫است‬ ‫بیگانه بوده‬ ‫او‬ ‫گذشته‬ ‫مردیست از قرون‬ ‫زیبائی‬ ‫یاد آور اصالت‬ ‫خود‬ ‫او در فضای‬ ‫کودکی‬ ‫چون بوی‬ ‫را‬ ‫پیوسته خاطرات معصومی‬ ‫میکند‬ ‫بیدار‬ ‫است‬ ‫او مثل یک سرود خوش عامیانه‬ ‫عریانی‬ ‫سرشار از خشونت و‬ My lover, Like a god in a Nepalese temple, Seems to be a stranger To the beginnings of his existence. He Is a man of centuries past, A reminder of beauty’s authenticity. In his own environment, He constantly awakens

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Individualism and the Beloved in the Poetry of Furūgh Farrukhzād Innocent memories, Like the smell of a child. Like a glad folk song, He is naked and rough.

He is “a man of centuries past,” but the same stanza says that he’s “a stranger to the beginnings of his existence.” A god in a Nepalese temple has an ancient, timeless quality, seemingly unaware of his history, yet still possessing contemporary importance to worshippers. For the beloved, although the connection with the past exists, it isn’t part of his immediate consciousness. That lack of self-consciousness suggests a lack of awareness of his own heroic qualities featured in the beginning of the poem, qualities that reflect his relationship to the past. It allows him to maintain the individualistic balance between the heroic and the everyday that characterizes him throughout the poem, and contributes to the “beauty’s authenticity” attributed to him that ends the sixth stanza. The seventh stanza elaborates on the lack of artifice that constitutes such an integral part of the beloved’s individuality, as well as the influence of that quality on people in his environment. It is his simplicity that “constantly awakens innocent memories, like the smell of a child” in people around him, and the stanza’s final description of him as “a glad folk song … naked and rough” establishes him as an unpolished man of the people, echoing both the sense of genuineness in “beauty’s authenticity” and the beloved’s association with nature. Like a folk song, too, he is part of the past that exists naturally today. The beloved’s relationship with the present follows easily: ‫میدارد‬ ‫او با خلوص دوست‬ ‫را‬ ‫ذرات زندگی‬ ‫را‬ ‫خاک‬ ‫ذرات‬ ‫را‬ ‫غمهای آدمی‬ ‫را‬ ‫پاک‬ ‫غمهای‬ He honestly loves The atoms of life, The atoms of dust, Human sorrows, Utter sorrows.

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures The stanza suggests the depth of his attachment to his environment and his acute consciousness of both its physical (atoms of life and dust) and emotional aspects (human sorrows). His awareness of those sorrows reflects Farrukhzād’s insistence that the development of self doesn’t take place in isolation from the external world. In an interview with Ghulāmḥusayn Sāʿīdī and Sīrūs Tāhbāz, Farrukhzād urged readers to be aware of more than their immediate personal affairs; self-awareness cannot be entirely distinct from awareness of the outside world. “I do not condone taking refuge in a room with the doors shut and looking inward under those circumstances … When a person finds her own world among people and in the depths of life, then she can always have it with her and stay in touch with the outside world from within it.”22 In “Maʿshūq-i Man,” the beloved’s positive relationship with the world around him also reduces the tension between the poem’s earlier depiction of him as wild, a part of nature as opposed to society, and the current portrayal of him as enjoying many facets of civilization: ‫میدارد‬ ‫او با خلوص دوست‬ ‫را‬ ‫یک کوچه باغ دهکده‬ ‫را‬ ‫یک درخت‬ ‫را‬ ‫یک ظرف بستنی‬ ‫را‬ ‫رخت‬ ‫یک بند‬ He honestly loves a village garden path, A tree, A dish of ice cream, A clothesline.

The beloved’s fondness for such mundane things supports Muḥammad Mukhtārī’s assertion that “he, like her [the speaker], is common. He is someone who puts uniqueness together in his own manner. Rather than that idol reserved for the elites to worship, he is like everyone’s beloved, in a normal life.”23 Homely pleasures of the senses appeal to him: the green of a garden path, perhaps the shade of a tree, and the taste of ice cream. Having established the beloved as an individuality comprised of contradictions – heroic yet fond of ice cream, savage yet full of affection for a garden path, a figure of the past who is conscious of his present world down to its 148

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Individualism and the Beloved in the Poetry of Furūgh Farrukhzād atoms of dust – the poem ends with a stanza that emphasizes how he and the speaker are essentially alone: ‫من‬ ‫معشوق‬ ‫ایست‬ ‫انسان ساده‬ ‫را‬ ‫او‬ ‫انسان ساده ای که من‬ ‫عجایب‬ ‫در سر زمین شوم‬ ‫شگفت‬ ‫چون آخرین نشانه یک مذهب‬ ‫در لبلی بوته پستانهایم‬ ‫ام‬ ‫پنهان نموده‬ My lover Is a simple person, A simple person whom I, In this strange ominous land, Have hidden in the thicket of my breasts Like the last oracle of a wondrous religion.

The passage represents an abrupt shift in tone from the comfortable images of the two previous stanzas, with the final lines of the poem accomplishing three things. First, they remind us sharply of both characters’ refusal to adhere to behavioral models. The stanza begins where the last one left off, characterizing the beloved as a simple man, but the speaker reappears as a central figure and assumes a protective role in a suddenly hostile environment. The unexpected image of a strong woman sheltering her mighty (but perhaps vulnerable) lover stresses the unconventional nature of both people and their relationship. Second, the lines place the lovers, their individuality thus reemphasized, in a threatening “strange ominous land.” Although ajāyib, which I  have translated as “strange,” implies something wondrous, shūm (ominous) gives the word a negative sense. The poem’s conclusion on this note acknowledges the significance and potential consequences of the couple’s break from social conventions. In spite of the positive depictions of some aspects of society – the village garden path, for ­example – the couple seems alienated from the rest of humanity, much like the defiant couple in “Fatḥ-i Bāgh.” In the latter poem, society disapproved of the lovers, but was powerless to affect them; here, it poses a significant threat.

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures Third, the passage clarifies the nature of the conflict between the lovers and their environment with the description of the beloved as “the last oracle of a wondrous religion” whom the speaker hides and protects. Religions govern the choices their adherents make and the priorities they set. The beloved, in what he is and what he has chosen, would seem to represent a religion involving disregard for, perhaps unawareness of, convention – especially where convention conflicts with his own inclinations. The speaker’s similar bent is evident both in her disregard for cultural expectations and in this joyful celebration of her rebellious lover. The use of the word madhhab (religion) is significant because it emphasizes the couple’s commitment to their priorities, and the speaker’s description of the beloved as the last oracle adds to the sense of menace that they’re facing as a result: taken together, it becomes clear that living outside social norms has social repercussions. The speakers of both “Maʿshūq-i Man” and “Fatḥ-i Bāgh” are confident enough to risk these repercussions, and unlike some speakers in Farrukhzād’s earlier work, they don’t question themselves later. In “Fatḥ-i Bāgh,” the speaker and her beloved leave an entire society behind in abandoning the sullen window, going out to pick the apple from the distant branch, and turning their backs on the city to search for meaning in nature. For them, it pays off, not because there aren’t consequences (the malice behind the windows at the end makes that clear), but because those consequences pale in comparison with the positive outcome of their decisions:  freedom in a loving relationship and the consciousness that they have become individuals able to live independently in an atmosphere of joy and growth. “Maʿshūq-i Man” flows easily between models of tradition and individual modes of expression, indicating a lack of concern with the potential inconsistency of reflecting classical ideals in one line and abandoning them in the next. The speaker doesn’t tell us directly who she is and how she interacts with her environment. Rather, she demonstrates all of that in her description of her lover, mixing the conventional and the unconventional in a distinctly individual way. He is simple, yet heroic, pleasantly rustic, yet bloodthirsty. She takes the initiative as a woman writing a love poem, yet describes her lover’s conquest of her with pleasure. 150

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Notes 1. Parts of this chapter are adapted from my dissertation, “ ‘And This Is I’: The Power of the Individual in the Poetry of Forugh Farrokhzād” (PhD diss., University of Texas, 2005). 2. Michael Hillmann discusses reactions to Farrukhzād’s poetry and its place in the context of Persian literary tradition in A Lonely Woman:  Forugh Farrokhzād and Her Poetry (Washington, DC:  Three Continents Press and Mage Publishers, 1987), 17ff. 3. Farrukhzād, “Khāna-yi Matrūk” in Majmūʿa-yi Ash’ār-i Furūgh, 2nd ed. (Saarbrucken: Nawid-Verlag, 1992), 93. 4. All translations are mine. 5. Rivanne Sandler argues that “Forugh Farrohzad’s poetry of love can be read as an intimate dialog with a muse. And … the muse is not an external agent, but rather the poet herself, the source of her creativity.” “Forugh Farrokhzad’s Romance with Her Muse,” in Forugh Farrokhzad: Poet of Modern Iran (London: I.B.Tauris, 2010), 53. Poems such as “The Abandoned House” support this viewpoint, and on occasion Farrukhzād clearly spoke of poetry and her own creativity as a metaphorical lover. However, the overtly sexual tone of poems such as “Fatḥ-i Bāgh” and “Maʿshūq-i Man,” where the speaker relishes the contrast between her beloved’s masculinity and her own femininity, suggests that Farrukhzād’s poetic experience of the beloved is not exclusively internal. 6. Furūgh Farrukhzād, “Pāsukh” in Majmūʿa-i Ashʿār-i Furūgh, 167–8. 7. Hillmann, A Lonely Woman, 95. 8. Forugh Farrokhzād, “Fath-i Bāgh” in Another Birth: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzād, trans. Hasan Javadi and Susan Sallée (Emeryville, CA:  Albany Press, 1981), 359–62. 9. For discussions of the importance of bird images in “Faṭh-i Bāgh,” see Ardavan Davaran, “ ‘The Conquest of the Garden’: A Significant Instance of the Poetic Development of Forugh Farrokhzād,” in Farrokhzād, Asir, 119–22, and Michael Hillmann, “ ‘Fatḥ-i Bāgh:’ Farākhānī bar Fardiyyat,” Andīsha va Khiyāl 6 (1992): 13–22. 10. Hillmann “Farākhānī bar Fardiyyat,” 13. 11. In “Forugh Farrokhzad: A Feminist Perspective,” Milāni writes that “ ‘Light,’ ‘water,’ and ‘mirror,’ symbolizing lucidity, affluence, and good fortune are used in Persian wedding ceremonies. Though the lovers of this poem are not ‘married’ in the traditional sense of the word, their union however is sanctified.” Farzaneh Milani, “Forugh Farrokhzad:  A  Feminist Perspective” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1979), 194. 12. Davaran refers to the registry as “an old book of marriage license records.” “A Significant Instance,” 120.

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures 13. Farzaneh Milani sees this passage as support for her argument that the lovers feel threatened in the garden: feelings of dislocation and vulnerability lurk behind the festive mood of this poem. From the very first line, and at the ecstatic moment when the two lovers enter their paradise, the poet describes the crow flying over their heads, the crow that eventually will spread the news of their unconventional relationship. Anxiety breaks through from the outset. Guilt and suspicion set in. The couple, it seems, remain isolated, expelled as it were. This Paradise eventually turns into an exile  – a willful self-exile at best. No wonder its inhabitants have to ask the hares, the shells, and the eagles, “What is to be done?” (Farzaneh Milani, Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1992), 151). Milani’s reading makes no distinction between being conscious of society’s awareness and disapproval, and being affected by it. The poem alternates between descriptions of the conventions the lovers are defying and their triumphant voyage of revelation, the latter rendering the malice they sense irrelevant, if not meaningless. Consistent throughout the poem, the pattern begins with the description of the tale-bearing crow, and moves immediately to the lovers’ discovery of the garden. Then comes the referral to everyone’s fear, the lovers’ lack of it, and the ridiculousness of “the flimsy linking of two names/and embracing in the old pages of a register” compared to the vitality of the speaker’s experiences outside that convention. In instances such as this, society’s pettiness actually serves to intensify the sense of significance, even grandeur, in the claiming of their lives as individuals. Far from being an act of insecurity, their appeal to nature represents a further illustration of the lovers’ rejection of society; they turn their backs on the city and value the opinions of nature in negotiating their new path. 14. Davaran, “A Significant Instance,” 120–1. 15. Hillmann, “Farākhāni Bar Fardiyyat,” 19–20. 16. Davaran, “A Significant Instance,” 122. 17. Karl Joachim Weintraub, The Value of the Individual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), xv. 18. Milani, Veils and Words:  The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1992), 140–1. 19. Farrokhzād, “Maʿshūq-i Man” in Tavalludī Dīgar, 325–8. My translation owes much to that of Ahmad Karimi-Hakkāk in Remembering the Flight:  Twenty Poems by Forugh Farrokhzād (Port Coquitlam, BC: Nik, 1997), 37–41 and to that of Michael Hillmann from his unpublished manuscript The Sound That Remains: Forty Persian Poems by Forugh Farrokhzad, 31. 20. Majnūn is the hero of the twelfth-century Iranian poet Niẓāmī’s Laylī and Majnūn. Laylī’s father has denied Majnūn as a suitor because his love for her appears intense to the point of madness. Majnūn lives in the desert for years, pining for Laylī.

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Individualism and the Beloved in the Poetry of Furūgh Farrukhzād 21. Forugh Farrokhzād, “Guftagū bā Furūgh,” in Furūgh Farrukhzād:  Jāvdāna Zīstan, dar Auj Māndan, ed. Bihrūz Jalālī (Tehran:  Intishārāt-i Murvārīd, 1996), 169. 22. Furūgh Farrukhzād, “Guftagū-yi Sīrūs Tāhbāz va Duktur Sāʿidī bā Furūgh,” in Dar Ghurūbī Abadī: Majmuʿa-yi Āsār-i Manthūr-i Furūgh Farrukhzād, ed. Bihrūz Jalālī (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Murvārīd, 1997), 179–80. 23. Muḥammad Mukhtārī, Insān dar Shiʿr-i Muʿāthir (Tehran:  Intishārāt-i Ṭūs, 1999), 611.

Bibliography Davaran, Ardavan. “‘The Conquest of the Garden’:  A  Significant Instance of the Poetic Development of Forugh Farrokhzād.” In Another Birth: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzād, translated by Hasan Javadi and Susan Sallée, 117–24. Emeryville, CA: Albany Press, 1981. Farrokhzād, Forugh. Another Birth: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzād. Translated by Hasan Javadi and Susan Sallée. Emeryville, CA: Albany Press, 1981. ——— Dar Ghurūbī Abadī:  Majmuʿa-yi Āsār-yi Manthūr-i Furūgh Farrukhzād. Edited by Bihrūz Jalālī. Tehran: Intishārāt-i Murvārid, 1997. ——— Majmūʿa-yi Ashʿār-i Furūgh. 2nd ed. Saarbrucken: Nawid-Verlag, 1992. ——— Remembering the Flight: Twenty Poems by Forugh Farrokhzād. Edited and translated by Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak. Port Coquitlam, BC: Nik, 1997. Hillmann, Michael C. “ ‘Fatḥ-i Bāgh:’ Farākhānī bar Fardiyyat.” Andīsha va Khiyāl 6 (1992): 13–22. ——— A Lonely Woman:  Forugh Farrokhzād and Her Poetry. Washington, DC: Three Continents Press and Mage Publishers, 1987. ——— The Sound That Remains:  Forty Persian Poems by Forugh Farrokhzad, 31. Unpublished manuscript. Jalālī, Bihrūz, ed. Furūgh Farrukhzād:  Jāvdāna Zīstan, dar Auj Māndan. Tehran: Intishārāt-i Murvārīd, 1996. Milani, Farzaneh. “Forugh Farrokhzad:  A  Feminist Perspective.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1979. ——— “Nakedness Regained: Farrokhzad’s Garden of Eden.” In Forugh Farrokhzad: A Quarter Century Later, edited by Michael C. Hillmann, 91–104 Austin: Literature East and West, 1988. ——— Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1992. Mukhtārī, Muḥammad. Insān dar Shiʿr-i Muʿāṣir. Tehran: Intishārāt-i Ṭūs, 1999. Oehler-Stricklin, Dylan. “ ‘And This Is I’: The Power of the Individual in the Poetry of Forugh Farrokhzād.” PhD diss., University of Texas, 2005.

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures Sandler, Rivanne. “Forugh Farrokhzad’s Romance with Her Muse.” In Forugh Farrokhzad:  Poet of Modern Iran, edited by Dominic Parviz Brookshaw and Nasrin Rahimieh, 53–67. London: I.B.Tauris, 2010. Weintraub, Karl Joachim. The Value of the Individual. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1978.

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7 Making Love through Scholarship in Jamīl Buthayna Richard Serrano

In this chapter I argue that many of the characteristics associated with the figure of the beloved and her would-be lover in Arabic poetry come not necessarily from the poetry itself, but from the way in which this poetry has been transmitted over a millennium and a half and reassembled by scholars, both European and Arab, in the twentieth century. In order to demonstrate my argument I examine what is purportedly a reassembled poem by the early seventh-century Arab poet Jamīl and juxtapose its contradictory representation of Jamīl’s beloved, Buthayna, with that found in the far more consistent prose anecdotes about her in the tenth-century compendium of song and poetry, the Kitāb al-Aghānī (Book of songs). Imposing European values about genre and form to fragments of text long predating any poetry in today’s modern European languages, coupled with an apparent abhorrence of genre mixing, have led to a distortion of the figure of the beloved herself. Until the ‘Udhrī poets reformulated the dynamics of desire in the late seventh century, in Arabic poetry lovers tended to be far more memorable than their beloveds. Indeed, reminders of how difficult it is to remember the beloved recur throughout pre-Islamic poetry. In the qaṣīda, the most prestigious genre of classical Arabic poetry, the pre-Islamic and Umayyad poet nearly always begins by searching for the site of the aṭlāl, 155

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures traces of encampments long ago abandoned where the lover and his beloved briefly trysted when their respective tribes crossed transhumant paths, now obscured by the desperate indistinguishability of the features of the landscape itself. Only once the poet comes across what he believes to be  – or convinces himself to be  – the traces of those encampments are his memories of her triggered. The memories evoked, however, are seldom anything other than stock images and clichés, making most of the beloveds as indistinguishable from each other as the encampment traces that unleash the memories are indistinguishable from the landscape in which they are embedded. In contrast, the poet-lover  – and nearly every pre-Islamic poet was a lover, if nowhere but in his text  – had characteristics that rendered him distinctly individual, or at the very least allow readers both past and present to distinguish many poets one from another.1 The focus in the pre-Islamic qaṣīda is not on evoking the beloved, but instead on representing the poet’s melancholy pose as he boasts of his prior amorous actions. For example, in the Mu‘allaqa of the most notorious of all pre-Islamic poets, the sixth-century Imru’ al-Qays, our attention remains riveted on the figure of the lover, such a virtuoso that when a mother under him hears her baby cry she cannot bear to turn any more than the upper part of her body from the pleasure the poet gives her: Many’s the pregnant woman like you, aye, and the nursing mother I’ve night-visited, and made her forget her amuleted one-year-old Whenever he whimpered behind her, she turned to him With half her body, her other half unshifted under me.2

What is memorable in the poetry of Imru’ al-Qays is not this woman or that woman or any woman in particular, but instead what the poet does to and for these women. Here Imru’ al-Qays does not even bother to address the beloved by name, instead reminding her that she is but one of many pregnant women and nursing mothers he has pleasured. Such a bawdy scene is unimaginable in the love poetry of the ‘Udhrīs, a tribe whose poets at the end of the seventh century famously recast the beloved as a singular and unattainable ideal. In contrast to Imru’ al-Qays, 156

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Making Love through Scholarship in Jamīl Buthayna who cannot be bothered to speak the woman’s name, Jamīl b.  Ma‘mar, the most renowned of the ‘Udhrī poets, is so besotted with his beloved Buthayna that he is usually referred to as Jamīl Buthayna, as if his name itself must indicate enthrallment to her. His obsession for Buthayna seems to swallow up half his name, to the exclusion of the expected indications of his place of origin, his tribe, or perhaps what attributes he embodies. In contrast to Imru’ al-Qays’s world of boundless sexual conquest, Jamīl creates in his poetry a world circumscribed by thwarted love, which is virtually the only theme of his surviving verses. In this world it is not the beloved pinned beneath her lover who cannot bear to turn from him, but instead Jamīl, who no matter where he is can never turn his thoughts from Buthayna, although in this case it is not pleasure that keeps him pinned in place, but instead the torment imposed by insurmountable separation. Unlike his pre-Islamic predecessors, Jamīl has no difficulty in triggering memories of Buthayna; indeed, the difficulty lies in his inability to stop remembering her. Despite Jamīl’s incessant remembering, for its part the Arabic literary tradition has had difficulty in remembering Buthayna clearly and consistently. Better put, the tradition has chosen to remember Buthayna in three distinct and contradictory ways. First, there is the tradition that has assimilated her to the prevailing image of the idealized beloved dominant in Arabic culture, which some scholars still believe is the ultimate source of the image of the beloved, unattainable and pure, in the courtly love tradition of the Western European troubadours. Second, there is the version of Buthayna found in the handful of anecdotes about her transmitted in late-Abbasid anthologies, who is more willful and actively involved in the plotting of her trysts with Jamīl. Third, there is the version in the poetry ascribed to Jamīl, which never quite comes into focus and remains more a locus of hopeless longing than a woman. There are, then, various Buthaynas, each a function of form and source, while Jamīl as poet-lover remains constant in his suffering regardless of who or what his beloved may be. Jamīl is always with Buthayna, regardless of where he might be, while Buthayna, regardless of which sort of Buthayna is depicted, is always somewhere else beyond reach, access to her blocked at the last minute, Jamīl’s stolen moments with her unbearably fleeting and barely remembered. Indeed, the vagaries of literary taste and the difficulties of transmission 157

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures over the centuries mean that the Buthayna of the poetry was very nearly permanently rendered beyond reach, as her textual traces began to disappear and scatter. The version of Buthayna found in the poetry is not, however, a timeless figure passively received by readers and scholars, but is instead as much a reconstruction (or construction, as we will see) as Jamīl’s dīwān itself is not a document passively received by readers and scholars, but instead the result of imaginative (re)construction performed by scholars over the past century-and-a-half. Out of the hundreds of lines ascribed to Jamīl, Arab scholars some centuries later and European scholars not quite a millennium-and-a-half later have spun a beloved for Jamīl as inconstant as the lovers portrayed a century or so before him. This should not take away from the fact that Buthayna’s gender-inflected inconstancy necessarily differs from that of the desert-roaming pre-Islamic poet. As scholars manufactured poems out of poetry, they created a beloved who never quite comes into focus, who is always the sum of her contradictions, no matter how hard the ensuing narrative and theoretical traditions attempt to smooth away those contradictions in order to form a more anodyne, cliché-ridden love story and a formulaic theoretical construct of love. Buthayna is a creation of literary form and reception, which in this case turns out to be nearly the same thing. Although Jamīl seems to have been a real, historical personage, the relative certainty of his historicity in part derives from its contrast with the obvious fictionality of accounts of the life of Majnūn Layla (a nickname meaning something like “The One Driven Mad by Layla” or even just “Mad for Layla”), who, if he had actually existed, would have been a poet roughly contemporary to Jamīl. Somewhat paradoxically, Jamīl’s historicity is attested by the hazy uncertainty of the narrative of his life that can be constructed out of the terse anecdotes recounted in the two main sources in which we find them, the Kitāb al-Aghānī (Book of Songs), compiled in the tenth century by Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī, and the Kitāb Wafayāt al-A‘yān wa-Anbā’ Abnā’ al-Zamān (The deaths of eminent men and news of the sons of the time), a thirteenth-century biographical dictionary compiled by Ibn Khallikān. Although some, maybe even all of the events of Jamīl’s life may have been fictionalized, or are at least presented so artfully as to highlight its romantic aspects, at the core of these narratives seems to be a 158

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Making Love through Scholarship in Jamīl Buthayna real man’s life obscured by its distillation and distortion into a tragic and emblematic story of star-crossed lovers. Jamīl is said to have been born about 660 ce and to have lived most of his life in the Ḥijāz, the westernmost region of what is today Saudi Arabia. He falls in love with his cousin Buthayna, but her family intervenes by marrying her off to another man. The poet pines after her and continues to compose poetry about her despite her marriage. He then lives for a while in Yemen, and eventually ends up in Egypt, where he dies in 701, without ever having gotten over his lost love. Although this story of thwarted love is no doubt why Jamīl continues to be remembered in popular culture more than thirteen centuries after his death, the question of why and how his poetry was remembered and transmitted was a point of contention between two of the most eminent European Orientalists of the twentieth century. While Francesco Gabrieli argues that his dīwān “circulated widely in the … ninth century,” Régis Blachère, despite a grateful nod to Gabrieli’s scholarly “zeal,” insists that no dīwān under Jamīl’s name was ever constituted in the ninth century.3 Although, as is generally the case with negatives, it is impossible to prove definitively that Jamīl’s dīwān never existed, Gabrieli does not offer incontrovertible evidence for its existence. Even if, as he claims, this dīwān circulated in the ninth century, that would still be two centuries after the poems were composed. Whatever form Jamīl’s poetry took from the seventh to the ninth century, Gabrieli’s belief in the dīwān’s existence fuels the scholarly zeal, noted by Blachère, that allows him to believe that he can reconstruct it. As Blachère points out, most of Gabrieli’s (re)construction of the dīwān is composed of single lines, apparently orphans from poems otherwise long since forgotten.4 This state of affairs is not wholly unexpected, since Arab scholars and anthologists of classical poetry often cite individual lines, whether to indicate aesthetic appreciation, to illustrate the explanation of an odd word or point of grammar, or to flesh out a biographical sketch. Of course, it is also possible that these lines never belonged to any poem of Jamīl’s, or perhaps any poem at all. Gabrieli’s dīwān of Jamīl is found in two articles published in the Rivista degli studi orientali, “Ġamīl al-‘Udrī. Studio Critico e Raccolta dei Frammenti” (Jamīl al-‘Udhrī:  A  critical study and the collection of fragments) (1937), and “Contributi alla Interpretazione  di Ġamīl” 159

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures (Contributions to the interpretation of Jamīl) (1939).5 The 698 lines of poetry (trusting Pierre Masnou’s count) are gathered, as the title of the first article indicates, from no fewer than 22 different sources, ranging in date from the ninth to the seventeenth centuries.6 I can only marvel at Gabrieli’s scouring of the voluminous manuscript tradition for lines ascribed to Jamīl. Indeed, all scholars of Jamīl since, whether Arab or Western, whether they acknowledge his influence or not, are deeply indebted to him – and all seem to accept his unspoken assumption that Jamīl’s poetry can be found, collected, and comprehended. Since an examination of all 698 lines and their 22 sources are beyond the scope of this essay, the longest poem of Gabrieli’s dīwān of Jamīl, and the only poem which Gabrieli himself chooses to discuss at great length in his articles, will instead serve to represent the whole. Just as the extreme nature of Imru’ al-Qays’s promiscuity has come to make him representative of pre-Islamic poetry, the unusual length of the poem numbered 27 by Gabrieli will serve to represent the nature of Gabrieli’s project, because in the (re)construction of such a long poem the assumptions made by Gabrieli and his successors bring into sharp focus the way in which Buthayna has been (re)constructed beyond the limits of the individual fragments that Gabrieli has gathered. In other words, assembling 39 lines to form Poem 27 is a reduced-scale version of the task that Gabrieli undertook when he decided to gather the 698 lines that form Jamīl’s putatively lost dīwān. Gabrieli believes there was a dīwān, so he makes one. He also believes there was a poem, so he makes one of those, too. If Blachère is right, and there never was a dīwān, perhaps one might argue that there never was a poem either. The distinction is more than the mere counting of angels dancing on the heads of pins, since a poem means differently within the demarcation of its form than unbounded lines of poetry would, as we will see. Before demonstrating, perversely, that Poem 27 of Gabrieli’s dīwān of Jamīl is not a poem but instead lines of poetry forced to conform to a certain idea of what a poem should be, I present a translation that hopefully does not eliminate all the ambiguity found in the original Arabic. Translating poetry is always an exercise in futility; the harder the translator tries to remain faithful to the original, the more certain it is that he must cheat in order to approximate 160

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Making Love through Scholarship in Jamīl Buthayna its sense in the target language, and the ensuing act of approximation then leads the reader ever further astray. Part of the difficulty in the case of this poem is that the reader necessarily expects the result to be odd; it is Arabic and over thirteen centuries old, after all. Nonetheless, if the translation tips from odd into incoherent or incomprehensible, the translator risks losing the attention of the reader altogether. The temptation to impose coherence, whether on the part of the translator or on the part of the scholar, is difficult to resist. The italicized notations within brackets in the translation below indicate seven distinct Arabic words that could be rendered as “love” along a continuum of desire running from friendship to lust. Following the translation, I will have more to say about the different kinds of attachment implied by these seven words:

Poem 277 1. If only the first flowering of youth could be renewed,       and the time that turned and fled, O Buthayna, returned. 2. We could continue on contented as we were,       you a true friend though you gave me but little. 3. Whatever things I may forget, I will not forget the words she spoke       when she allowed my worn-out camel near: “To Egypt bound?” 4. Nor her words: “If not for spying eyes,       I would come to you, so forgive me – may the ancestors ransom you!” 5. O my two friends, the passion [wajd] I hide is obvious;       my tears are witness to what I hide this morning. 6. Do I not see – God! – that there will be ever more tears       when the abode puts a great distance between us. 7. When I said, “O Buthayna, the passion [wajd] in me is my murderer,”       she said, “It will always be so and only get worse.” 8. If I said, “Restore but some of my wits so that I may live among people,       she would say: “Far from it!” 9. I am not sent back with that which I came seeking,       nor will my love [ḥubb] for her perish like that which perishes. 10. May they compensate you with reproach, O Buthayna,       when a praiseworthy friend departs. 11. And I said to her, “Between me and you, know       that before God we have a pact and vows.

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures 12. My love [ḥubb] for you is both newfound and long-possessed,       there being no love [ḥubb] that is not both newly gained and won  long ago.” 13. The mountain path toward union between her and me,       even if she leveled it with desire [manā], would be steep. 14. I wore out my life waiting for her favor,       and used up time while it was still new. 15. If only muttering black strangers would mix poison destined       for the rumor-mongers spreading lies about her and me among   the people. 16. If only at every dusk and every dawn       their shackles and fetters were doubled! 17. Those women imagine out of ignorance       that when I came I wanted [urīdu] them. 18. I divide my glances equally among the women       but in my breast the gap between them is vast. 19. If only I knew whether I would ever spend one night       at Wād al-Qurā, I would then truly be happy. 20. Will I alight in a land whose winds persist       howling over abandoned highland paths? 21. And whether I, one fated time, will truly meet with my good fortune,       so that the worn bond of sheer friendship [ṣafā] will be renewed. 22. Longing loves [plural of hawā] may meet after having despaired;       what one needs may be sought although far off. 23. Will I drive my lank, tall, swift camel across a wind-swept plain       where the long-necked journey-weary camels try to outrun her 24. Over a feared desert plain, the heights of which are as if       sleeping when those who will die lost pass by? 25. With the eyes of a wild calf amid a herd,       and with a breast smooth as a silver plate she took me captive; 26. She walks head held high, the way one vaunting her beauty       walks, swaying, wearing a bejewelled belt, toward her  sisters-in-law. 27. When I went to visit her one fateful day,       a man untwisting his hands showed up to stop me. 28. He turned away and closed his eyes at my longing [hawā], falsely       charging me with crimes against her, rejecting what he knew to  be true. 29. So I cut myself off from her out of fear, as if I were avoiding her;       but when he pays no attention to us, we will return.

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Making Love through Scholarship in Jamīl Buthayna 30. Whoever is given in this world a wife like her       will live a life well led. 31. My longing [hawā] dies when I see her,       and when I part from her, it revives, returning. 32. The men say, “O Jamīl, take up arms and wage holy war!”       but why would I want holy war not waged against women? 33. All talk among women is a joy;       anyone killed in their midst is a martyr. 34. To whoever doubts my love [ḥubb] for Buthayna       let the stone-mottled sands of Dhū Ḍāl be my witness. 35. Don’t you know, o Mother of the cowry-charm, that I laugh       remembering you, despite your hardness? 36. I was caught by longing [hawā] for her when just a boy, and my love [ḥubb] for her       has never to this day stopped growing and increasing. 37. Upon reflection she said, “I’ve already attained his affection [wudd],       avarice cannot hurt me, so why should I be generous?” 38. If my guts were laid bare, you would find under them       my love [ḥubb] for Buthayna – both the newly-gained and  long-ago won. 39. No friends are remembered without my remembering her       and no avarice without my saying, “She will be generous.”

I admit that translating something that I  will then claim does not exist would seem to be an exceedingly pointless exercise, but I  would like to suggest that disassembling Gabrieli’s Jamīl allows us to understand how the (re)constructed poem in its wholeness comes apart. Out of the 22 sources from which Gabrieli extracts the 698 lines of Jamīl’s dīwān, he relies on 12 for this poem. The earliest source is Ibn Sallām, a ḥadīth scholar and philologist who died in 845, but not before compiling his Ṭabaqāt al-Shu‘arā’ (Generations of poets) from which Gabrieli draws. The most recent source is ‘Abd al-Qādir’s seventeenth-century Khizānat al-Adab (Treasuries of Literature). In between we find (in chronological order) Ibn Qutayba’s ninth-century Kitāb al-Shiʿr waal-Shu‘arā’ (Book of Poetry and Poets), Ibn Dāwūd’s ninth-century Kitāb al-Zahrā (Book of the Refulgent Blossom), Al-Qālī’s tenth-century Kitāb al-Amālī (Book of Dictation), the Kitāb al-Aghānī (Book of Songs) already mentioned above, Ibn Rashīq’s eleventh-century Kitāb al-‘Umda (Book of 163

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures the pillar),8 Al-Bakrī’s eleventh-century Mu‘jam mā Ista‘jama min Asmā’ al-Bilād waal-Mawāḍi‘ (Dictionary of the unintelligible names of countries and places), Ibn ‘Asākir’s twelfth-century Al-Tārīkh al-Kabīr (The Great History), Yāqūt’s thirteenth-century Mu‘jam al-Buldān (Dictionary of Countries), the Kitāb Wafayāt al-A‘yān already mentioned above, and Dāwūd al-Anṭakī’s sixteenth-century Taz’īn al-Aswāq bi Tafṣīl Ashwāq al-‘Ushshāq (Ornamentation of the Markets through the elaboration of the yearnings of lovers). Merely listing the evocative, often fanciful, titles gives some sense of how widely divergent the purposes of the sources must have been, although what each work has in common is the ruthless selection of parts – sometimes mere snippets – of earlier works that later cease to be transmitted in their entirety. Although the preservation of so much of early Arabic literature is due to the anthologists and compilers of reference works, perversely, these anthologies and reference works also seem to have contributed to the disappearance of earlier, once-whole works. Once the original work had been distilled to its essence, or once the scholar reading it from the perspective of centuries later had extracted from it what was most useful or pleasing to him, the original was rendered superfluous. The task Gabrieli takes on is in some sense an attempt to reverse this process as a result of which Jamīl had nearly gone extinct. A closer look at Gabrieli’s manipulation of the sources to create Poem 27 shows that he has not cobbled together a Frankenstein’s monster out of 12 sources spread over seven centuries, grabbing a line here and another there. Instead, he chose between two distinct conceptions of Jamīl’s poetry, one represented by the lines as found in al-Iṣfahānī, and the other by those as found in al-Iṣfahānī’s contemporary al-Qālī. Gabrieli’s version of the poem is basically al-Qālī’s 35 lines in the same order with a further four tacked on from other sources at the end. In this sense, Poem 27 is an anomaly, since most of the lines Gabrieli collects into his dīwān of Jamīl are found only in the Kitāb al-Aghānī. In the case of Poem 27, Gabrieli relies on the rest of the sources for variants, which he sometimes uses to amend al-Qālī, but usually cites in order to disregard them. For example, Gabrieli cites and disregards 14 variants in al-Anṭākī, the only other source in which Poem 27 is largely whole, and maintains the line order in al-Qālī, which al-Anṭākī changes slightly. Gabrieli’s scholarship does not imply a choice between 164

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Making Love through Scholarship in Jamīl Buthayna al-Qālī and al-Anṭākī, but instead seems to indicate that al-Anṭākī is a corrupted version of al-Qālī. The implication seems to be that the six centuries of transmission between al-Qālī and al-Anṭākī introduced errant readings into the text, which the scholar should dismiss after careful consideration. Gabrieli’s decision to choose al-Qālī’s version (indeed one of al-Qālī’s versions of this poem, as I will explain below) over that found in the Kitāb al-Aghānī, however, requires further commentary, since the latter is the far more celebrated work. The saga of how the Kitāb al-Aghānī  – a vast collection of songs and anecdotes about famous composers, musicians, singers, and the poets whose verse served as the source for the lyrics they sang  – came to be edited and published in editions of varying scholarly rigor is recounted in Hilary Kilpatrick’s magisterial Making the Great Book of Songs:  Compilation and the Author’s Craft in Abū al-Faraj al-Isbahānī’s “Kitāb al-Aghānī.” Although some of its lacunae are shocking and remain unexplained (“What! No Abū Nuwās?”), the Kitāb al-Aghānī is the single most important source of classical Arabic poetry for both scholars and the more casual reader, although the notion that one might read casually from a work thousands of pages long demanding all sorts of indexes and footnotes in order to make it somewhat less intractable says something about the continued importance of poetry to Arabic culture. Gabrieli’s preference for al-Qālī in this case may also reflect the problematic nature of relying on the Kitāb al-Aghānī as a source for poetry. Al-Iṣfahānī was commissioned specifically to gather not poetry but songs for the court in Baghdad. As Kilpatrick points out, “musicians regarded poetry as a quarry from which to extract lyrics, and they were prepared to change words, rearrange lines and combine the verses of different poets to create the text they wanted for their setting.”9 The very nature of the source then would seem to caution against the efficacy of the sort of literary archaeology that Gabrieli and other scholars would perform. Although it would be an exaggeration to claim that reconstructing the dīwān of Jamīl from the Kitāb al-Aghānī would be akin to reconstructing the oeuvre of Shakespeare from the Cole Porter songs in Kiss Me Kate, the comparison is useful in helping us to understand what it means to shift language as it is scrambled from one genre to another – imagine what labors would bedevil scholars trying to reconstitute “to be or not to be” from “Too Darn 165

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures Hot.” Roughly three centuries separate Shakespeare from Porter and perhaps three-and-a-half separate Jamīl from the Kitāb al-Aghānī. The culture of the opulent Baghdad courts in which scattered lines of his poetry were set to music would have been no less astonishing to Jamīl than the lights of Broadway would have been to Shakespeare. Due to the paucity of sources, Gabrieli usually has no choice but to follow al-Iṣfahānī, but here he does have a choice and chooses not to, preferring al-Qālī. Al-Qālī provides an interesting counterpoint to al-Iṣfahānī. As the nisba of the latter indicates, he was born in Iṣfahān (or Iṣbahān, as it is often rendered), a center of Persian culture, although he was apparently of Arab stock and education. Al-Qālī, on the other hand, was born in a backwater of what is now Turkey and spent his youth in Baghdad, capital of what remains of the Abbasid empire and seat of the caliph. At age 40 he leaves Baghdad for Cordoba, the capital of Umayyad Spain, which was then at the zenith of its power and glory. He is generally understood as committed to bringing the learning of the East, including its literature, to the periphery of the Arab world in the West. Al-Qālī’s purpose would then seem to have little in common with that of al-Iṣfahānī. He does not seek to compile an anthology of songs and anecdotes for use in the court, but instead wants to gather the “greatest hits” of Arabic literature for Andalusī readers roughly 250 years after Muslims first conquered the Iberian Peninsula. The temptation to separate the two scholars – to classify al-Qālī as Western and al-Iṣfahānī as Eastern, the former as Umayyad and the latter as Abbasid – is, however, undercut by the fact that al-Iṣfahānī’s family considered itself descended directly from the last Umayyad caliph to rule in the East. Meanwhile, Al-Qālī’s patron, the Umayyad caliph of Cordoba, al-Ḥakam, having amassed a library of four hundred thousand volumes “paid a huge sum of money to have an advance copy sent him from Baghdad of the Kitāb al-Aghānī.”10 Although this anecdote may be apocryphal, intended to demonstrate al-Ḥakam’s prodigal support of learning while refuting any notion that Cordoba lagged behind its eastern rival Baghdad, it reminds us that it is the needs of their patrons that determine how al-Iṣfahānī and al-Qālī collect Jamīl’s work. It is his importance as a poet and a character to the Arabic literary tradition, both lyric and narrative, however, that explains why they gather Jamīl’s poetry. 166

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Making Love through Scholarship in Jamīl Buthayna To make this all the more complicated, al-Qālī himself offers two distinct versions of Poem 27; al-Iṣfahānī, although he does not claim that all the lines Gabrieli will centuries later gather into Poem 27 belong to one single poem, nonetheless groups them all into one section of his anthology’s entry on Jamīl and does not append any anecdotes to them, which implies that they form some sort of whole uninterrupted by narrative. It may also be the case that both al-Qālī’s two versions and al-Iṣfahānī’s fragments-turned-poem ultimately have the same source. Al-Qālī tells us that his teacher, a scholar famed for his memory, “recited to us [meaning al-Qālī and his fellow students] two transmitted versions [of this qasida that] differ at the beginning, at the end, and in the wording of a few lines.”11 Although, as Hilary Kilpatrick explains, al-Iṣfahānī does not himself list al-Anbārī as a source, three centuries later Yāqūt mentions him as one of the Kitāb sources for the Kitāb al-Aghānī.12 Such was the parlous state of Jamīl’s poetry in tenth-century Baghdād that the transmission of Poem 27, whether Jamīl ever knew these 35, 39, or 42 lines as a poem, may have depended on the memory of one man: al-Anbarī, who knew it in at least two forms. The differences between the two versions transmitted by al-Qālī are greater than the differences between the longer version in al-Qālī and the lines transmitted by al-Iṣfahānī and the other sources cited by Gabrieli. The most obvious difference is that the rhymes found at the end of first two hemistichs are reversed. The longer version, chosen by Gabrieli, begins: 1. If only the first flowering of youth could be renewed, and the time that turned and fled, O Buthayna, returned. The shorter version, disregarded by Gabrieli, begins: 1. If only the days of reciprocated affection [al-ṣafā’] would return, and the time that turned and fled, O Buthayna, were new.

What is striking about the existence of all these versions of Poem 27 is that they demonstrate its elasticity. That it stretches into an eventual 42 lines in its most recent iteration means that its history runs counter to that of Jamīl’s poetry in general, which has experienced a winnowing process that seems to have eliminated most of it from the historical record. As Jamīl’s poetry shrinks, Jamīl’s poem expands. This reminds us of the history of the 167

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures One Thousand and One Nights, whose tales increased in number with the passage of time, some of them even translated from eighteenth-century French tales with no Arabic sources that were subsequently translated into Arabic, discovered by European scholars, and translated back into French and English. We might also wonder what it tells us about the literary value of a poem whose first line can be reversed without any evident loss of meaning. Finally, regardless of how long the poem has become over the years, if it is a qaṣīda, as al-Qālī indicates, it lacks some of the constituent parts we have come to expect from the form, although in recent years a case has been made that scholars of the past century have misunderstood and distorted what has come to be considered a key ninth-century description and theorization of the qaṣīda.13 Nonetheless, at the very least there should be a concluding section of the poem in which Jamīl lauds himself, his tribe, or a patron, otherwise it is difficult to understand how the poem could fulfill the basic purpose of the genre, which is praise. Only the most willfully optimistic reader could possibly consider Poem 27 complete. Its state of incompletion might lead us to imagine that in years to come line after newly discovered line could be added, so long as each ends with the correct rhyme. And yet the poem will never be whole, because those other elements of the qaṣīda considered integral to the form  – even by those scholars who do not consider much of anything integral to the form  – are by definition excluded. This is to say that since only a relatively small fraction of the lines of even the most love-obsessed Arab poet’s qaṣīda is devoted to love and longing, and since Jamīl’s putative dīwān has been scrubbed of any lines that do not treat the topic of love, there can be no complete qaṣīdas in Jamīl’s poetry as we know it. The qaṣīda is by definition polythematic, whereas none of the poetry ascribed to Jamīl is polythematic, therefore there are no complete qaṣīdas in the (re)constructed dīwān of Jamīl. Why does it matter whether Poem 27 is a reconstructed poem or a poem manufactured by scholars anxious to reassemble orphan lines of poetry? Why does it matter that Gabrieli always chooses length over coherence? A closer look at its depiction of Buthayna reveals that it is incoherent in her portrayal and in its representation of love itself. The impossibility of the poem gives way to the impossibility of this version of Buthayna, in 168

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Making Love through Scholarship in Jamīl Buthayna stark contrast to her representation in the anecdotes, which depict instead a beloved all too possible and complicit before – and even after – she is married off by her family. Indeed, the anecdotes present a Buthayna willing to go to great, conniving lengths to slip past the surveillance of her father, brothers, and even husband in order to meet Jamīl. In one of the anecdotes she participates in a particularly complex scheme by which she manages to convey a message to Jamīl about a rendezvous through his friend, fellow poet, and go-between Kuthayyir, despite the presence of her father. If the Buthayna of the anecdotes in the Kitāb al-Aghānī is an invention, her creator imagined a willful, clever, headstrong young woman – in fact, a liar and a trickstress – for whom there is no evidence in the poetry. The Buthayna of the anecdotes is far more vividly portrayed than the Buthayna of the poetry and yet is also far more constant in her feelings for Jamīl, perhaps because the poetry never strays from the consciousness of Jamīl, while the anecdotes are willing to grant some autonomy for Buthayna as a character. The anecdotes are somewhat polyphonic, allowing the reader to at least imagine other perspectives on Buthayna and her story, while the poems are unrelenting in their presentation of Jamīl’s monocular vision of her. The Buthayna of the poetry is only what Jamīl imagines her to be based on the memories he wears out with overuse. In Poem 27 Jamīl acknowledges shared feelings in the opening lines and the suggestion in line 4 that only the fear of scandal prevents her from joining him, but by lines 7 and 8 she appears wholly indifferent to him. He implies that she does not appreciate him or his love in line 10 and that she lacks desire for him in line 13. In lines 27–9, on the other hand, we learn that the impediment to their meeting is not her indifference or cruelty, but a man, who is not identified – perhaps her husband, brother, or father (the notes we find in the [re]constructed dīwāns say he is her husband). In line 37 he imagines that she is cruelly toying with him. In the poem sometimes he speaks of her, at times he addresses her, or he cites her words, while at other times he merely imagines her thoughts. The poem is incapable of providing a stable perspective on Buthayna. We might choose to understand this as a psychologically accurate depiction of the state of mind of a man deranged by thwarted love. I would suggest instead that the derangement is textual rather than psychological. In other words, Jamīl’s depiction of Buthayna as capricious and her motives as unfathomable represents 169

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures neither Buthayna’s changeable character nor Jamīl’s crazed despair. Instead, it is the effect of forcing together individual lines that originally – and, as I  have shown in my description of how Jamīl’s dīwān has been (re)constructed, evoking the original of Jamīl’s poetry is even more problematic than is usually the case when speaking of Arabic poetry composed fourteen centuries ago – came from different poems. Furthermore, since Jamīl’s poetry has been reduced over the centuries to one theme, we cannot rule out the possibility that Jamīl is not Jamīl, but instead “Jamīl,” a category of poetry into which all like-minded lines, including those by his imitators, have been tossed by scholars eager to track down his lost verse. If the poem is a composite, then its Buthayna is also a composite, assembled from lines of poetry about women of radically different temperaments, who otherwise need share only an inability to be reached and possessed. The sort of love Jamīl expresses for Buthayna in Poem 27 cannot be considered consistent either. He employs seven different words to represent his feelings for her, as I have indicated in the parenthetical transliterated terms in the translation: ḥubb, ṣafā’, wudd, urīdu, munā, hawā, and wajd. A  key term used for just the sort of love that Jamīl seems to feel for Buthayna, ‘ishq, however, is missing from the poem. Before analyzing the significance of its absence from the poem – and its near absence from the entire dīwān of Jamīl, it may be helpful to examine the other terms first. Ḥubb seems to be the most general and all-encompassing term for love. Ṣafā’, which does not appear in Gabrieli’s version of Poem 27, but does appear in the alternative version found in al-Qālī, refers to reciprocated feelings of friendship. Wudd means “affection.” In addition to these relatively anodyne terms, Poem 27 also includes three indicating physical desire. Urīdu means “I want,” while munā means “desire.” Hawā refers to desire, and is related to a group of verbs whose infinitive means “to fall,” like the motion of a setting star or planet, which makes translating it as “falling in love” difficult to resist. Finally, wajd occurs twice in the poem, which is well served by the English word “passion,” since it implies the suffering caused by desire. In this way it is akin to the passion of Christ or the supposed “patience” (from the Latin patī, meaning “to suffer”) of Job, although any careful reader knows that Job expresses little patience. Either the poem intends to represent the wild swings of Jamīl’s emotions as he experiences passion, wants her friendship, wants her affection, and, 170

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Making Love through Scholarship in Jamīl Buthayna finally, just wants her, before returning to ḥubb, or it is a psychologically profound representation of a man who cannot admit the true nature of his feelings for his beloved. Or perhaps the poem represents the poet’s desire to dissemble about the true nature of his feelings, but his suffering makes its concealment impossible. Or perhaps the various terms show up in the poem when they do for prosodical reasons. Or, as I  have already suggested, the poem simply is not a poem, with the result that the various manifestations of Jamīl’s feelings are so many shards of smashed poems, whether composed by Jamīl or his imitators, awkwardly assembled to form a never-before-was poem. The overarching Arabic literary tradition, further muddled by the assimilation of ‘Udhrī poetry to the ideology of courtly love in medieval Western Europe, has had similar difficulty coming to terms with the nature of Jamīl’s feelings for Buthayna – and the nature of her feelings in return or whether she returns them at all. As Martin Jagonak points out, “The notion that ‘Udhrī poets speak of platonic love is not borne out in Jamīl’s poetry.”14 Indeed, platonic love as commonly understood (in which sexual relations are beyond bounds) is not even the sort of love Plato talks about, as any astute examination of the Symposium will attest. Curiously, despite the wide range of terms describing Jamīl’s feelings for Buthayna in Poem 27, not once does he utter the word ‘ishq, the Arabic word for the most dangerous, deranging sort of passion, which, considering Jamīl’s reputation as the most lovelorn of all lover-poets, would seem the most appropriate term of all. There are five instances of ‘ishq or one of its derivatives in the entire dīwān of Jamīl, but a closer look reveals that two come from sources dating from the twelfth century, one from the fourteenth century, and one from the sixteenth century. This means that ‘ishq does not appear in either al-Qālī or the Kitāb al-Aghānī, which are the two primary sources for Gabrieli’s Poem 27. In other words, according to the documentary evidence examined by Gabrieli, ‘ishq does not surface until rather late in the collection of Jamīl’s poetry, and has been all but banished from the earliest collection of texts ascribed to Jamīl, with one telling exception. We find ‘āshiq, meaning one who loves in this dangerous and deranging way, in the first of two lines in Gabrieli’s poem number 86, which the note tells us he has taken from al-‘Askarī’s tenth-century Kitāb al-Ṣināʿatayn, al-Kitāba 171

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures wa al-Shi‘r (Book of the two arts of writing and poetry), a handbook on rhetoric: What could the slanderers spread about except to say that I lust after you [‘āshiq]?

The only line of poetry including a form of ‘ashaqa that is ascribed to Jamīl by a source antedating the two most important sources for Gabrieli’s Poem 27 implies that Jamīl rejects the label of lover deranged by thwarted lust. Although the emotional terminology employed by Jamīl in Poem 27 runs the gamut from affection to physical desire, it stops short of the very worst sort of destructive desire and, in fact, insists that referring to his feelings for Buthayna as such is nothing other than slander. How is Jamīl’s rejection of ‘ishq as linguistically nominal as regards his love for Buthayna to be understood? If the constant shifts in perspective and the leap from one sort of love to another represent a psychologically accurate portrayal of a lover in torment, then he is simply in denial of his passion-induced madness. I would again argue, however, that the apparent derangement of the lover in the poem is a result of the imposition of form on unrelated lines of poetry that not only do not belong in the same poem, but may not belong to the same poet. Although ‘ishq, this deranging sort of lust, is not otherwise found in poetry ascribed to Jamīl before the tenth century, the word is, however, found in one of the anecdotes about Jamīl and Buthayna collected in the tenth-century Kitāb al-Aghānī. The second anecdote of the biographical section on Jamīl describes the moment when Jamīl first fell in love. He joins a celebration of another branch of his tribe: Jamīl went out on a feast, a day for which the women had adorned themselves, so that some of them showed themselves not only to the women but also to the men. Jamīl presented himself to Buthayna and her sister Umm al-Jusayr [who were] among the women of the Banī al-Aḥabb, closely related to daughters of his father’s brother ‘Ubayd Allāh b. Quṭba. He saw that among the women was one who held his gaze, amazing him. He fell madly in love [‘ashaqa] with Buthayna and as night fell sat with the women, among whom were young men of the Banī al-Aḥabb. He realized that Buthayna’s tribe had

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Making Love through Scholarship in Jamīl Buthayna recognized in his gaze his love [ḥubb] for Buthayna and were angry at him.15

The anecdote makes it clear that Jamīl falls prey to precisely the sort of dangerous and deranging passion that he refuses to acknowledge. So powerful is this refusal that although the anecdote represents the sudden onset of his feelings with the verb ‘ashaqa, when the anecdote retreats into a perspective filtered through Jamīl’s consciousness, it chooses the more general (and less threatening) noun ḥubb to describe those feelings. In other words, the denial is twofold. Jamīl’s poetry is free of any variant of ‘ishq, except the one instance noted above, in which it is ascribed to the mistaken and malign accusations of others. Similarly, when the anecdote relates Jamīl’s falling in love from the perspective of others, it is described as ‘ishq, but when the narrative returns to Jamīl’s perspective it is mere ḥubb. However, this Jamīl is not our poet, but instead a character based on a historical figure whose story has come to supersede his poetry. We can only assume that most of Jamīl’s poetry is lost; perhaps even most of what is ascribed to him was, in reality, written by someone following his death. Like Orpheus, who for the Greeks was the greatest singer ever known, Jamīl today (and for many centuries) is known not for his work but for his story. Unlike Orpheus, however, at least some of Jamīl’s poetry has been transmitted over the centuries, if we can assume that at least some of the poetry assigned to him was indeed composed by him. The Orientalist (re)construction of Jamīl’s dīwān has done the poet a great disservice. Gabrieli and his successors saw their task as stripping the narrative strata away in order to reveal a poetry simultaneously preserved and obscured by the anecdotes. Although there are striking moments in the poetry, its mutilated state means that it can never be more than a compelling image here or a pleasant turn of phrase there. Because of the anecdotes’ biographical pretensions, the narrative has a coherence that the poetry will never regain. What exactly the relationship was between anecdote and verse is probably lost forever. Some of the references in the poetry are, however, so obscure that the anecdotes attached to them are almost certainly an attempt to dissipate the obscurity with narratives that explain the poem’s mysteries with purportedly biographical context, much as the hadīth are brief narratives that often attach themselves to puzzling 173

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures passages in the Qur’an. It may be the case then that the story of Jamīl and Buthayna was constructed piecemeal by exegetes (whether or not they saw themselves as such) who managed to preserve the most obscure parts of the poem, creating in turn a story that attracted lines of poetry that reinforced the narrative. Perhaps it is time to once again bring the narrative and poetry back together despite their contradictory representations of the beloved, since by the tenth century the lines of verse were intended to punctuate the anecdotes. Such a reunion will not eliminate the contradictions between the complicitly amorous Buthayna of the anecdotes and the inscrutable and therefore unapproachable Buthayna of the scattered lines of poetry. It would however preserve enough ambiguity that she could not be labeled as either merely the wanton of the prose or the capricious temptress of the cobbled-together poems.

Notes 1. The ṣa‘ālīk or “brigand” poets of the sixth and seventh centuries are a notable exception. Their exclusion from all social interaction, including sex, defined them. 2. A. J. Arberry, The Seven Odes: The First Chapter in Arabic Literature (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1957), 62. 3. Francesco Gabrieli, “Djamīl,” in Encylopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, ed. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W. P. Heinrichs (Leiden: Brill, 1960–2005); Régis Blachère. Histoire de la littérature arabe des origines à la fin du XVe siècle de J.-C. (Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1952–66), 3:654. 4. Blachère, Histoire de la littérature arabe, 3:654. 5. As Latham points out, Gabrieli’s dīvān of Jamīl was preceded by three years by that of Bashīr Yamūt, published in Beirut. Latham, “The Interpretation of Some Verses by Jamīl,” Journal of Semitic Studies 15 (1970): 219. 6. P. Masnou, review of Dīwān Ǧamīl al-šā‘ir al-‘udri, by Ḥusayn Naṣṣār, Arabica 9 (1962): 88. 7. I am grateful to the poet Jaime Robles for her generous suggestions and challenging questions as I prepared this translation. 8. Wen-Chin Ouyang offers translations of this work’s subtitles, which vary from one citation to the next:  “on the merits of poetry and its etiquette (fī mahāsin al-shi‘r wa ādābihi) … on the poetic craft (fī ṣanʿat al-shi‘r) on knowing the craft of poetry, picking out its errors and its defects (fi ma‘rifat ṣināʿat al-shi‘r).” Ouyang, Literary Criticism in Medieval Arabic-Islamic Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 189.

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Making Love through Scholarship in Jamīl Buthayna 9. Hilary Kilpatrick, Making the Great Book of Songs: Compilation and the Author’s Craft in Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣbahāni’s “Kitāb al-Aghānī” (London: Routledge, 2003), 55. 10. John A. Haywood, Arabic Lexicography: Its History and Its Place in the General History of Lexicography (Utrecht: Brill, 1965), 58. 11. C. Brockelman, “Ibn al-Anbārī,” in Bearman et  al., Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition; Abū ‘Alī Ismā‘īl b.  al-Qāsim al-Qālī, Kitāb al-Amālī (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣriyya, 1926), 1:272 and 2:299. 12. Kilpatrick, Making the Great Book of Songs, 16. 13. James Montgomery has been in the vanguard of the retheorization of the qaṣīda. He recontextualizes Ibn Qutayba’s discussion of the qaṣīda and dismantles the prevailing (mis)understanding of its intentions and significance. See Montgomery, “Of Models and Amanuenses: The Remarks on the Qaṣīda in Ibn Qutayba’s Kitāb al-Shi‘r wa-l-Shu‘arā’,” in Islamic Reflections, Arabic Musings:  Studies in Honour of Alan Jones, ed. R.  Hoyland and P.  Kennedy (Oxford: Gibb Memorial Trust, 2004), 1–47. 14. Martin Jagonak, Das Bild der Liebe im Werk des Dichters Ǧamīl ibn Maʿmar:  Eine Studie zur ‘udritischen Lyrik in der arabischen Literatur des späten 7 Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2008), 11. 15. Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī, Kitāb al-Aghānī (Beirut: Dār Iḥyā’ al-Turāth al-ʿArabī, 1994), 4:293.

Bibliography Arberry, A. J. The Seven Odes: The First Chapter in Arabic Literature. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1957. Blachère, Régis. Histoire de la littérature arabe des origines à la fin du XVe siècle de J.-C. 3 vols. Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1952–66. Brockelman, C. “Ibn al-Anbārī.” In Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, edited by P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W. P. Heinrichs. Leiden: Brill, 1960–2005. Gabrieli, Francesco “Ǧamīl al-ʿUdhrī:  Studio critico e raccolta dei frammenti.” Rivista degli studi orientali 17 (1937): 40–71, 132–72. ——— “Contributi alla interpretazione di Ǧamīl.” Rivista degli studi orientali 18 (1939): 173–98. ——— “Djamīl.” In Encylopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, edited by P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W. P. Heinrichs. Leiden: Brill, 1960–2005. Haywood, John A. Arabic Lexicography:  Its History and Its Place in the General History of Lexicography. Utrecht: Brill, 1965. al-Iṣfahānī, Abū al-Faraj. Kitāb al-Aghānī. Beirut: Dār Iḥyā’ al-Turāth al-ʿArabī, 1994.

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures Jagonak, Martin. Das Bild der Liebe im Werk des Dichters Ǧamīl ibn Maʿmar: Eine Studie zur ‘udritischen Lyrik in der arabischen Literatur des späten 7 Jahrhunderts. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2008. Kilpatrick, Hilary. Making the Great Book of Songs: Compilation and the Author’s Craft in Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣbahāni’s “Kitāb al-Aghānī.” London: Routledge, 2003. Latham, J. D. “The Interpretation of Some Verses by Jamīl.” Journal of Semitic Studies 15 (1970): 219–25. Masnou, P. Review of Dīwān Ǧamīl al-šāʿir al-ʿudri, by Ḥusayn Naṣṣār. Arabica 9 (1962): 88. Montgomery, James E. “Of Models and Amanuenses: The Remarks on the Qaṣīda in Ibn Qutayba’s Kitāb al-Shiʿr wa-l-Shuʿarā.” In Islamic Reflections, Arabic Musings: Studies in Honour of Alan Jones, edited by R. Hoyland and P. Kennedy, 1–47. Oxford: Gibb Memorial Trust, 2004. Ouyang, Wen-Chin. Literary Criticism in Medieval Arabic-Islamic Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997. al-Qālī, Abū ‘Alī Ismāʿīl b. al-Qāsim. Kitāb al-Amālī. Cairo: Maṭbaʿat Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣriyya, 1926.

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8 Jahān Malik Khātū n: Gender, Canon, and Persona in the Poems of a Premodern Persian Princess Domenico Ingenito

So many lovers you have in the world Why don’t you include the name of the Lady of the World? (Jahān Malik Khātūn) The poet is a faker. He Fakes it so completely, He even fakes that he’s suffering: The pain he’s really feeling! (Fernando Pessoa)

The concept of the beloved in premodern Persian lyric poetry (ghazal) is a fascinating literary topic whose study enables us to explore the complex network of relationships between authors, texts, readers, and the world as a tangible reality as well as a symbolic representation.1 The nature of the beloved in this tradition is often abstract (suspended as it is between the political, the erotic, and the metaphysical) and ambiguous:  a critical approach to its ambivalences can offer a perspective able to go far beyond the scope of Persian studies and even contribute to the further development of literary theory. In this chapter, by taking advantage of the extraordinary 177

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures poetic output of a fourteenth-century Persian princess, Jahān Malik Khātūn, I  will focus on the unresolved nature of the beloved in Persian love poetry as a means to explore Jahān’s creation of a fluid literary persona interacting at multiple levels with the classical poetic canon, gender, and historical reality. Jahān Malik Khātūn, “The Lady of the World” (d. after 1382), can be considered the most important female poet of the premodern Islamicate world. Her large divan – which comprises 1,431 love lyrics (ghazals) – is still scarcely studied and yet to be translated into English.2 As a daughter of the Injuid ruler Mas‘ūdshāh (d. 743/1343), she flourished in Shiraz at the court of her uncle Abū Isḥāq (d. 758/1357) and was engaged in constant poetic exchanges with her contemporaries, namely Ḥāfiẓ (d. 792/1390) and ‘Ubayd Zākānī (d. c. 770/1370). She survived the downfall of her family’s sovereignty and dedicated the literary output of her maturity to the Muzaffarid Shāh Shujā‘, and to the Jalayrid Aḥmad, who ascended to the throne in 1382. If the suggested interpretation of a specific ghazal holds true, she might have been able to witness the ascension of Timur’s son Mīrānshāh, who was appointed governor of Azerbaijan in 1393.3 One of the manuscripts preserving the collected poems of Jahān Malik Khātūn also contains an introduction composed by the poet herself.4 This text  – whose full English translation is available in the Appendix III of this contribution – is perhaps one of the most revealing autobiographical pieces of literature ever written by a premodern Persian author. It offers us a glimpse into the process of transfiguration of life experiences into lyric poetry by addressing, on the one hand, the relationship between gender and literary canon and, on the other, the correlation between sacred and profane love. Although Jahān is a woman, the romantic affection staged in her ghazals is essentially homoerotic: just as in the tradition set by her male fellow-poets, she presents her own poetic persona in the guise of a man who is in love with a young beloved. The discrepancy between the femininity of her biological gender and the masculinity of her poetic voice (i.e., the “poetic persona”, or “lyrical I”) requires us to establish new paradigms to better understand not only the nature of the beloved in the Persian lyric tradition, but also the connection between the biography of the poets and the real or imaginary addressees of their ghazals. 178

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Jahān Malik Khātūn In this study, the line between the imaginary and the real identity of the beloved will heed the dualistic nature of the lyric “you” as a sign that mediates between the historical and the fictitious aspects of the ghazal. As far as the nature of the beloved in Persian poetry is concerned, Jahān’s introduction to her divan offers us some specific hints regarding the relationship between the mundane and the metaphysical dimensions of love, which serve as an essential prelude to the subject. For this reason, an in-depth analysis of her statements about the majāzī (“metaphorical” or mundane) and the ḥaqīqī (“true” or divine) aspects of love-imagery is needed. Once the mechanisms regulating this ambivalences are uncovered, it will be necessary to question the identity of the poetic persona, the firstperson voice in a poem (the lover, the poet, or perhaps a lover-poet), and its correlation with the real, historical author. I  will suggest that, when dealing with the structural complexity of the premodern ghazal, the category of the self needs to be divided into three subcategories: the poetic persona (or lyrical “I”), the historical author of the text, and the “fictitious author,” which mediates between the first two. By analyzing the strategies used by Jahān to depict the poetic “I” of her poems, we shall see how the construction of a masculine – sometimes even misogynistic – voice for the poetic self is a necessary stratagem in order to fulfill the expectations of the poetic canon set by her male predecessors.

Who and Where Is the Beloved? Jahān’s depiction of the beloved does not differ greatly from the standard representation displayed by her contemporaries’:  a tall, white-skinned, dark-featured, ruthless, brave, quarrelsome, and flirtatious young boy of Turkic descent, often intoxicated by wine or by his own beauty. In terms of style and imagery, as far as the depiction of the amorous relationship is concerned, her ghazals are almost completely devoid of any explicitly mystical elements. Among her contemporaries, her poems are much closer to those of ‘Ubayd Zākānī (the greatest satirist of premodern Iran) than to Ḥāfiẓ’s songs. The discrepancy between the latter’s style and Jahān’s is striking, especially in those texts in which the princess imitates her renowned fellow poet. If, for instance, we compare the following two poems crafted according to the same formal pattern, the first by Ḥāfiẓ and the second by 179

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures Jahān, we will soon recognize how profoundly different their poetic styles can be: I. Ḥāfiẓ5 Give me the news of our embrace, and from my soul I will arise! I am bird of paradise, from this worldly snare I will arise. I swear to your affection: should you elect me to be your slave From the dominion of time and space upon me, I will arise. O Lord, from your cloud of guidance pour rain onto my presence Before like dust blown away and lost I will arise. Sit down by my grave with minstrels, songs, and wine: Seduced by your smell, up from my sepulcher dancing I  will arise. Rise and display to me your body, O elegant idol of mine So that dancing and moving my hands from this world I will arise. I’m old, I know, yet hold me tight in your embrace for just one night: From our bed, as morning breaks, young I will arise. When my death approaches grant me respite to see your face One breath I plead: as Ḥāfiẓ then from this world and life I will arise.6 II. Jahān Before your face, my heart from my soul will arise But the soul is nothing: from both worlds my heart will arise. Should you step on the soil where the inflamed lovers were buried, Shouting and dancing, from their graves they will arise. A shirt is the only veil now between you and me Hold me tight; this veil too, at last, will arise.

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Jahān Malik Khātūn For how long my tormented destiny will remain asleep? It is now time for it to wake up: it will arise! So much the violence of your departure afflicts the world, That I fear turbulent seditions from these times will arise. Stuck in the mud would remain the feet of the juniper If dancing in the garden like a cypress your body will arise. No farewell to your embrace, until the last breath of my body: I will keep you mine even if suddenly my hopes for life will arise. Upheaval stirs up, when that red rose sits down The cypress tree sits down when that walking cypress will arise. If only one whisper of the griefs of the Lady of the World would come out: O the cries that from the old and the youth will arise! (505)

These two ghazals are similar with respect to their rhyme (ān), meter (ramal) and refrain (bar khīzad), “he/she/it arises, will arise,” for Jahān and for Ḥāfiẓ bar khīzam, “I arise, will arise”). As for form and imagery, the two poems are bound by a tight intertextual relationship (istiqbāl/javāb).7 Although it would be difficult to ascertain whether Jahān’s ghazal is a reply to Ḥāfiẓ or vice versa, these two ghazals are close enough to show how two contemporary poets can make different uses of the same linguistic material. Ḥāfiẓ creates a connection between sensuality and the realm of the afterlife. The theme of his ghazal is the metaphysical projection of love, which turns mundane sensuality into an instrument capable of overcoming the boundaries of decay and death. Jahān’s ghazal alludes to images of death, and depicts the physical description of the beloved as a source of sedition and upheaval in this life. By the token of the beloved’s song, she is not privy to metaphysical speculations: she is rather concerned with the here and now of the amorous relationship and the social aspects and repercussions of her sorrow. Although Jahān often deals with the social dimensions of lovesickness, in the introduction to her divan she describes a transition from a life

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures of solitude and seclusion to a sort of bovarism ante litteram in which her inner bewilderment is transfigured into poetic lyricism: As a consequence of these premises, this woman, Jahān, daughter of King Mas‘ūd, having witnessed the tyranny of time, sought to embrace salvation through the practice of contentment and turned her heart towards the direction of inner tranquility. Thus this line became my refrain:       C  hoose unity and don’t look for a companion among   your friends       Stay alone: don’t seek intimacy among your people! For any single shape that appeared in front of my eyes, thousands of thoughts would emerge to the surface of my mind. Despite all the afflictions caused by the painful cycle of days and nights, I occasionally composed – as a form of entertainment for my spirit – a few fragments which were as desperate as the condition of lovers, as troubled as the heart of ardent whisperers, as broken and scattered as the heart of the Lords of Gazes, and futile, blindly futile, as the unfulfilled wishes of the Lords of Desire (3).

Is Princess Jahān declaring the fictitious nature of the love affairs described by her poems only to avoid moral criticism by her contemporaries? She seems to vaguely refer to an actual source of inspiration, but she also hastens to underline that her poetic experience derives from contentment and solitude. What kind of “reality” were her poems supposed to be mirroring? In a study dealing with the realism of premodern Italian lyric texts, Claudio Giunta observes that the very first documented specimen of lyric poetry written in Italian – “Madonna dir vo voglio” by Giacomo da Lentini – as an imitation of the provençal poet Fulk of Toulouse’s sonnet, is an example of sheer insincerity, in which the beloved, “My lady,” is more a linguistic function rather than a real individual, a literary persona, rather than a historical individual.8 Giunta argues that the formalistic and intrinsic insincerity of the Sicilian school of early Italian poetry soon developed, by the time of Dante, into a kind of new poetry, Lo Stil Novo (the New Style), which 182

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Jahān Malik Khātūn perceptibly shifted towards the depiction of real amorous experiences. The problem is not to determine whether the author is sincere, but to consider to what extent the intrinsic fictionality of a lyric text can adhere to external reality. Lyric poetry can be considered a literary mechanism that aims at reproducing the self ’s thirst for an object of desire within the virtual space of artistic fictionality. The aesthetic success of such a mimetic mechanism – almost entirely focused on the expression of one’s innermost feelings  – relies on the display of virtual sincerity. I say virtual sincerity because the main structural interaction informing a love poem is built upon a relationship between an abstract “I” (the lover) and a “you” (the beloved, also addressed in the third person) and withal delivered by a lover that is sincere and independent of the author’s real intentions, beliefs, and feelings. The reader is urged to believe (as a suspension of disbelief) in the sincerity of the emotional display, whereas the literary critic (as well as the learned reader) endeavors to unmask the song’s secret and shed light on the multifaceted mechanisms of fictionality. It is true that in the ghazal tradition “poems are, as a rule, written about other poems and not about direct unmediated experience,” but the symbolic ambivalence of lyric poetry is a function of the juxtaposition of convention, confession, and social context.9 Devoid as it is of any contextual clues, this line from Jahān’s amorous ghazal 34 is a good example of such ambivalence: III.  Ashamed will be of reigning over Iran      Whoever sought refuge in the alley of your consolation.

Is the poet directing an innuendo at a political figure of her time, or is she talking to a real beloved by employing imagery drawn from the category of kingship and vassalry allegiance? Or is she talking to no one at all, and merely playing with the language of courtly poetry? How do we need to deal with the “you” of texts like this? It is true that the “you” of a lyric poem is, first and foremost, confined within the realm of poetic language. But if we consider poetic texts as linguistic artifacts participating in social interactions, that same fictitious “you” can become a symbolic reference to the person to whom the poem is dedicated or addressed or by whom it has been requested. 183

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures As suggested before, the beloved “you” depicted by Jahān is very similar to the object of desire described by her contemporaries: the stereotypical “I” of a ghazal is an (often-feminized) adult male, whereas the “you” is a young male beloved. Therefore, the relationship between the lover and the beloved at the heart of the ghazal is expressly and essentially homoerotic. As an idealized erotic representation, it does not necessarily reflect the social ties that bind together the poet and the recipient of the distichs.10 It is well known that the roots of the ghazal are intimately bound to the qaṣīda. A genetic relationship that makes the ghazal prone to host ideals of love that are based on courtly models of praise and political devotion.11 Furthermore, the mystical auditions commonly referred to as the samā‘ sessions would often include sessions of ghazal recitation, as a means to “visualize” the beauty of God through the depiction of the fictive human beloved described by the poems. This habit, which was quite widespread among central Asian and Khorasanian Sufi circles since the end of the tenth century, attests to the fact that the historical and symbolical addressees of these poems could go far beyond the narrow perimeter delimited by the ritualized lover-beloved amorous narrative.12

The Quest for Extratextual Reality The fictitious “you” of a poem, that is, the formalized presence of the beloved, can potentially act as a sign pointing to a specific person within the context of a real social interaction. In fact, in some cases the formulaic predictability (in terms of imagery and tropes) of the ghazal can be interrupted by the abrupt mention of names, titles, epithets, or toponyms that allude to an external reality and shed light on the historical context of the poet.13 I  have elsewhere suggested that in most of the ghazals in which Ḥāfiẓ mentions Shiraz, he also offers a either direct or indirect reference to a king or a prince. In all these instances the poet usually praises his own literary talent, as if such statements connected to both kingship and his abode were markers of his actual poetic performances at court.14 For example, in Jahān’s divan, two of the most relevant deviations from the typically abstracted geography of the setting of the canonical ghazal feature the expression “Baghdādī pisar” (Baghdadi boy) as its refrain (radīf): 184

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Jahān Malik Khātūn IV.  A  las, for the Baghdadi boy has sacked the capital of my  soul     The passion for the Baghdadi boy has cast turmoil in the world [shūrī dar Jahān] (279–80).

The similes used by Jahān to describe this “Baghdadi boy” are in line with the imagery often employed to describe the physical beauty of the beloved: his moon-like face is compared to the jasmine, he is as slender as the tall cypress-tree, and his cheeks and down are nicely scented. The geographical specification of the beloved depicted above deviates from the norm and opens a window into the extrinsic reality of the poem. The expression “Baghdādī pisar,” which adds an element of specificity to the stereotypical representation of the beloved (not just a generic boy, but “the Baghdadi boy”), denotes the presence of a tangible character that is not entirely fictional and whose name has been withheld. We should probably refrain from imagining the “Baghdādī pisar” as a young boy from Baghdad with whom Jahān might have been literally – not just literarily – in love: such an allusion would have been deemed immorally sensual and audacious. For this reason, Dominic Brookshaw’s suggestion that the boy from Baghdad might well be a reference to Shaykh Uvays’s son Aḥmad Jalāyir should be taken seriously into account.15 Jahān’s praise for the young Aḥmad in a panegyric suggests that the text was composed in the aftermath of the prince’s coronation and the subsequent conquest of Baghdad; hence “Baghdādī Pisar”: V.  M  ay your glory shine, and please in this world [dar īn  Jahān]     Establish my glory, for nobody recognizes my worth (7).

In the second hemistich of this panegyric, she haughtily urges the prince to make up for the esteem she has been denied by her contemporaries. Such a familial mannerism could possibly justify the use of the expression “Baghdadi boy” to refer to the prince. Moreover, in the phrase “capital of my soul” the allusion to dār al-mulk, the capital of the state, sets the stage, from the very first line, for a clear reference to the geographical space of power.

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Poetry as a Fictitious Transfiguration The ultimate proof of Jahān’s attempt to adhere strictly to the classical canon comes from the evidence that one-fifth of her divan is an imitation of one-third of the Sa‘dī’s ghazals and while she quotes him verbatim in many of her ghazals, at least on one occasion she also mentions his name as a way to pay homage to his poetry: VI.  I n the fashion of quotation [taḍmīn] I now report this line     From the poetry of Saʿdī, towards which my taste is   inclined (91).

Sa‘dī was the first author who managed to intertwine the physical and the metaphysical poles of love into a style whose limpidity would be imitated for several centuries after his death, and whose legacy largely contributed to the emergence of the multi-dimensional style of Ḥāfiẓ.16 Although Sa‘dī’s ghazals are often crafted around sets of earthly images that do not embrace the overtly mystical technicalities displayed by poets like ‘Irāqī, Rūmī, or ‘Aṭṭār, his depiction of love represents an ideal in which physical passion is the space deputed to the meditation on divine love, as evident in the following verse: VII.     

 hen the eyes of short-sighted ones fall upon the W   beautiful page of your face They look at your down [khaṭṭ], whilst the Gnostics see the pen of God’s creative grace.17

Most of Jahān’s poetic endeavors seem to be directed at imitating Sa‘dī’s style. However, despite her literary devotion towards Sa‘dī, her poetry offers no elements of mysticism, and her imagery possesses the linear simplicity of the ghazals of twelfth-century poets such as Anvarī or Amīr Mu‘izzī. A very few lines in her divan explicitly reflect the conflation of mystical love and mundane passion as it was developed by Sa‘dī: VIII.  So dear to the heart is your face, it’s like a mirror       Reflecting the divine favor and the Divine favor and the   blissful signs (37).

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Jahān Malik Khātūn IX.    Look at the divinely created features of the beloved:       Th  ere is no gaze that does not stare at his sun-like   face (125).

Considering the pervasiveness of mystical imagery during the fourteenth century, Jahān’s purely mundane treatment of love affairs – which approaches a stereotypical phenomenology of love in its most immaculate form – appears anachronistic, especially when compared to her contemporary – or quasi-contemporary – poets like Kvhājū of Kerman, Ḥāfiẓ, ‘Imād Faqīh, and Kamāl Khujandī, whose poems are imbued with technical expressions (although often keeping a semantic ambivalence) drawn from the realm of mysticism. Nonetheless, in two lengthy paragraphs appearing in the introduction to her divan Jahān outlines very precisely the scope of her poetic research as a result of spiritual meditations: By composing such lines I  was giving shape to transcendental reality by the means of mundane metaphors and thus I appeased the burning sorrow of the days with the refreshing water of the [poetic] description of my inner condition. And all this, in spite of some people who, absolutely deprived of any sacred flame or elevated aspiration, would dwell on the surface of those shapes and consider despicable the mundane reflection of those marvels. In fact, because of the loose strength of their gaze, they couldn’t draw aside the veil from the object of their contemplation:           Not all gazes can dare to stare at the sun           Nor all drops know how to unify with the sea. But to all the scholars who are able to penetrate truth and ponder its intricacies it is clear that the ultimate purpose of speech is not its external meaning but, rather, the comprehension of mysteries. The poetic expression of metaphors is the main vehicle to grasp and describe the ultimate truths of the spirit. And it is for this reason that they state that metaphors are a bridge toward transcendental reality [al-majāz qanṭarat al-ḥaqīqa] (3).

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures These words echo the treatises on love known to her time, especially Aḥmad Ghazālī’s Savāniḥ, and the sixth chapter of  ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt’s Tamhīdāt, which would offer Persian poets the groundwork for elaborating an original theoretical system that represented the experience of human love as a tangible transition to a full understanding of the love for God.18 We must bear in mind that the expression “al-majāz qanṭarat al-ḥaqīqa” is a sentence usually employed by Arabo-Persian rhetoricians in order to describe metaphorical speech as a transition from figurative expressions to the objects they designate: as if metaphors would allow us to penetrate the meaning of an object much better than non-figurative speech.19 To my knowledge, Jahān is the first poet who explicitly applies the opposition between majāz and ḥaqīqat (“metaphorical” or physical love versus “real” or spiritual love) to the relationship between the physical and the invisible world.20 The Qur’anic passage often cited as an invitation to explore the physical world as a means to understand the presence of God is the first part of 41:53: ّ ‫اق َوفِي أَنفُ ِس ِه ْم َحتّ ٰى يَتَبَيّنَ لَهُ ْم أَنّهُ ْال َح‬ ‫ق‬ ِ َ‫َسنُ ِري ِه ْم آيَاتِنَا فِي ْالف‬ We shall show them Our signs in the horizons and in themselves, till it is clear to them that it is the truth.

The relationship between the micro- and the macrocosmos (as an analogue of the connection between the visible world and the unseen) is defined clearly in a passage of al-Ghazālī’s Jawāhir al-Qur’ān: Every expression contains symbols [rumūz] and allusions [ishārāt] that can be grasped by whoever perceives the symmetry [muwāzina] and the reciprocity [munāsiba] existing between the material world [‘ālam al-mulk] – or the world of physical manifestations [‘alām al-shuhāda] – and the invisible, heavenly world [‘ālam al-ghayb wa al-malakūt]:  even in the absence of structural or formal correspondence, all elements of the material and tangible world are essentially a simulacrum [mithāl] of the spiritual reality belonging to the heavenly world. The physical simulacrum [al-mithāl al-jismānī] of the material world is embedded into the spiritual essence [al-maʿnī al-rawḥānī] of this world. It is for this reason that the physical world is one station among the stations on the path towards God. In fact, just as it is impossible to reach the

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Jahān Malik Khātūn fruit without going through its skin first, similarly, it is impossible to ascend towards the world of the souls [‘ālam al-arwāḥ] without crossing first the representation of the world of physical bodies.21

Although al-Ghazālī does not employ the expressions majāz and ḥaqīqat, the parallel he traces between the visible and the invisible world, by presenting the shapes of these worlds as signs of the metaphysical layer of reality, can be regarded as a perfect framework for the poetic development of a love discourse based on the allegorical intersection of worldly and mystical experiences. By representing this world as a necessary bridge towards the understanding of God’s truth, al-Ghazālī redeems the material aspects of worldly life and turns the sensorial experience of the world into an active tool for metaphysical exploration: And the key to accessing the knowledge of divine beauty is the knowledge of the wonders of God’s creation. And the key to penetrating God’s creation is first and foremost human beings’ five senses, whose existence belongs to this physical body made from water and clay. It is for this reason that human beings fell in the world of water and clay in order to enjoy this gift [the five senses] and to achieve the knowledge of God through the knowledge of the self and the knowledge of all the horizons that can be grasped by the senses. As long as these senses are with you and will investigate for you, you will be considered as someone who is of this world.22

Jahān Malik Khātūn – probably for the first time in the history of Persian poetry – creates a steady analogy between the metaphysical conception of the material and spiritual aspects of reality and the rhetorical association between metaphors and worldly objects. It can be argued that her confession of adherence to a mystical discourse for her poetical experience might serve as a sort of justification for the amorous content of her songs. But this can be only partially true, since her argument is perfectly coherent with the tradition on which she relies, which also demonstrates to what extent a tendency towards the metaphysical layer of the poetic discourse on love can be kept even when the literary representation is crafted exclusively through images of mundane love. 189

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures This means that her ghazals, like the ghazals of any other lyrical poet of her period – at least from Sa‘dī onwards – do depict mundane love inspired by worldly affairs, but their ultimate horizon is the meditation on an ideal of universal love aimed at understanding the quintessential beauty of God. For this reason, as I have suggested earlier, the poetic “you” of these texts does not correspond to any tangible beloved per se. It is, on the contrary, an idealized mundane beloved whose presence is a witness to God’s beauty and, according to the contexts of execution and dedication, can refer to any kind of real recipient: a friend, a real object of desire, a patron, or a spiritual guide.

The Poetic Masks of the Author The ambiguous identity of the beloved in the Persian ghazal, which constantly shifts between a canonized and stereotypical depiction and a virtual or surreptitious representation of real figures, affords analyses into the complexity of the lyric “I,” which is the persona who is supposed to be the initiator of the amorous interaction. Just as the beloved of the Persian ghazal is a fictitious presence ideally detached from any historical circumstances, but capable of being projected onto real persons depending on the nature of social interactions taking place “around” the text, likewise the poetic persona, the “I,” does not necessarily coincide with the author of the text. How does this virtual entity, a fictitious self, interact with the real author? What kind of multi-faceted stratifications separate the historical author from the poetic persona? In this respect, the case of Jahān is especially interesting because she is a woman who not only interacts with male poets but also relies on a poetic tradition almost completely dominated by them, and considers a male subject and a male object as the actors in a particular expression of love. In her divan, we get the impression that her voice seems to be hiding a multiplicity of personae. For example, in the preface to her divan, Jahān not only does not hide her gender, she even utilizes her femininity as something inherent to the act of composing poetry in the wake of her female predecessors. Despite this acknowledgment of her gendered historical persona, her poems do not contain any markers denoting the femininity of her biological sex. 190

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Jahān Malik Khātūn If we did not know that Jahān Khātūn composed the poems of the divan, it would be impossible to ascertain the sex of the poet. Although some have argued that the delicate imagery of her lines indicates a recognizable female presence, I believe that none of the stylistic and thematic features displayed in her ghazals is able to disclose her gender. It is worth remarking that, since Persian is a language that offers no morpho-syntactical distinctions between masculine and feminine, the gender of nouns and pronouns must be determined through contextual (often extra-textual) data or the explicit mention of classes of inherently gendered nouns, such as the oppositions man/woman, boy/girl, husband/wife, and so on. The phallo-logocentrism of premodern Iranian societies implies a default masculinization of all instances of linguistic communication for which the speaker does not consider as relevant the specification of a feminine self. The very fact that Jahān does not emphasize her gender with explicit textual clues implies that her poetic act is projected towards a horizon of literary value and communicative expectations for which the emergence of a female self is indeed not so relevant. Moreover, Jahān offers not only female-gendered textual clues, but in many occurrences she explicitly presents herself as a male narrator: X.    I am like Alexander: in search of the water of life       N  ow amidst the darkness of your hair enraptured by   strife (267). XI.    It is true that Ayāz was Maḥmūd’s slave       I’m Ayāz, but I have no Maḥmūd, no conclave (165). XII.  Joseph’s mouth never fulfilled my desires       Like the wolf I became: my lips stained with blood but   empty is my mouth (333).

Sometimes the poet is even more explicit and talks about herself in terms of manliness, virility, and masculine courage: XIII.  I have never been a man worthy of your love, what can I do?       I have no choice but falling in love with your face (122). XIV.  I never was a man worthy of his love, but       How different is a man from a true man (170)!

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures The fact that Jahān explicitly embraces her gender in the introduction to her divan suggests that adopting a masculine voice for her lyrical performance was not a consequence of a need to hide her gender for social, political, or moral reasons. The discrepancy between the feminine voice presented in her introduction and the masculinity of her poetic persona in her poems appears as an anomaly that offers us a glimpse into the gap in the relationship between the historical, extra-textual, “real” presence of premodern Persian authors and their poetic voices. The heavily standardized poetic conventions of the lyrical canon and the lack of reliable information about the private life of classical authors prevents us from discerning to what extent the “I” in these poems differs from the actual author. How fictitious is the poetic performance with respect to the characteristics of the authorial self? Although a poetic trend from a time and place different from our own can present unfamiliar textual specificities, we often assume that there is a direct connection between the intimate voice of an author and the literary fiction that pronounces “I” in his/her text. Even in the case of overtly fictitious genres like the novel, our spontaneous attitude is to find, among the characters or even within the voice of the narrator, some aspect of the author’s personality or psychological profile.23 But the poetry of Jahān Malik Khātūn, who contradicts a biased critical perception of continuity between author and lyrical persona, urges us to elaborate a different theoretical approach to the study and understanding of the self among classical Persian authors. Notwithstanding the apparently confessional nature of lyric poems, each time we critically approach a ghazal we should bear in mind that in any text there is a fundamental distinction between the historical author and the poetic persona:  the historical author (or empirical author) is the person who materially composed the text, whereas the poetic persona (or lyrical “I”) is the speaker who, within the text, speaks in the first person (singular or plural). Any connection between the empirical author and the poetic persona is determined by historical factors, cultural context, and generic conventions. If, for example, romantic poetry was often characterized by an intimate connection between the feelings of the author and their expression through a poetic persona, this does not hold true in the case of the Persian ghazal, where the reader gets the impression that all authors  – regardless of chronological and 192

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Jahān Malik Khātūn geographical differences  – are sharing the same inner condition and expressing more or less the same ardent desire for their often reluctant and ruthless beloved. The encomiastic qaṣīda, on the other hand, displays a more complex structure, in which the fictitious persona of its lyrical prelude is juxtaposed with both the collective voice of the court – which addresses the prince  – and the personal voice of the poet, who often describes his state of penury and the hardship connected to his activity. As I argued elsewhere, the hypertrophic conventionality of imagery and tropes displayed by premodern ghazal poets turns these texts – often conceived as hypertextual imitations of past or contemporary lyric poems – into unities constituting larger macrostructures in which the concepts of both “authorship” and “I” are an instance shared by authors belonging to different locations and epochs.24 In terms of authorship, this means that only limited aspects of a ghazal belong to the person who composed it, as it is the product of an accumulation of shared tropes and imageries, lyric formulae and common ideals. The poetic persona, the “I” of these texts, does not correspond to the historical singularity of the author, but rather relates to a multiple and complex voice shared by the multitude of poets who have been responding to and imitating each other across centuries and from all the corners of the Persian-speaking world. It is also because of such functional divergence that, in most cases, the pen name of the author that appears at the end of a ghazal – technically referred to as takhalluṣ  – acts as a distinctive persona addressed by the “I” of the poem through the second or third person: “listen, Sa‘dī,” or “I, unlike Ḥāfiẓ,” and so on. It can be pointed out that the gender discrepancy between the masculine tradition and the explicitly confessed femininity of Jahān Malik Khātūn is a magnification of the natural gap already separating the empirical author from the poetic persona throughout the entire history of the Persian ghazal.25 In almost all classical Persian ghazals we can think of this pen name (at least from the twelfth century onwards) as a device that occupies an intermediate space between the presence of the historical or empirical author and his poetic persona, which in the case of this genre belongs to a ritualized identity shared by all Persian ghazal poets. It is a sort of projection of 193

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures the empirical author towards the fictive presence of his poetic persona, the sign of the “fictitious author.” The real presence of the author – the universe of his everyday actions and thoughts – is usually invisible to us, yet an image of the author’s beliefs and system of values takes shape in a reader’s mind. Every time one says “such-and-such an author thinks this or believes in that,” we are not dealing with the real person (about whom we might know nothing at all) but with a literary projection, a sort of transfiguration of the self, performed (deliberately or not) by the empirical author. In the last line of a ghazal, there is a shift from the first to the second or third person, which is technically a transition from the intradiegetic to the extradiegetic level of the text, and the poetic persona highlights the presence of the poet by addressing his pen name, and what we here call “the poet” is merely a mark left by the fictitious author. Therefore, in Jahān’s ghazals the poetic persona acts and speaks exactly like the “I” of her male fellow poets, but when it comes to the mention of her pen name, “Jahān,” the speaker shifts from the shared “I” of the poetic persona to the presence of the fictitious author of the text. Before analyzing the implications of opting for jahān, “the world,” as a pen name, it is necessary to consider how gender intervenes at the level of the fictitious author. In other words, how does a female historical author like Jahān project her literary persona in order to impose a masculine lyric “I”?

Gender Trouble The princess brings up the problem of her gender, as a fictitious author, exactly when in her introduction she describes the process of literary creativity and the social acceptance of the art of poetry as a path of excellence: Among scholars and intellectuals it is well known that if the art of poetry were not distinguished by excellent virtues able to confer preeminence, the great personalities of the past and the most renowned men of wisdom (may God be satisfied by them) would have not poured all their fruitful efforts into the path set by this practice. Nevertheless, since very few Persian women have been engaged in the art of poetry, this lady thought that

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Jahān Malik Khātūn any renown in this practice might have been considered a defect and I  therefore abstained from it. But after some time I realized that many notable women of Persia and Arabia have become famous with this art. And if poetry were forbidden [for women], the beautiful beloved of the Prophet Muḥammad, the moon whose standard is the sun, the pearl of the treasure of modesty, the Lady of the Day of Resurrection, Fāṭima, wouldn’t have ever composed poetry or recited verses such as:     Indeed women are fragrant flowers created for you     May you smell the fragrance of their petals. And most of the women of Arabia have composed poetry, [and] among the Persians I  can cite the name of ʿĀysha Muqriyya, who was also one of the initiates to the path of faith and one among the birds of the sky of truth. She became famous for her quatrains, among which I can quote the following ones:     How splendid if I could enjoy our encounter     A  nd splendidly I  would welcome your arrows into my  chest.     But I know how impossible it is for me to reach you;      Hence splendid will it be just to pass through your  thoughts.     I have been used to suffering for you during my entire life.     F  rom you concealed, I  have practised a thousand loves  with you.     But I never told you all this,     Because I never felt worthy of your presence. And many other Persian poetesses, like Pādshāh Khātūn, Qutlughshāh Khātūn, and others, according to their own talent have slackened the reins of their poetic art. I too, although a woman, have followed the example of their boldness (3–4).

By reading this passage we can infer that in the case of Jahān what really threatens her legitimacy as a female poet is that the presence of a woman within a tradition dominated by men might disrupt the formal continuity of the canon. Her argument is not based on ethical values, as one would otherwise suppose; it largely depends on the evidence of female writing that 195

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures can be found in the Persian and Arabic literary past. If the gender of the authors forming the poetic tradition is masculine, how is a female empirical author going to affect the canon? Can such an author’s poetic activity be considered legitimate regardless of this gender difference? Interestingly enough, instead of looking for a solution among the moral values belonging to her social space, Jahān prefers to address the literary tradition to which she belongs: what allows her to compose poetry is the presence of women among the poets who flourished before her. We should bear in mind that, from the perspective of the canon that dominated the aesthetics of classical Persian poetry, any deviation from the traditional norm was severely criticized and marginalized. The conservation of the literary norm could have been threatened by stylistic idiosyncrasies, but also by the presence of a different class of empirical author, whose gender difference could have penetrated and infected the symbolic level of the poetic output. However, this discrepancy could be bridged through a total adherence to the formal conventions of the poetic tradition. Which implies that also the poetic persona (the lyrical “I”) of a female poet had to convert into a masculine voice in order to conform to the literary tradition and the rules of verse composition. In the last part of her introduction, where Jahān seems to be displaying a rhetorical humility by inviting her male fellow poets to amend her lines, this is, de facto, a further strategy to confess the aberration represented by her female empirical persona, and to demonstrate her willingness to correct it on the grounds of poetic talent: I now address the all-embracing favor of all learned men, intellectuals and scholars and hope that whenever they face the modest talent and the poor poetic good of this Lady, with no hesitation may they express their opinion without hiding their disapproval. And wherever they find my imperfections and stylistic mistakes, I hope they will bestow upon me the honor, if possible, of correcting my lines, so that the poetry of this woman may no longer dwell in the darkness of mediocrity (4).

Although the political and cultural role played by women during the Il-khanid period was more liberal when compared with the urban fringes still untouched by the influence of Turco-Mongol social habits, misogynistic prejudices against women’s literacy still permeated most of 196

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Jahān Malik Khātūn the literary circles of that time.26 For example, Awḥadī Marāgha’ī, in his didactic mathnavī Jām-i Jam (Jasmshid’s Cup) composed in 733/1333 and dedicated to Sultan Abū Saʿīd Bahādur Khān, in the section dedicated to “vicious women” warns that: When your woman acts immature, beat her! If she doesn’t cover her face, cover her with the shroud! Don’t give a pen [qalam] to a vicious woman! It’s much better if you cut off [qalam kunī] her hand! … … … … … … … … Only men should use pens and tablets. If she never memorized the first Sura of the Qur’an, Why should she read Vīsu Rāmīn?27

From two satirical works of Jahān’s contemporary ‘Ubayd Zākānī (Risāla-yi Ṣad Pand), we find evidence that even in the relatively liberal Injuid Shiraz it was considered too licentious for a woman to read books based on amorous matters like Vīs va Rāmīn: XV.   Do not expect continence and an intact arse [kūn-i  durustī] from a woman, who reads stories like Vīs va Rāmīn,       Or from young boys who consume wine and hashish.28

The caution exercised by Jahān with respect to her (presumably) almost exclusively male audience can also be ascribed to the social norms of her time. But the success of her efforts to veil her empirically feminine identity in order to align it with the masculine gender of her fellow poets’ lyrical persona is attested to by the dismissive arguments of her detractors: XVI.  If one day the poems of Jahān were to reach India,       The soul of Khusraw would tell Ḥasan, These were   composed by a cunt!29

We do not know what circumstances may have prompted Kamāl of Khujand (d. Tabriz, 803/1400–01) to compose such a misogynistic line aimed at offending Jahān by suggesting an association between her poetic endeavors and the cliché – very much exploited at that time, as witnessed in ‘Ubayd Zākānī’s Risāla-i Dilgushā – of vaginal farts. 197

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures Dawlatshāh Samarqandī (d. 900/1494 or 913/1507) erroneously attributed this curse to ‘Ubayd’s pen.30 Despite the philological uncertainty, due to the lack of more reliable sources, this wandering line is a vivid testament to the symbolic category of the biological element associated with poetic art, which the predominantly male literary milieu of premodern Iran would use in order to deal with the presence of a female poet: XVII.  J ahān Malik Khātūn is a whore and her poetry is   whorish to boot:       O friends, enjoy instead more refined poems!31

This isolated couplet by Kamāl Khujandī sets a correspondence between the biological presence of the poet-princess  – transmuted through her imagined sexuality – and her works: she is a whore and so is her poetry. There is a mechanism of reflection between the author (represented as a whore) and her texts (compared to the whoredom of their author) that constituted something completely new within the panorama of premodern Persian poetry, dominated as it was by an utter separation between the reception of literary texts and the disembodied presence of their authors. The relevance of this misogynistic discourse for acquiring a dominant masculine voice is a problem that goes beyond the category of personal prejudices. Jahān, in fact and most interestingly, in an effort to assimilate her poetry into the dominant literary canon, does not limit herself to adopting a masculine lyrical persona. She also reproduces, in some instances, the misogynistic attitudes that are embedded in the values of courtly love: XVIII.  E  very man who ever went through hardships and  troubles         Beware! It was for sure a result of women’s action (82). XIX.    Please don’t be unfaithful like women:         Love affairs belong only to men (243)!

These statements echo Maryam’s warnings against Shīrīn in Niẓāmī’s Khusraw va Shīrīn: XX.  Women are like vulgar flowers:       Impure and dirty inside, but pretty outside.       In no country will you find loyalty

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Jahān Malik Khātūn       From horses, swords and women:       Loyalty belongs to man, how can it refer to women?32

Jahān incorporates the perspective of the male canon at the very heart of her literary persona and in turn reproduces the same scheme offered by Nīẓāmī in his mathnavī Haft Paykar. In order to praise the qualities of Tūrān Dukht by describing her inner and outer perfection, the author states that “she had the appearance of a woman [ba ṣūrat zan], but the inner nature of a man [ba ma‘nī mard].”33 Just as in Niẓāmī’s depiction of Tūrān Dukht, Jahān’s ultimate strategy is to bestow legitimacy upon her own poetic activity by introjecting a masculine lyrical “I” along with – paradoxically – its potentially misogynistic mindset.

The World: An Attempt of Ambiguous Refeminization When critics try to determine whether the beloved of a specific ghazal – or even the beloved of a specific author – is a human being (and, in that case, male or female) or God, they fail to take into account the extent to which these texts are based on a gap between the fictitious mundane love they depict, the metaphysical horizon to which they potentially belong, and the historical context of composition, recitation, and transmission. But there are a few elements in the ghazal as a genre where these three layers (the fictitious, the allegorical, and the historical) converge. One of these is the pen name of the author and the space around it, which I prefer to describe as the neighborhood of reality As indicated earlier in this essay, the pen name appearing at the end of a ghazal corresponds to the fictitious author, which means that in that space – and above all by the author’s choice of signatures – the poet selects from their personality or their social function a series of characteristics that will inform the reader’s construction of an idea about the author. It is no coincidence that in the history of Persian lyric poetry the signature of the poet started appearing in the same space, where previously in the panegyric – from which the ghazal partially derives34 – the name of the patron was mentioned: a vanishing point towards external reality. 199

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures Therefore, the final lines of a ghazal occupy a textual space that maintains the memory of an ancient point of contact with the world outside the text. Such convergence between the inner and outer spaces of the text, from the eleventh century onwards, emerges through the poet’s pen name, which, as a marker for the fictitious author, mediates between the poet’s historical-biographical reality and the presence of a collective poetic persona that adheres strictly to the literary tradition. “Jahān” means “the world” in Persian and, as will be explored, its contextual specificities further complicate the interplay between the multilayered nature of her biographical self and the virtuosity of her poetic performances. As said, Persian nouns and pronouns do not mark gender, unless it is specified by the context (infratextual or pragmatically extratextual) or through the few sets of nouns whose gender is inherently determined:  zan/mard, pisar/dukhtar, mudhakkar/mu’annas, and so on. Such indeterminacy has enabled the practice of ambiguity to reach skillful heights, and has catalyzed the interaction between the physical and the metaphysical layers of the poetic experiences that took place between the thirteen and the fourteenth centuries.35 However, there are some cases in which Persian authors allegorically specify the gender of some nouns that are otherwise gender-neutral. This could be the result of linguistic, mythopoeic, or imagery-related reminiscences of pre-Islamic gender-specific Iranian languages, or perhaps due to influences of Arabic calques or loanwords: XXI.  Did you see today the king on that wide plain?       He was near to that army with that standard of   auspicious effigy.       You didn’t say what he is like! No! So I will:       The stars are the army to his moon,       And I say “moon” because in the Arabic language       The “sun” is feminine and the “moon” is masculine.36

In these lines taken from a qaṣīda dedicated to the Ghaznavid Sultan Maḥmūd’s son Muḥammad, we learn – ex negativo – that the moon among the Iranians is considered to be female, whereas the sun is masculine. In Aḥmad Ghazālī’s introduction to his Savāniḥ (the first Persian treatise on 200

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Jahān Malik Khātūn mystical love), linguistic concepts acquire gendered specification for the sake of expressing the otherwise inexpressible truths about love: XXII 

“We shall entrust the bride-like meanings to the men-like words in the marital chamber of speech.”37

Jahān, “the world,” is one of these nouns, and the poets usually anthropomorphize it in the figure of a woman who seduces her thousand lovers before killing them. Princess Jahān’s contemporary fellow poets are prone to warn their readers away from the pernicious enchantment of this world, as in these homiletic lines by Ḥāfiẓ: XXIII.  Although the world is a bride whose beauty is endless,         Limitless is the infidelity that she practices.38 XXIV.  D  o not expect loyalty and fealty from this capricious world,          For it is a decrepit bride who has thousands of husbands.39

This idea, of course, precedes Ḥāfiẓ and can be found among most of the early Persian poets, especially in the didactic texts that warned of the transient nature of this world and the evanescence of mundane pleasures and goods. In a lengthy qaṣīda, Nāṣir Khusraw characterizes the world as a debauched woman who, utilizing chicanery and spell, poisons her husband’s wine cup. Whoever surrenders in to the bewitching ways of such a woman and what she purports, he remarks, should not be considered a true man.40 The motif of the world as a ruthless and draconian feminine presence can also be found in al-Ghazālī’s Kīmiyā-i Sa‘ādat when, in the chapter dedicated to the “knowledge of the world,” he warns that “the world is similar to a non-virgin, debauched woman [mathal-i vay chun zanī nābikār-i mufsid ast] who first seduces men to let them fall in love with her, and then takes them home to kill them.”41 It would be useful, in future research, to explore how ancient Iranian gender-specific languages associate the concept of “the world” with a female principle, as a “living matter” able to give birth and generate. In this respect, it is also worth remarking that in the second paragraph of 201

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures his chapter about the world, al-Ghazālī defines the difference between the world (dunyā) and the hereafter (ākhirāt) in terms of pre- and post-death (marg):  “And the world and the hereafter are expressions referring to two distinct circumstances: what comes before death – and is closer to you – is called ‘the world,’ whereas what comes after death is called ‘hereafter.’ ”42 It is therefore clear that Jahān Malik Khātūn’s pen name – far from being a gender-neutral personal name – partially reflects a trace of the empirical author’s feminine identity and, at the same time, potentially alludes to the treacherous and lustful nature of the world (a qaḥba, “prostitute,” as Anvarī defined it). The possible overlap between Jahān’s pen name and the association between the noun jahān and its negative female connotation is suggested by a fragment that Dawlatshāh Samarqandī erroneously attributed to ‘Ubayd Zākānī: XXV.  O Vizier, Jahān is an infidel whore:         Aren’t you ashamed of such a whore?         Discard her and choose another large cunt.         Isn’t Jahān too tight for the lord of the world [jahān]?43

According to Dawlatshāh, these lines were supposed to be addressed to Amīn al-Dīn Jahrumī, the boon companion of Jahān’s uncle, Abū Isḥāq, in order to discourage him from marrying the princess. There is no trace of these lines in ‘Ubayd’s divan, but oddly enough they do appear in a similar wording in Salmān Sāvajī’s collected poems: XXVI.  O Vizier, the world is an infidel whore         Aren’t you ashamed of such a whore?         Seek abundance outside of this one [i.e., the mundane world]         Isn’t the world too tight for the lord of the World?44

The different wording of the second couplet may suggest that the author could be referring to the infidelity of the world and not to that of Jahān Malik Khātūn. If this is in fact a warning of an unspecified minister by underscoring the motif of the transience of the world, is the obscene variant reported by Dawlatshāh a corruption of Salmān’s fragment or it is a

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Jahān Malik Khātūn manipulation by ‘Ubayd in order to vituperate Princess Jahān with obscene language? Jahān was aware of possibility of such a conflation and took advantage of it extensively throughout her entire divan: XXVII.  Y  ou might blame Jahān by saying “deceitful is her love,”         But listen: does anybody expect loyalty and affection from the world [jahān] (524).

The repetition of “Jahān” creates a confluence between at least three rhetorical figures: jinās-i tāmm (homonymy), (the poet’s pen name, in the first hemistich, the world in the second); īhām (amphibology), which is the semantic ambiguity that occurs when two senses of the same word are both meaningful within the structure of the line (in the second line Jahān and the world can both be construed as deceitful), and īhām-i tanāsub (amphibological congruity), when one of the two meanings of the amphibology is supported by the presence of another word that might belong to the same semantic field. In this case, the verb zanī, “to hit,” can also be read as an indefinite noun (“a woman”) and it resonates with the instances that jahān refers to the female presence of the poet. So suffused is her divan with such puns that the reader can have difficulty distinguishing one Jahān (the pen name) from the other (noun): XXVIII.  I said, O soul of the world [jān-i jahān, “Jahān’s beloved”], please throw a glance our way!           He said: How could I ever get along with the world [Jahān], since it doesn’t obey us! (45)

Her puns often imply an act of symbolic possession in which the senses of sovereignty and of amorous affection overlap: XXIX.  O my idol, if you don’t mind possessing the world         Why don’t you say that Jahān [the world] belongs to you? (87)

The pun on “Jahān” is not exclusive to the maqṭa‘ of her ghazals. Her general tendency is to disseminate her name in every two or three lines. Such stratagem creates an effect of further reverberation in which her

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures presence, her literary body – by reiteration, juxtaposition, and metonymic contact – is shown as a world on a smaller scale, as a microcosmos reproducing the macrocosmos: XXX.  O  my beloved, in this world [jahān] you are of the soul of Jahān       Without you the world [Jahān] would have no soul, nor heart (128).

In other lines, biological material of the fictitious author, such as seen above, is assimilated to the physical structure of the world: XXXI.  S hould the people of the world bake bricks from the clay of Jahān         I would never pull out from my bones my love of you (133). XXXII.  Should the entire world [Jahān] become a rose garden,         All thorns I would see because of my heart’s suffering at your departure (256).

Conclusion Jahān skillfully employs many of the canonical aspects of the premodern poetry. While her verses resound with the themes and formal peculiarities of her time, the conversation between her biological persona, her genderless poetic “I,” and her gendered signature create ripples upon the thick surface of her poetic discourse. What is fascinating about the Persian ghazal as a genre, particularly in its intertextual relationships and sociohistorical framework, is that although the identities of the lover and the beloved and the interactions in which they are engaged are quite repetitive and predictable, there are a countless number of possible narrative variations which depend on the degree to which the poetic text is penetrated by external reality (both its codes and its events) through the presence of the empirical author and his or her empirical addressees. For this reason, even though gender does not appear to exert an influence on these processes, it is in fact a key issue, 204

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Jahān Malik Khātūn which becomes clear as we move from the genderlessness of the poetic persona (and its “you” counterpart, the beloved) towards the actual historical existences implied by these poetic performances in the real world. As abundantly pronounced in Jahān’s work, the beloved and the poetic persona (the “you” and the “I” of a lyric text) are linguistic functions belonging to a deep structure within which the canonical homoerotic relationship of the ghazal can be adapted to a large variety of social contexts. Consequently, they generate multiple connections between poetic fiction and the historical and biographical backgrounds to which the author belongs. The stratagems employed by Jahān in order to gain the approval of her contemporaries reveal a thorough engagement with gender as a tool to mask and unmask through the multiple levels of the text her own female biological presence. In her poems, we can conclude, the beloved that she portrays is an abstracted object of desire waiting for historical reification according to the social contexts of her literary performances. An amorous abstraction, inhabiting the interstitial spaces between fictionality and reality, but that which is able to bestow legitimacy upon the artistic endeavors of a woman whose voice would otherwise have been lost forever.

Notes 1. On the concept of the beloved in premodern Persian poetry, see Ehsan Yarshater, “The Theme of Wine-Drinking and the Concept of the Beloved in Early Persian Poetry,” Studia Islamica 13 (1960), 43–53, and J. T. P. de Bruijn, “Beloved,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica, online edition (Columbia University, 1996–), accessed September 15, 2014, available at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/beloved. 2. Jahān Malik Khatūn, Dīvān-i Kāmil-i Jahāh Malik Khātūn, ed. Pūrāndukht Kāshānīrād and Kāmil Aḥmadnizhād (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Zavvār, 1374/1995). Page references hereafter given parenthetically in text. See also the new poems attributed to Jahān and published by Javād Basharī, “Ash‘ārī Naw-yāfta az Jahān Malik Khātūn,” Payām-i Bahāristān 3 (1388/2009):  740–66. The most comprehensive contributions to the study of her life and works is offered by Dominic Brookshaw’s excellent article “Odes of a Poet-Princess: The Ghazals of Jahān-Malik Khātūn,” Iran 43 (2005): 173–95; see also, by the same author, “Jahān-Malek Ḵātun,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica (New  York:  Encyclopaedia Iranica Foundation, 2008), vol. 14, fasc. 4, pp.  383–5, available at http:// www.iranicaonline.org/articles/jahan-malek-katun. A  selection of her poems is available in beautifully crafted English verse:  Dick Davis, trans., Faces

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures of Love:  Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz (Washington, DC:  Mage Publishers, 2012), 135–93. For an Italian translation, see Domenico Ingenito, “ ‘Sedavo il dolore ardente dei giorni con l’acqua del canto poetico’: I versi della Dama del Mondo (Jahān Malek Khātun),” Semicerchio:  Rivista di poesia comparata 43 (2010): 40–60, and “ ‘Questi versi una fica li ha cantati.’ La Dama del Mondo (Jahān Malek Khātun):  La maggiore poetessa dell’Islam medievale,” Testo a fronte: Teoria e pratica della traduzione letteraria 44 (2011): 37–76. 3. Brookshaw, “Odes of a Poet-Princess,” 174. 4. It is a 332 folios manuscript (Supplément persan 763, Bibliothèque Nationale de France) kept at the Bibliotheque nationale de France, probably composed when the poet was still alive and dedicated to Sulṭān Aḥmad Jalāyir. See Edgar Blochet, Catalogue des manuscrits persans (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1905–34), 3:222. 5. Bold Roman numerals in the article refer to the original Persian texts in Appendix II. 6. Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfiẓ, Daftar-i Digarsānīhā dar Ghazalhā-yi Ḥāfiẓ, Bargirifta az Panjāh Nuskha-yi Khaṭṭī-i Ṣada-yi Nuhum, ed. Salīm Naysārī (Tehran: Farhangistān-i Zabān va Adab-i Fārsī, 1386/2007), 2:189. 7. For the two most important studies on the subject of poetic imitation (istiqbāl, tatabbu‘, or javāb) in premodern Persian literature, see Paul E. Losensky, Welcoming Fighānī (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 1998) and Riccardo Zipoli, The Technique of the Ǧawāb:  Replies by Nawā’ī to Ḥāfiẓ and Ǧāmī (Venice:  Cafoscarina, 1993). See also Domenico Ingenito, “Percorsi intertestuali nella storia del ghazal persiano tra imitazione e riscrittura:  Per una ermeneutica della risposta poetica” (PhD diss., Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale,” 2012). 8. Claudio Giunta, Versi a un destinatario:  Saggio sulla poesia italiana del Medioevo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002), 359–61. 9. Franklin Lewis, “Sexual Occidentation:  The Politics of Conversion, Christian-love and Boy-love in ‘Attār,” Iranian Studies 42, no. 5 (2009): 709. 10. On the topic of homoeroticism in Persian literature, see Sīrūs Shāmīsā, Shāhidbāzī dar Adabiyāt-i Fārsī (Tehran:  Firdaws, 1381/2002); cf. “Homosexuality iii. In Persian Literature,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica, online edition, accessed 3/1/2014, available at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/homosexuality-iii. See also Lewis, “Sexual Occidentation,” and Dominic Brookshaw, “To Be Feared and Desired:  Turks in the Collected Works of ‘Ubayd-i Zakani,” Iranian Studies 42, no. 5 (2009): 725–44. 11. See Julie Scott Meisami, “The Poetry of Praise: The Qasidah and Its Uses,” in Medieval Persian Court Poetry (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1987), 40–76, as well as “Ghaznavid Panegyrics: Some Political Implication,” Iran 28 (1990): 31–44.

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Jahān Malik Khātūn 12. Lloyd Ridgeon, “The Controversy of Shaykh Awḥad al-Dīn Kirmānī and Handsome, Moon-Faced Youths:  A  Case Study of Shāhid-Bāzī in Medieval Sufism,” Journal of Sufi Studies 1 (2012): 3–30. On the practice of samā‘, see Leonard Lewisohn, “The Sacred Music of Islam:  Samā‘ in the Persian Sufi Tradition,” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 6 (1997): 1–33. 13. In a critical reading of the latest Italian translations of the divan of Ḥāfiẓ, I tried to show how later authors interpreted the poems of Ḥāfiẓ in order to forge biographical data; see Ingenito, “Tradurre Hāfez: Quattro divān attuali,” Oriente moderno 89, no. 1 (2009): 151–72. 14. Domenico Ingenito, “Amir Khosrow and Hāfez:  A  Geopoetical Approach” (paper presented at the Seventh European Conference of Iranian Studies, Kraków, September 7–10, 2011). 15. To whom, according to Henri Massé, the largest extant manuscript of Jahān’s divan might have been dedicated; see Henri Massé, “Le divan de la princesse Djehane,” in Mélange d’iranologie en mémoire de feu Said Naficy, ed. Parimarz Naficy (Tehran: Université de Tehran, 1972), 4–5. See also Brookshaw, “Odes of a Poet-Princess,” 182. 16. Domenico Ingenito, “ ‘Tabrizis in Shiraz Are Worth Less than a Dog’: Humām Tabrīzī and Sa‘dī Shīrāzī, a Lyrical Encounter,” in Beyond the Abbasid Caliphate: Politics, Patronage and the Transmission of Knowledge in 13th–15th Century Tabriz, ed. Judith Pfeiffer (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 77–127. 17. Sa‘dī, Ghazalhā-yi Sa‘dī, ed. Ghulām-Ḥusayn Yūsufī (Tehran:  Sukhan, 1385/2006), 35. 18. See Naṣrullāh Pūrjavādī, Bāda-yi ‘Ishq:  Pazhūhishī dar Ma‘nā-yi Bāda dar Shi‘r-i ‘Irfānī-i Fārsī (Tehran: Kārnāma, 1387/2008), 141–9; see also Ingenito, “Tabrizis in Shiraz,” 104–15. 19. See Wolfhart Heinrichs, “On the Genesis of the ḥaqîqa-majâz Dichotomy,” Studia Islamica 59 (1984): 111–40. 20. See Domenico Ingenito, “A Persian Theoretical Approach: Metaphor as a Bridge between the Seen and the Unseen” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, March 23, 2014). 21. Muḥammad al-Ghazālī, Jawāhir al-Qur’ān, ed. Muḥammad Qabbānī (Beirut: Dār Iḥyā’ al-ʿUlūm, 1411/1990), 48–9. 22. Muḥammad al-Ghazālī, Kīmiyā-yi Sa‘ādat, ed. Ḥusayn Khadīvjam (Tehran: Shirkat-i ‘Ilmī va Farhangī, 1380/2001), 1:71–2. 23. For a critical approach to the problem of the literary persona, see Robert C. Elliott, The Literary Persona (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). See also Leo Spitzer, “Note on the Poetic and the Empirical ‘I’ in Medieval Authors,” Traditio 4 (1946):  414–22. Cf. Meisami’s arguments on the dramatizations of the poetic persona in Persian lyric poetry in “Persona and Generic Conventions in Medieval Persian Lyric,” Comparative Criticism 12

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures (1990): 125–51. See also Geert Jan Van Gelder, “The Abstracted Self in Arabic Poetry,” Journal of Arabic Literature 14, no. 1 (1983), 22–30. 24. Ingenito, “Percorsi intertestuali,” 1:8–13. 25. See Paul Losensky, “Linguistic and Rhetorical Aspects of the Signature Verse (Takhalluṣ) in the Persian Ghazal,” Edebiyat 8 (1998):  239–71; Julie Scott Meisami, Structure and Meaning in Medieval Arabic and Persian Poetry, (London:  RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 105–10; Wojciech Skalmowski, “Modes of Address in the Makhlaṣ of the Ghazals of Sa‘di and Ḥāfiẓ,” in Proceedings of the First European Conference of Iranian Studies Held in Turin, September 7th–11th, 1987, vol. 2, Middle and New Iranian Studies, ed. Gherardo Gnoli and Antonio Panaino (Rome: Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1987), 531–40. 26. Brookshaw, “Odes of a Poet-Princess,” 175–6. 27. Awḥadī Marāgha’ī, Dīvān-i Kāmil-i Awḥadī Marāgha’ī, ed. Amīr Aḥmad Ashrafī (Tehran: Pīshru, 1362/1983), 526. 28. ‘Ubayd Zākānī, Kulliyāt-i ‘Ubayd-i Zākānī, ed. Ja‘far Muḥammad Maḥjūb (New York: Bibliotheca Persica Press, 1999), 321. 29. Kamāl Khujandī, Dīvān-i Kamāl-i Khujandī ed. A.  Karamī (Tehran:  Mā, 1372/1993), 407. 30. Dawlatshāh Samarqandī, Tadhkirat al-Shu‘arā’, ed. Fāṭima ‘Alāqa (Tehran: Pazhūhishgāh-i ‘Ulūm-i Insānī va Muṭāla‘āt-i Farhangī, 1285/2007), 509. 31. Khujandī, Dīvān, 407. 32. Nīẓāmī Ganjavī, Kulliyāt-i Khamsa-yi Niẓāmī Ganjavī, ed. Muʿīn Farr (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Zarrīn, 1362/1983), 245. 33. Ibid., 136. 34. Scholars agree on the fact that multiple factors can be mentioned to trace the historical origins of the ghazal, either as an independent genre (technical ghazal) or as a lyric composition with no specific formal boundaries (lyrical ghazal). In this chapter I  emphasize the connection with praise poetry in order to account for the political dimensions that the ghazal had since its very first appearances. For an excellent philological analysis of the origins and the development of the Persian ghazal, see Alireza Korangy, Development of the Ghazal and Khāqānī’s Contribution, (Wiesbaden:  Harrassowitz, 2013), 1–112. 35. Bo Utas, “Ambiguity in the Savāniḥ of Aḥmad Ghazālī,” in Proceedings of the Second European Conference of Iranian Studies Held in Bamberg, 30th September to 4th October 1991, by the Societas Iranologica Europaea, ed. Bert Fragner et al. (Roma: Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1995), 701–10. 36. Farrukhī Sīstānī, Dīvān-i Ḥakīm Farrukhī Sīstānī, ed. Muḥammad Dabīr-Siyāqī (Tehran: Zavvār, 1371/1992), 106.

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Jahān Malik Khātūn 37. Aḥmad Ghazālī, Majmū‘a-yi thār-i Fārsī-i Aḥmad Ghazālī, ed. Aḥmad Mujāhid (Tehran: Dānishgāh-i Tihrān, 1370/1991), 105. 38. Ḥāfiẓ Shīrāzī, Daftar-i Digarsānīhā dar Ghazalhā-yi Ḥāfiẓ, Bargirifta az Panjāh Nuskha-yi khaṭṭī-yi Ṣada-i Nuhum, ed. Salīm Naysārī (Tehran: Farhangistān-i Zabān u Adab-i Fārsī, 1386/2007), 2:1937. 39. Ibid., 1:180. 40. Nāṣir Khusraw, Dīvān-i Nāṣir Khusraw, ed. Mujtabā Minuvī and Mahdī Muḥaqqiq (Tehran: Dānishgāh-i Tihrān, 1353/1974), 78. 41. Al-Ghazālī, Kīmiyā, 1:75–6. 42. Ibid., 71. 43. Dawlatshāh, Tadhkirāt, 506. 44. Salmān Sāvajī, Kulliyāt, ed. ‘Alī ‘Abbās Vafā’ī (Tehran:  Dānishgāh-i Tihrān, 1382/2003), 304.

Bibliography Awḥadī, Marāgha’ī. Dīvān-i Kāmil-i Awḥadī Marāgha’ī. Edited by Amīr Aḥmad Ashrafī. Tehran: Pīshru, 1362/1983. Basharī, Javād. “Ashʿārī Naw-yāfta az Jahān Malik Khātūn.” Payām-i Bahāristān 3 (1388/2009): 740–66. Blochet, Edgar. Catalogue des manuscrits persans. 2 vols. Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1905–34. Brookshaw, Dominic. “Odes of a Poet-Princess:  The Ghazals of Jahān-Malik Khātūn.” Iran 43 (2005): 173–95. ——— “Jahān-Malek Ḵātun.” In Encyclopedia Iranica, vol 14, fasc. 4, pp. 383–5. New York: Encyclopaedia Iranica Foundation, 2008. ——— “To Be Feared and Desired:  Turks in the Collected Works of ‘Ubayd-i Zakani.” Iranian Studies 42, no. 5 (2009): 725–44. Bruijn, J. T.  P.  de. “Beloved.” In Encyclopedia Iranica. Online edition. Columbia University, 1996. Accessed September 15, 2014, available at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/beloved. Davis, Dick, trans. Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz. Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 2012. Dawlatshāh, Samarqandī. Tadhkirat al-Shu‘arā’. Edited by Fāṭima ‘Alāqa. Tehran: Pazhūhishgāh-i ‘Ulūm-i Insānī va Muṭāla‘āt-i Farhangī, 1285/2007. Elliott, Robert C. The Literary Persona. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Farrukhī, Sīstānī. Dīvān-i Ḥakīm Farrukhī Sīstānī. Edited by Muḥammad Dabīr-Siyāqī. Tehran: Zavvār, 1371/1992. Gelder, Geert Jan Van. “The Abstracted Self in Arabic Poetry.” Journal of Arabic Literature 14, no. 1 (1983): 22–30.

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures Ghazālī, Aḥmad. Majmū‘a-i Āthār-i Fārsī-i Aḥmad Ghazālī. Edited by Aḥmad Mujāhid. Tehran: Dānishgāh-i Tihrān, 1370/1991. al-Ghazālī, Muḥammad. Jawāhir al-Qur’ān. Edited by Muḥammad Qabbānī. Beirut: Dār Iḥyā’ al-‘Ulūm, 1411/1990. ——— Kīmiyā-i Sa‘ādat. Edited by Ḥusayn Khadīvjam. 2  vols. Tehran:  Shirkat-i ‘Ilmī va Farhangī, 1380/2001. Giunta, Claudio. Versi a un destinatario: Saggio sulla poesia italiana del Medioevo. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002. Ḥāfiẓ, Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad. Daftar-i Digarsānīhā dar Ghazalhā-yi Ḥāfiẓ, Bargirifta az Panjāh Nuskha-yi Khaṭṭī-yi Ṣada-yi Nuhum. Edited by Salīm Naysārī. 2 vols. Tehran: Farhangistān-i Zabān va Adab-i Fārsī, 1386/2007. Ingenito, Domenico. “Tradurre Hāfez: Quattro divān attuali.” Oriente moderno 89, no. 1 (2009): 151–72. ——— “‘Sedavo il dolore ardente dei giorni con l’acqua del canto poetico’: I versi della Dama del Mondo (Jahān Malek Khātun).” Semicerchio: Rivista di poesia comparata 43 (2010): 40–60. ——— “Amir Khosrow and Hāfez:  A  Geopoetical Approach.” Paper presented at the Seventh European Conference of Iranian Studies, Kraków, September 7–10, 2011. ——— “‘Questi versi una fica li ha cantati.’ La Dama del Mondo (Jahān Malek Khātun): La maggiore poetessa dell’Islam medievale.” Testo a fronte: Teoria e pratica della traduzione letteraria 44 (2011): 37–76. ——— “Percorsi intertestuali nella storia del ghazal persiano tra imitazione e riscrittura: Per una ermeneutica della risposta poetica.” PhD diss., Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale,” 2012. ——— “‘Tabrizis in Shiraz Are Worth Less Than a Dog’:  Sa‘dī and Humām, a Lyrical Encounter.” In Beyond the Abbasid Caliphate:  Politics, Patronage and the Transmission of Knowledge in 13th–15th Century Tabriz. Edited by Judith Pfeiffer. Leiden: Brill, 2013, 77–127. ——— “A Persian Theoretical Approach: Metaphor as a Bridge between the Seen and the Unseen.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, 23 March, 2014. Jahān Malik Khatūn. Dīvān-i Kāmil-i Jahāh Malik Khātūn. Edited by Pūrāndukht Kāshānīrād and Kāmil Aḥmadnizhād. Tehran: Intishārāt-i Zavvār, 1374/1995. Kamāl, Khujandī. Dīvān-i Kamāl Khujandī. Edited by A. Karamī. Tehran:  Mā, 1372/1993. Khusraw, Nāṣir. Dīvān-i Nāṣir Khusraw. Edited by Mujtabā Minuvī and Mahdī Muḥaqqiq. Tehran: Dānishgāh-i Tihrān, 1353/1974. Korangy, Alireza. Development of the Ghazal and Khāqānī’s Contribution: A Study of the Development of Ghazal and a Literary Exegesis of a 12th c. Poetic Harbinger. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2013.

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Jahān Malik Khātūn Lewis, Franklin. “Sexual Occidentation: The Politics of Conversion, Christian-love and Boy-love in ‘Attār.” Iranian Studies 42, no. 5 (2009): 693–723. Lewisohn, Leonard. “The Sacred Music of Islam:  Samā‘ in the Persian Sufi Tradition.” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 6 (1997): 1–33. Losensky, Paul. “Linguistic and Rhetorical Aspects of the Signature Verse (Takhalluṣ) in the Persian Ghazal.” Edebiyat 8 (1998): 239–71. Losensky, Paul E. Welcoming Fighānī: Imitation and Poetic Individuality in the Safavid-Mughal Ghazal. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 1998. Massé, Henri. “Le divan de la princesse Djehane.” In Mélange d’iranologie en mémoire de feu Said Naficy, edited by Parimarz Naficy. Tehran: Université de Tehran, (1972), 1–42. Meisami, Julie Scott. Medieval Persian Court Poetry. Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1987. ——— “Ghaznavid Panegyrics: Some Political Implication.” Iran 28 (1990): 31–44. ——— “Persona and Generic Conventions in Medieval Persian Lyric.” Comparative Criticism 12 (1990), 125–51. ——— Structure and Meaning in Medieval Arabic and Persian Poetry. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. Niẓāmī, Ganjavī. Kūlliyāt-i Khamsa-yi Niẓāmī Ganjavī. Edited by Mu‘īn Farr. Tehran: Intishārāt-i Zarrīn, 1362/1983. Pūrjavādī, Naṣrullāh. Bāda-yi ‘Ishq:  Pazhūhishī dar Ma‘nā-yi Bāda dar Shi‘r-i ‘Irfānī-i Fārsī. Tehran: Kārnāma, 1387/2008. Ridgeon, Lloyd. “The Controversy of Shaykh Awḥad al-Dīn Kirmānī and Handsome, Moon-Faced Youths: A Case Study of Shāhid-Bāzī in Medieval Sufism.” Journal of Sufi Studies 1 (2012): 3–30. Sa‘dī. Ghazalhā-yi Sa‘dī. Edited by Ghulām-Ḥusayn Yūsufī. Tehran: Sukhan, 1385/2006. Salmān, Sāvajī. Kulliyāt. Edited by ‘Abbās Vafā’ī. Tehran:  Dānishgāh-i Tihrān, 1382/2003. Shāmīsā, Sīrūs. Shāhidbāzī dar Adabiyāt-i Fārsī. Tehran: Firdaws, 1381/2002. Skalmowski, Wojciech. “Modes of Address in the Makhlaṣ of the Ghazals of Saʿdi and Ḥāfiẓ.” In Proceedings of the First European Conference of Iranian Studies Held in Turin, September 7th–11th, 1987 by the Societas Iranologica Europaea, vol. 2, Middle and New Iranian Studies, edited by Gherardo Gnoli and Antonio Panaino. Rome:  Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente,  (1987), 531–40. Spitzer, Leo. “Note on the Poetic and the Empirical ‘I’ in Medieval Authors.” Traditio 4 (1946): 414–22. Utas, Bo. “Ambiguity in the Savāniḥ of Aḥmad Ghazālī.” In Proceedings of the Second European Conference of Iranian Studies Held in Bamberg, 30th September to 4th October 1991, by the Societas Iranologica Europaea, edited by Bert Fragner et al. Rome: Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, (1995), 701–10.

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures Yarshater, Ehsan. “The Theme of Wine-Drinking and the Concept of the Beloved in Early Persian Poetry.” Studia Islamica 13 (1960): 43–53. Zākānī, ‘Ubayd. Kulliyāt-i ʿUbayd Zākānī. Edited by Ja‘far Muḥammad Maḥjūb. New York: Bibliotheca Persica, 1999. Zipoli, Riccardo. The Technique of the Ǧawāb: Replies by Nawā’ī to Ḥāfiẓ and Ǧāmī. Venice: Cafoscarina, 1993.

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9 Pleasing the Beloved: Sex and True Love in a Medieval Arabic Erotic Compendium Pernilla Myrne

According to an oft-quoted anecdote, the Arab philologist al-Aṣma‘ī (d. 213/828 or 216/831) once asked a Bedouin how he and his fellows defined the word ‘ishq, “passionate love.”1 For us, the Bedouin replied, passionate love means looking at the beloved and perhaps kissing her, whereupon he asked al-Aṣma‘ī about the opinion of town dwellers. Al-Aṣma‘ī, who lived in Basra, answered that for them passionate love means parting the legs of the beloved and mounting her. This nefarious definition upset the Bedouin, who exclaimed, “You are not a lover [‘āshiq]; you only want a child!”2 The anecdote illustrates a hot topic in the early Arabic literary discourse, the nature and meaning of love, which was discussed in Arabic literature from Jāḥiẓ (d. 255/868 or 869) onwards, in belles lettres as well as other genres.3 Early on, the dividing line was precisely between the chaste love connected to the Bedouins and their pure lifestyle (ḥubb badawī) and the sexually fulfilled love connected to the urban lifestyle (ḥubb ḥaḍarī). Some littérateurs claimed that physical intimacy is insignificant for true love and perhaps even deleterious for the loving couple, a position often associated with “courtly love.”4 Others claimed that sexual union is necessary for the love relationship, at least if it is licit. Some of the most radical ideas in this respect were conveyed by the flourishing genre of erotic literature. This essay will discuss the view of erotic love in the earliest extant 215

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures Arabic erotic handbook, Jawāmi‘ al-ladhdha (Encyclopedia of Pleasure), which was probably written in the late tenth century by a certain ‘Alī b. Naṣr al-Kātib.5 One of the interesting features of this book is the central position of the female beloved and her desire, which has to be satisfied for the sake of marital harmony and mutual love.

Love and the Beloved in Early Arabic Literature The Bedouin type of love was probably more a literary motif than based on real experience at the time of al-Aṣma‘ī, at least in the Abbasid urban centers, where a more dissolute lifestyle flourished.6 The chaste Bedouin style of love was frequently idealized in literature on love from the ninth century onwards, and the motif of unfulfilled love, “refined yearning,” came to dominate love poetry.7 The famous handbook of etiquette al-Muwashshā by al-Washshā’ (d. 325/936) conveys the idea that love is not only a feeling, but also a social ideal and a way of behavior for refined people.8 The prerequisite for this type of love is chastity.9 The goal of refined love seems to be the lover’s self-representation rather than uniting with the beloved. Unfulfilled love enables the lover to express his yearning and suffering in poetic terms.10 The beloved, on the other hand, is often a somewhat detached and vague figure.11 What is more, courtly love poetry from the ninth and tenth centuries tends to describe the female beloved in unflattering terms; the demanding and unfaithful beloved is a recurrent motif.12 Nonetheless, women seem to have played an important role in the courtly environment, many examples of which can be found in Muwashshā.13 Meanwhile the word ‘ishq (passionate love) was, controversially, introduced as one of the words for spiritual love by tenth-century Sufis in Baghdad.14 The meaning of spiritual love and the metaphorical use of the many words for love continued to be discussed among the Sufis.15 According to the tenth-century Sufi al-Daylamī, spiritual love is experienced in eleven stages, and ‘ishq is its last stage and culmination.16 For others, ‘ishq meant excessive love and thus something destructive and harmful.17 In medical and philosophical discourses, passionate and excessive love was considered a psychological condition with 216

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Pleasing the Beloved physical consequences.18 In the view of physicians, the lover’s excessive obsession with the beloved prevents him or her from functioning normally and disrupts the natural balance in the body. In the eleventh century, Abū Sa‘īd b.  Bakhtīshū‘ (d. ca. 450/1058) argued that ‘ishq is an illness precisely because of its combination of excessive love and sexual desire.19 Accordingly, he defined ‘ishq as an abnormality, whereas a natural, and therefore sound, sexual drive is characterized by the wish to have children, an opinion that he ascribes to Plato but which he obviously shares.20 Along a similar line, Ibn Sīnā (d. 428/1037) maintained that the desire for sexual union belongs to the animal soul, and it can only be respectable if it has a rational purpose, such as begetting a child, which is only possible with a wife or female slave.21 Love does not seem to be an issue here; wives and concubines were legal partners, but not necessarily beloveds. While the association between chaste love and refinement was fashionable at the time of Ibn Dāwūd and al-Washshā’, sensual love was apparently cherished and praised by others. Legal literature encouraged sensuality between spouses and the positive effect of sex on marriage is stressed in hadiths.22 The most important concern for legal literature on sex, however, is that the relationship is licit. Physicians sometimes stressed the positive effects of coition, but without relating it to love.23 They could, for example, recommend the patient have sexual intercourse with someone other than the beloved as a cure for passionate love and a distraction from the beloved.24 This recommendation depicts sexual desire as detached from love and was evidently mostly given to men, who could buy slave concubines for this kind of therapeutic sex.

The Encyclopedia of Pleasure and the Nature of Love The Encyclopedia of Pleasure, the earliest extant erotic manual in Arabic, is to a large degree concerned with medicine. Like earlier Arabic physicians, its author ‘Alī b.  Naṣr stresses the many positive health effects of coition. Compared to pure medical works, however, where sex is often detached from love, Ibn Naṣr emphasizes the positive effects of sex for 217

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures romantic relationships.25 Moreover, sexual intercourse is salutary for the whole person – mind and body and soul – as the following paragraph relates: Earlier sexologists [al-mutaqaddimūn fī ‘ilm al-bāh] explained that coitus gives fire to the soul [nafs], joy to the heart, renewal of intimacy [ulfa and uns], increase in the body, consolation of the eye, sharpness of the mind, brightness of the intellect, assurance and permanence of the pledge, solidity of love, continuance of affection [maḥabba], and the recovering of disunion. In taking a woman there is happiness for the hearts, pleasure for the souls, treatment for the chest, the calming of passion and the heat of the man.26

It is not clear who the earlier “sexologists” are, but presumably they are physicians; ‘ilm al-bāh is a predominantly medical science.27 The descriptions of the positive effects of coitus that he attributes to these earlier physicians, however, are not evidently supported by the sources to which we have access. The idea that sexual intercourse is not only a source of happiness and love but also beneficial for the intellect seems rather unique. Perhaps the author exaggerated a bit in order to make his point clear. Nevertheless, a key idea in this paragraph is that sexual union ignites love as well as strengthening it and making it last, an idea that, as we will see, is central in Ibn Naṣr’s theory of love. Ibn Naṣr mentions some of the various opinions about the meaning and nature of love, but instead of dismissing the ideas with which he does not agree he tries to give them logical explanations. People who love (ahl al-hawā) can be divided into two factions as to their view of the role of sex in romantic relationships, and he explains; those who regard sex as a necessary component of a romantic relationship and those who maintain that sex and love are incompatible.28 The first faction argues that coition increases affection (maḥabba) and intimacy (uns) and calls it “the nails of love” because it fastens the bond between lovers, making it stronger and more enduring.29 The second faction claims that sexual union destroys friendship (wudd) and extinguishes the fire of love. In this division, Ibn Naṣr obviously hints at al-Washshā’, who also mentions a group of people who uses the metaphor “nails of love.” Contrary to Ibn Naṣr, however, al-Washshā’ criticizes these people.30 They are the people of adultery and obscene language, he claims; their love is corrupt and 218

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Pleasing the Beloved devoid of faithfulness.31 They are only looking for obscenity, al-Washshā’ declares, and “they call it the nails of love.”32 Nonetheless, their immorality will prove to be devastating, al-Washshā’ continues, as sinfulness is not compatible with love but rather weakens passion and breaks the bonds of love. In this line of reasoning, love is a moral quality, not a psychological one. The obscenities these people are looking for are obviously illicit sexual acts. It is not clear, however, what effect licit sexual acts have on love, or whether this type of refined love can ever occur in a licit relationship. Whereas al-Washshā’ sharply criticizes those who regard sexual union as essential for a romantic relationship, they obviously have Ibn Naṣr’s support. The differences in opinion have to do with how a person loves, he argues, and the effects of sexual acts depend on whether one loves someone for her or his own sake (dhāt al-ma‘shūq) or for a goal (gharaḍ).33 It is not possible to reserve passionate love for one kind of relationship and ordinary love for another, merely on account of the type of relationship.34 Love for the beloved’s own sake is strengthened by sexual intercourse: the more the better. Conversely, sexual abstinence may extinguish love. In this regard, it does not matter if love is licit or not. Love for a goal (spiritual love), on the other hand, thrives on sexual abstinence, and the more sex a couple has, the faster this type of love will vanish. The “goal of love” that Ibn Naṣr refers to here is obviously spiritual union. He quotes mystical reasoning, attributed to “wise men” (ḥukamā’), who reasoned along the following lines. Loving another person’s soul (nafs) is a way of getting knowledge (ma‘rifa, i.e., gnosis) about one’s own soul. In order for love to occur, there has to be a similarity between the souls of the lover and the beloved. Hence, the soul of the beloved is a mirror of the lover’s soul.35 Pure souls will recognize each other and unite, while the bodies are irrelevant; they are merely the occasion for the souls to recognize each other. It will take a longer time for impure souls to reach gnosis, and they will have to frequent the bodily image of the beloved for a while until they are able to set it aside. Unrefined lovers, on the other hand, take resort to bodies and bestial pleasures because they are not capable of the pure love of the soul. The idea that love has a higher goal is commonplace in mystical and philosophical reasoning from the same period. The philosophical encyclopedia of the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwān al-ṣafā’), which 219

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures may be contemporary with the Encyclopedia of Pleasure, describes various philosophical opinions about ‘ishq.36 The Brethren of Purity maintain, for instance, that the ultimate goal (gharaḍ) of ‘ishq and of men’s infatuation with beautiful bodies and attractive women is to awaken the souls from negligence and provide them with an exercise in turning away and raising themselves from sensual and corporeal matters.37 The Brethren of Purity attribute a different gharaḍ to women’s love for men, however; the goal of women’s ‘ishq is the same as that of animals, namely reproduction (baq’ al-nasl).38 Ibn Naṣr does not only refer to the philosophical and mystical traditions, he also brings up the chaste love connected to the pure lifestyle of the Bedouins and mentions some of the passionate Bedouin lovers.39 For the Bedouins, ‘ishq is passionate love, love that lasts forever or until the lover dies of grief.40 Nonetheless, their seemingly all-encompassing love is in actual fact not real love, Ibn Naṣr seems to claim, on the basis of a sociological explanation. Nomads are not burdened by the responsibilities weighing on the shoulders of town dwellers and farmers; neither do they have good company or recreation to keep them occupied. Unoccupied and bored, they fill their time with thinking about an unattainable beloved and if they do not have any outlet for their sexuality they will direct their sexual desire to her. However, the Bedouin love is illusory, Ibn Naṣr seems to believe, as this kind of love will pass away as soon as it is fulfilled. The Bedouin type of love is in effect devoid of intimacy, which sexologists (al-‘ulamā’ bi asbāb al-bāh) claim is fundamental for erotic love, according to Ibn Naṣr.41 He finds a similar attitude to love among men who are more interested in conquering a beloved than in the beloved herself. After sexual union is accomplished, this type of lover will be bored and needs to be away from the beloved in order to revitalize desire. Ibn Naṣr gives another explanation for the diverse effects of sexual union on love. The type of love that is weakened by sexual union is sensual (ḥissī), he claims, whereas the love that is consolidated by sexual union is intellectual (fikrī).42 He does not explain what he means with these two terms, but he gives an example that shows that it may be difficult to distinguish the two types of love. A  man who loves his wife or concubine 220

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Pleasing the Beloved may be temporarily unable to carry out sexual intercourse due to a disagreement or quarrel between them. At this point, he may think that he has lost sexual interest in her because his love to her was sensual and thus transient. This may lead him to divorce her, only to discover that he misses her and wants her back. If he keeps longing for her even after a long time, his love for her was in truth intellectual. Ibn Naṣr therefore advises men to have patience and endure moments of hardship with their beloved. It is not stated whether women’s love can also be intellectual, but throughout the book women’s role in the love relationship is considered significant and men are assumed to seek their love, as we will see below. The ideal is a marriage based on love, even if the legal implications, and perhaps also the intellectual and emotional features, are thought to be different for women and men.

Encyclopedia of Pleasure: A Sexual Ethic for the Elite Encyclopedia of Pleasure influenced later Arabic erotica and is quoted by several authors, among others the fifteenth-century religious scholar al-Suyūṭi.43 Despite its obvious significance, however, there is no complete and scholarly edition of the Encyclopedia of Pleasure and it is very little studied.44 For this study, I rely on three manuscripts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.45 The book itself is rarely mentioned by biographers, except by Ḥājī Khalīfa (d. 1067/1657), who identifies the writer as “the well-known” Abū Naṣr Manṣūr b.  ‘Alī al-Kātib al-Samānī.46 This name is not consistent with the name of the author written on the three manuscripts used in this study, which were all produced long before Hājī Khalīfa’s time. It seems likely that the writer is an Abū al-Ḥasan ‘Alī b. Naṣr al-Kātib who died 377/987, according to Ibn al-Nadīm.47 Ibn al-Nadīm does not mention the Encyclopedia of Pleasure, but the other books attributed to him in Fihrist are, like the Encyclopedia, about courtly etiquette and refinement: Iṣlāḥ al-Akhlāq (Improving the character), Adab al-Sulṭān (The Etiquette of the Sovereign), Kitāb al-Barāʿa (The Book of Excellence or The Book on Eloquence), and Suḥbat al-Sulṭān (The Book of Keeping Company with the Ruler). In addition, Ibn al-Nadīm notes, Ibn Naṣr wrote 221

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures more books that he probably did not finish. His father (or grandfather) was a physician, which may explain his medical knowledge. The content of the Encyclopedia of Pleasure seems to owe much to the relatively tolerant and cosmopolitan intellectual environment during the Būyid rule of Baghdad (945–1055), with its sometime-libertine outlook and eclectic attitude to religion.48 The Būyids were Shiites, yet supported a Sunni caliph. Ibn Naṣr, who was a kātib (secretary of the chancery), was apparently a Shiite. He devotes one chapter to temporary marriage (mut‘a), which he endorses as a safe alternative to illicit relationships with women. While Shiite authorities supported this, he cites Sunni authorities as well: he turns to the Islamic school that supports his argument best.49 One of the striking features in the Encyclopedia of Pleasure is that sexual behavior and erotic love are intrinsically linked to an aristocratic code of conduct; it offers a sexual ethic for the elite. Here again it has something in common with Muwashshā by al-Washshā’, which was possibly written some 50 years earlier and addressed the same audience. Whereas Muwashshā proposes chastity as an ideal for refined people, however, the Encyclopedia of Pleasure encourages them to practice sophisticated sex. The idea is that the elite (al-khāṣṣa) should practice sex with refinement, so as to distinguish themselves from the brutish sexual behavior of animals and common people (al-‘āmma). This elitist vision is outlined in his introduction to the book: As man shares it [coition] with animals, whereas he alone possesses the excellence of language, he should, being subject to reason and the obligations of courtesy and superiority, whenever he desires it and unites with the one he loves, use the good manners and polite speech that distinguish him from animals, as to their brutal and rash way of doing it. By means of using his distinction, employing his consideration, committing acts of beauty, and proceeding with her in the manner of the noble character, he will achieve the excellence of virtue [muruwwa] and combine the characteristics of chivalry [futuwwa]. Socrates is related to have said that sexual intercourse without cordiality [mu’ānasa] is crude. Because of the predominance of the animal nature in common people and their similarity to cattle

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Pleasing the Beloved in examples and analogies, as far as the path of courtesy is concealed for them and the procedures [of behaving well in coition] are unintelligible to them, it is required to put an example to work towards, and a presentation to refer to so that the intelligent person may turn away from their course and adorn himself with his distinction. It is said that complete muruwwa is to avoid common people.50

Although this advice is evidently directed to men – men are the agents through all the procedures that lead to refined sex – its ultimate goal is mutual pleasure and harmony. The ideal lover, as laid out in the book, is well informed, well mannered, and attentive to the wishes and feelings of the partner. This lover is encouraged to strive for virtue by means of his behavior towards his beloved and sexual partner, giving muruwwa a new and somewhat remarkable meaning. In so doing, he is in charge of not only his own, but also the beloved’s proceeding along the path of courtesy, while ensuring that their relationship remains cordial. The book provides him with everything he needs to know to do so: it includes philosophical, medical and religious learning, as well as amusing and titillating anecdotes and poetry. It comprises extensive renderings from the Greek and Arabic medical tradition as well as Persian and Indian erotic wisdom.51

The Beloved in the Encyclopedia of Pleasure The Encyclopedia of Pleasure contains a “sociology of sexual relations” that is unique in its positive evaluation of various sexual categories.52 Love couples can comprise a man and a woman, a man and a man, or a woman and a woman.53 These categories are described in one section each, without denouncement.54 A  considerable part of the section on man-man love consists of poetry, anecdotes, and joking debates from the Abbasid literary tradition, where the advantages and the disadvantages (for a man) of taking a girl or a boy as a lover are compared.55 A boy may be a ‘ashīq (male beloved), but he will in that case behave like an ‘ashīqa (female beloved).56 The larger part of the book, however, is about heterosexual erotic love, preferably but not necessarily in the context of marriage. Various 223

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures sexual positions and techniques are discussed and the female beloved is scrutinized from every angle. Indeed, the female beloved is perhaps the main object of study in this book. As we have seen, the treatment of the female beloved was considered crucial for the aspiring sophisticated male elite, as the ideal sexual relationship was built on cordiality and mutual pleasure. In this regard, the author conveys an intriguing idea: not only is mutual sexual pleasure significant, but in fact the most powerful tool to accomplish and strengthen love is simultaneous orgasm, that is, simultaneous male and female ejaculation.57 Arab physicians were influenced by Galen, who held that both men and women produce semen, and that reproduction occurs when the male and female seed blend. In the Encyclopedia of Pleasure, however, simultaneous orgasm is not a matter of reproduction but of love: “The mixing of his and her seminal fluid is the most efficient in assuring love [mawadda] and mutual affection.”58 In accordance with Ibn Naṣr’s definition of manly muruwwa, it is the man’s responsibility to ensure that his ejaculation coincides with the woman’s and thus secures their love: “The man has to endeavor so that his ejaculation coincides with her at their first meeting. That will make her heart favorably disposed to him and it is the most powerful way of assuring love [mawadda] between them. If it happens in the beginning [of their relationship?], their love [widd] will last and their affection [maḥabba] be complete.”59 To be able to do this, the man must have knowledge about the beloved’s sexual desire and the prerequisites to satisfy it. This can be achieved with some education and experience. Ibn Naṣr devotes considerable space to the anatomy of women and their various sexual temperaments; he also includes precise techniques for giving them orgasm.60 He employs a scientific approach, as it were, for the study of women’s desires, instead of simply asking them what they enjoy. Women are categorized with regard to their physical dispositions and relationship status, with curious results. For example, he identifies 13 types of women in terms of their sexual desire, differentiated by age, physical constitutions, and marital status. Five of these groups do not like sexual intercourse; five groups love it, and three groups like it sometimes and sometimes not. He identifies eight different types of women in terms of the nature of their orgasms, which depend on their physical constitutions. Each of these types is divided 224

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Pleasing the Beloved into three subgroups according to the woman’s marital situation. The Encyclopedia is full of similar taxonomies; there are, for example, 13 ways of women’s walking, depending on physical constitution, marital status, and degree of lustfulness. The author shares this passion for taxonomies with his contemporaries and with the (largely Indian and Persian) sources that he cites.61

The Lover’s Duty The classifications of women in the Encyclopedia of Pleasure are there in order to teach men how to treat women and how to make her desire compatible with his, so that they can together reach the highest form of pleasure. All women are potential sexual partners but the man has to figure out to which category his woman belongs. He has to know what type of desire she has, and whether it is visible (ẓāhir) or hidden (bāṭin).62 He also has to consider her age, her body type, and her natural disposition in order to treat her the best way. When he knows that, he can act in agreement with her constitution, so that they reach harmony. If the woman reaches orgasm quickly, the man has to hold her back. The author gives some suggestions. He can distract her mind by means of elegant conversation, beautiful poetry or song, or playing chess (shaṭranj) with her.63 He can also take a walk in the gardens with her, if she is one of the women who leave their houses. If she instead reaches orgasm slowly, he has to be very careful that he does not ejaculate before her, as that could make her go out of her mind.64 In this case, the author tells about five arts of quickening a woman’s orgasm, including kissing and stroking. Whereas later erotic manuals focus on the beauty of the woman and its significance for men’s potency, Ibn Naṣr emphasizes the appearance and behavior of men. They should take care of their appearance and use perfume. They should also be anxious to please, Ibn Naṣr advises: “Know that you win women’s affection only by being in harmony with them, and you cannot be in harmony without knowing how to comply with them.”65 This is quite a demanding task due to women’s faulty character, which Ibn Naṣr describes in accordance with a recurrent misogynistic trend in early Islamic literature, something that it undeniably has in common with early Christian and Jewish literature.66 Women are assumed to be quarrelsome 225

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures and unfaithful, but their flaws do not seem to be reason enough for diminishing their importance or the significance of their satisfaction. Ibn Naṣr asserts that men’s greatest pleasure is to see their women sincerely enjoying sex for their own sake. He has himself investigated the sexual wishes of a number of men and come to the conclusion that all men want a woman who loses herself in sexual pleasure.67 Men are also instructed how to behave before and after intercourse so as to make the beloved feel comfortable and secure. They should use kisses, conversation, and humor to make her relax.68 It is particularly important to talk after coition, as otherwise the beloved may feel embarrassed and regret what she has done. Men should be extra careful when making love to their free wives, as they are sensible and may feel humiliated by exposing themselves during coition.69 Therefore, men should avoid challenging sexual positions with them. Slave concubines, on the other hand, demand the more challenging positions in order to feel pleasure, and it would be wrong to deny them that.70 The refined man has thus a capacity for satisfying both the desires of honorable free women and those of concubines.

Concluding Remarks The Encyclopedia of Pleasure reveals the multitude of literary discourses and the receptive intellectual and cultural atmosphere during the Abbasid Empire. The work incorporates ideas about love that prevailed in Western Asia in late antiquity and the early medieval era, and the author quotes and discusses medical, religious, and philosophical sources. As the earliest surviving work of erotic literature in Arabic and one that draws on a broad array of scholarship, it is cited in several later erotic works and can probably be regarded as the most important in the genre. As such, it indeed influenced later literature, but its ideas were given new meanings. Most importantly, it presents the rather striking view that women’s sexual pleasure is central for the mutual happiness of the love couple. The idea of mutual pleasure is prevalent in later Islamic texts on sex and marriage, but often this conflicts with another established notion, namely that of ḥusn al-taba“ul, women’s required obedience and devotion 226

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Pleasing the Beloved to their husbands and masters. An example is the well-known Islamic scholar al-Suyūṭī, who lived in late fifteenth-century Cairo. He quotes earlier erotic literature in his many Islamic books on love and sex, among them the Encyclopedia of Pleasure. Contrary to Ibn Naṣr, however, he seems to regard matrimonial happiness as being women’s responsibility. Women should make themselves attractive for their husbands and be sexually available to them, in all circumstances and whatever they are doing.71 Sexual harmony depends on the woman’s total submission to her husband or master’s wishes and indifference to her own.72 The same idea occurs in other Islamic erotic works and marriage handbooks, even those in which the need for mutual sexual satisfaction is stressed and the pleasure of the woman considered important  – for example in the chapter on marriage in Iḥyā’ ‘Ulūm al-Dīn by al-Ghazālī (d. 505–1111). In order to achieve matrimonial harmony women are required to obey their husbands and be submissive and beautiful, according to this later literature. By contrast, the female beloved in the Encyclopedia of Pleasure is an erotic subject and the lover has to adjust to her wishes. He is responsible for her satisfaction and thus for the success of their relationship. The woman’s love for the man depends on her pleasure and, by the same token, the man’s pleasure depends on the woman’s pleasure. The Encyclopedia of Pleasure is often contradictory, reflecting differences among its sources, and perhaps it is futile to search for a single coherent theory. Yet, one indisputably central idea is that love for the beloved’s own sake (dhāt al-ma‘shūq) is strengthened by sexual union. In this case, love and sex are interdependent; sex strengthens love and makes it last, and love is necessary for a full experience of pleasure. It is tempting to view the love for the beloved’s own sake, which is erotic and at the same time intellectual, as the Ibn Naṣr’s vision of true love. In that case, true love does not depend on whether the relationship is licit or not, even though marriage is the ideal. True love means a true appreciation of the beloved’s pleasure, which is integral to the lover’s own pleasure. The beloved’s pleasure, in turn, depends on the lover’s courteous behavior and attention to her needs. Thus, for the tenth-century gentleman to whom Ibn Naṣr addresses his book, the treatment of the female beloved is an indication of his distinction. 227

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Notes 1. In a variant, a Bedouin is asked to define the word zinā (fornication); ‘Abdullāh b. Muslim b. Qutayba, ‘Uyūn al-Akhbār, ed. Yūsuf ‘Alī Ṭawīl (Beirut: Dār Kutub al-‘Ilmiyya, 1985), 4:92. 2. Abū Ṭayyib Muḥammad b.  Isḥāq al-Washshā’, Kitāb al-Muwashshā, ed. Rudolphe Brünnow (Leiden: Brill, 1886), 77. 3. Cf. Abū ‘Uthmān b.  Baḥr Jāḥiẓ, “Al-Risāla fī al-nisā’,” in Rasā’il al-Jāḥiẓ, ed. ‘Abd al-Salām Muḥammad Hārūn (Cairo:  Maktabat al-Khānjī, 1399/1979), 2:139–59. For “theory of love”, cf. Lois Anita Giffen, Theory of Profane Love among the Arabs:  The Development of the Genre (New  York:  New  York University Press, 1971)  and Joseph Norment Bell, Love Theory in Later Hanbalite Islam (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1979). 4. Cf. Jean-Claude Vadet, L’esprit courtois en Orient dans les cinq premiers siècles de l’Hégire (Paris: G. P. Maisonneuve et Larose, 1968). 5. I am most grateful to Everett Rowson for sharing some of his knowledge about Jawāmi‘ al-Ladhdha with me. For an excellent summary and description of the book, see Rowson, “Arabic: Middle Ages to Nineteenth Century,” in Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature, ed. Gaétan Brulotte and John Phillips (New York: Routledge, 2006), 1:43–61. 6. Abdallah Cheikh-Moussa, “La négation d’Éros ou le ʿišq d’après deux épîtres d’al-Ǧâḥiẓ,” Studia Islamica 72 (1990): 72. 7. Cf. A.  Hamori, “Love Poetry (Ghazal),” in ʿAbbasid Belles-Lettres, ed. Julia Ashtiany et al., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 210–11, and Susanne Enderwitz, Liebe als Beruf:  al-ʿAbbās ibn al-Aḥnaf und das Ġazal (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1995), 27. 8. For example, al-Washshā’, Kitāb al-Muwashshā, 47. 9. Al-Washshā’, Kitāb al-Muwashshā, 77; Abū Bakr Muḥammad al-Iṣfahānī Ibn Dāwūd, Kitāb al-Zahra, ed. A. R. Nykl in collaboration with Ibrāhīm Tuqān (Beirut, 1351/1932), 66. 10. Cf. Thomas Bauer, Liebe und Liebesdichtung in der arabischen Welt des 9 und 10 Jahrhunderts: Eine literatur- und mentalitatsgeschichtliche Studie des arabischen Gazal (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1998), 71. 11. Ibid., 66–7. 12. Ibid. and 70–1; see also Hamori, “Love Poetry (Ghazal),” 209. 13. Cf. Mohammed Ferid Ghazi, “Un groupe social: ‘Les Raffinés’ (Ẓurafā),” Studia Islamica 11 (1956): 43 and 54. 14. According to Annemarie Schimmel, it was probably Abū al-Ḥusayn al-Nūrī (d. 295/907) who introduced the word. Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 137. It was al-Ḥallāj (executed 309/922), however, who became notorious for using it for divine love. Ibid., 72 and 137.

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Pleasing the Beloved 15. For example, by ‘Alī b.  Muḥammad al-Daylamī, who lived in Shiraz ca. 352/963–392/1002, according to Joseph Norment Bell and Hassan Mahmood Abdul Latif Al Shafie in the introduction to their translation of Daylami’s Kitāb ‘Aṭf, entitled A Treatise on Mystical Love (Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press, 2008), xiv. The words for love are discussed extensively in this work. 16. Daylami, A Treatise on Mystical Love, 31. 17. The earliest example in Arabic is in al-Jāḥiẓ, Risāla fī al-Nisāʾ:  “ʿIshq is the name for what exceeds that which is called ḥubb.” Cited in Giffen, Theory of Profane Love, 85. Another instance is Abū Sa‘īd Ibn Bakhtishū‘, Al-Risāla fī al-Ṭibb wa al-Aḥdāth al-Nafsāniyya, ed. and trans. Felix Klein-Franke (Beirut: Dār al-Mashriq, 1986), 55. The idea is originally from Plato; for this and other motifs in early Arabic literature on love originating from Plato and Aristotle, see Bell, Love Theory, 4–5. 18. For love sickness in Greek medicine and philosophy and its parallels in Arabic sources, see Hans Hinrich Biesterfeldt and Dimitri Gutas, “The Malady of Love,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 104, 1 (1984):  21–55. For al-Rāzī’s (d. 925)  contradictory view of the effect of sexual intercourse, see Peter Pormann, “Al-Rāzī (d. 925) on the Benefits of Sex: A Clinician Caught between Philosophy and Medicine,” in O Ye Gentlemen:  Arabic Studies on Science and Literary Culture in Honour of Remke Kruk, ed. Arnoud Vrolijk and Jan P. Hogendijk (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 115–27. 19. Bakhtīshū‘, Risāla fī al-Ṭibb, 46. 20. Ibid., 48. 21. Ibn Sīna, Risāla fī al-ʿIshq; see “A Treatise on Love by Ibn Sina,” ed. and trans. Emil L. Fackenheim, Mediaeval Studies 7 (1945): 221–2. 22. Cf. Ze’ev Maghen, Virtues of the Flesh:  Passion and Purity in Early Islamic Jurisprudence (Leiden: Brill, 2005). 23. Coitus is, for example, useful against melancholy, according to Rāzī and Qusṭā b.  Lūqā, a view that may come from Rufus of Ephesus (fl. ca. 100). Pormann, “Al-Rāzī,” 116 and 124. See also Pormann and Emilie Savage-Smith, Medieval Islamic Medicine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 49 and 76n8. 24. Al-Rāzi (d. 313/925), “Kitāb al-bāh manāfi‘ihi wa maḍārrihi wa mudāwātihi,” in Nuzhat al-Aṣḥāb fī Mu‘āsharat al-Aḥbāb, ed. Aḥmad Farīd al-Mazīdī (Cairo: Dār al-Afāq al-‘Arabī, 2007), 326. He attributes this idea to Galen. The idea that melancholy can be cured with sexual intercourse may come from Aretaeus of Cappadocia. Gutas, Greek Philosophers, XII, 22. 25. As a matter of fact, the Encyclopedia of Pleasure is also full of examples where sex is detached from love, often in the form of licentious poems and anecdotes. Yet, in the author’s own theorizing, in what we may call his “theory of love,” love and sex are interdependent, as we will see.

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures 26. Abū al-Ḥasan ‘Alī b. Naṣr al-Kātib, Jawāmi‘ al-Ladhdha, MS Aya Sofya 3836, fol. 5b; MS Fatih 3729, fol. 5b, Süleymaniye Library, Istanbul. All translations from the Encyclopedia are mine. 27. ‘Ilm al-bāh means “the science of coitus.” For this discipline, see Patrick Franke, “Before scientia sexualis in Islamic Culture:  ilm al-bāh between Erotology, Medicine and Pornography,” Social Identities:  Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 18, no. 2 (2012): 163–7. The name of the chapter in the Encyclopedia of Pleasure, “The Chapter on the Merits of Sexual Intercourse and its Benefits” (Bāb faḍl al-nikāḥ wa manāfi‘ihi), resembles titles in medical works, which describe the benefits (manāfi‘ ) of sexual intercourse, for example, al-Rāzī’s Kitāb al-Bāh Manāfi‘ihi wa Maḍārrihi wa Mudāwātihi. 28. Almost an entire chapter is devoted to this discussion, “The Chapter on Lovers’ Opinions about Sexual Union” (madhāhib al-‘ushshāq fī al-mubāshara). MS Aya Sofya 3836, fols. 42a–49b; MS Fatih 3729, fols. 42a–50a. 29. MS Aya Sofya 3836, fol. 42a; MS Fatih 3729, fol. 42a. 30. Al-Washshā’, Kitāb al-Muwashshā, 75–6. I have, so far, not found the expression “nails of love” elsewhere in the early literature, and it is not clear yet whether Ibn Naṣr has quoted Kitāb al-Muwashshā here. Probably not, as his examples of poetry about this “group” differ from those of al-Washshā’. Al-Shayzarī, a Syrian physician who lived in the twelfth century, quotes parts of the text in Encyclopedia of Pleasure, and refers to ‘Alī b. Naṣr. Contrary to Ibn Naṣr, however, he criticizes this group. These people, he declares, are neither refined nor acting in accordance with muruwwa. ‘Abd al-Raḥmān b. Naṣr al-Shayzarī, Rawḍat al-Qulūb wa Nuzhat al-Muḥibb wa al-Maḥbūb, ed. David Semah and George J. Kanazi (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2003), 258. 31. Al-Washshā’, Kitāb al-Muwashshā, 75. 32. Ibid., 76. 33. MS Aya Sofya 3836, fols. 42b–43a; MS Fatih 3729, fol. 43a. 34. Compare with al-Jāḥiẓ; according to Cheikh-Moussa, he confined passionate love (‘ishq) to mistresses, whereas men may feel “ordinary” love (ḥubb) for their legal wives and concubines. Cheikh-Moussa, “La negation d’Éros,” 75. 35. The notion of similarity, or affinity, is commonplace in Arab-Islamic books on love; see Bell, Love Theory, 109–12. 36. Rasā’il Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’, 3:260–75. For this philosophical sect, see Godefroid DeCallataÿ, “Brethren of Purity (Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’),” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Third edition, ed. Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, Everett Rowson (Brill Online, 2014). Accessed 1 October, 2014. 37. Rasā’il Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’, 3:272. 38. Ibid.,3:268. 39. MS Aya Sofya 3836, fol. 43b; MS Fatih 3729, fol. 43b. 40. Ibid., fol. 44a; MS Fatih 3729, fol. 44a.

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Pleasing the Beloved 41. Ibid., fol. 44b; MS Fatih 3729, fol. 44b. 42. Ibid., fol. 46a; MS Fatih 3729, fol. 46a. 43. The encyclopedia is quoted by al-Shayzarī (fl. sixth/twelfth century), both in his Rawḍat al-Qulūb and al-Īḍāḥ fī Asrār al-Nikāḥ; Mughulṭāy (d. 762/1361), al-Wāḍiḥ al-Mubīn; al-Samaw’al (d. 570/1175), Kitāb Nuzhat al-Aṣḥāb; Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 751/1350), Akhbār al-Nisā’; and al-Suyūṭī (d. 911/1505), al-Wishāḥ. 44. The best study so far is the encyclopedia article by Rowson mentioned above, note 5. There is an edition from 2002 that is a transcription of an unidentified manuscript, which only covers the second half of the book and is attributed to the wrong author. There is also a translation. The translation is not scholarly, however, and often abridges or excludes difficult paragraphs. Abū al-Ḥasan ‘Alī b. Naṣr al-Kātib, Encyclopedia of Pleasure, trans. Adnan Jarkas and Salah Addin Khawwam (Toronto: Aleppo, 1977). 45. MS Aya Sofya 3836 (533/1139); MS Aya Sofya 3837 (634/1236); and MS Fatih 3729 (582/1186). Only the Fatih MS is complete. 46. Ḥājī Khalīfa (Kâtip Çelebi), Kashf al-Zunūn ʿan Asāmī al-Kutub wa al-Funūn, ed. Şerefettin Yaltkaya and Rifat Bilge (Istanbul:  Maarif matbaasi, 1941–3), 1:571. The author given by Ḥājjī Khalīfa is probably the Samanid scientist with the same name, a colleague of al-Bīrūnī, famous for his mathematic and astronomical writings. 47. Muḥammad b.  al-Nadīm, Kitāb al-Fihrist, ed. Riḍā Tajaddud (Beirut:  Dār al-Masīra, 1988), 145. This is suggested by Franz Rosenthal in “From Arabic Books and Manuscripts VI: Istanbul Materials for al-Kindī and as-Sarakhsī,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 76, no.  1 (1956):  31, and “Fiction and Reality: The Sources for the Role of Sex in Medieval Muslim Society,” in Society and the Sexes in Medieval Islam, ed. A. L. Al-Sayyid-Marsot, Malibu 1979, 3–22. He also suggests a later date, elsewhere, though; see “Male and Female:  Described and Compared,” in Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Literature, ed. J. W. Wright Jr. and Everett K. Rowson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 25 and 45n7. Rowson assumes that the book was written in the late tenth century; see Rowson, “Arabic,” 48. 48. Cf. Joel Kraemer, Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam: The Cultural Revival during the Buyid Age (Leiden: Brill, 1986). 49. He has given a chapter the title “Māliki School of Law.” Its subject is heterosexual anal intercourse, which he claims the Māliki School endorses, a belief that is not completely justified, according to Rowson, “Arabic,” 50. 50. MS Aya Sofya 3836, fols. 1b–2a; MS Fatih 3729, fols. 1b–2a. For futuwwa as a specific set of qualities enabling group solidarity that were cherished among the fityān, see Cl. Cahen and Fr. Taeschner, “futuwwa,” in Encyclopedia of Islam, Second Edition, ed. P.  Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.  E. Bosworth, E.  van

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures Donzel, and W.  P. Heinrichs (Leiden:  Brill, 1960–2005). For muruwwa, see B. Farès, ed., “Murū’a,” in Bearman et al. Encylopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. Al-Washshā’ devotes a chapter to muruwwa in Kitāb al-Muwashshā, 30–3. In his description, muruwwa comprises piety and seems to be rather different from Ibn Naṣr’s understanding of the concept. 51. See Myrne, “Discussing ghayra,” for a quotation/adaption from a book attributed to Arṭiyās al-Rūmī, probably Aretaeus of Cappadocia, on erotic jealousy. Two books with female protagonists that are quoted extensively in Encyclopedia of Pleasure are listed by Ibn al-Nadīm in a short entry called “The names of Books Composed about Sexual Intercourse, Persian, Indian, Greek and Arab in the Form of Titillating Stories” (Asmā’ al-kutub al-mu’allafa fī al-bāh al-fārisī wa al-Hindī wa al-Rūmī wa al-‘arabī ‘alā ṭarīq al-ḥadīth al-mushbiq), Ibn al-Nadīm, Kitāb al-Fihrist, 376. These are Burdān (in the Jawāmi‘ MS the name is spelled variously Burjān and Burḥān) and Ḥabā’ib, by Abū Ḥassān al-Namlī (a ninth-century writer connected to the ‘Abbāsid court; see Kitāb al-Fihrist, 169) and Bunyān Dukht. 52. See Rowson, “Arabic,” 49. 53. MS Aya Sofya 3836, fols. 41b ff. 54. Except for baghā’, which is “disgraceful;” MS Aya Sofya, fols. 42a and 70b. The word signifies male passive homosexuality, according to Rowson, and male prostitution, according to Khawwam. Rowson, “The Categorization of Gender and Sexual Irregularity in Medieval Arabic Vice Lists,” in Body Guards:  The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New  York:  Routledge, 1991), 67 and ‘Alī b.  Naṣr al-Kātib, Encyclopedia of Pleasure, 108. 55. For these debates, see Rosenthal, “Male and Female.” 56. MS Aya Sofya 3836, fol. 75b. 57. The word for men’s as well as women’s orgasm is inzāl, “ejaculation,” as it was believed that both women and men ejaculate, although the nature of their respective ejaculation and the quality of their semen were discussed. In Encyclopedia of Pleasure, the author refers to Indian and Greek scholars’ views on the issue. 58. MS Fatih 3729, fol. 121b; MS Aya Sofya 3836, fol. 118a. 59. MS Aya Sofya 3837, fol. 27a; MS Fatih 3729, fol. 122a. “At their first meeting” should probably be “at their first sexual intercourse.” Ibn Naṣr also cites “the Indian,” who advises men not to have sexual intercourse with the woman at their first meeting. MS Aya Sofya 3837, fol. 37b. 60. MS Aya Sofya 3836, fols. 116a–17a; MS Fatih 3729, fols. 116b–17a. 61. The sources are still to be identified, however. Ibn Naṣr quotes extensively from someone he calls “the Indian,” or “the Indian philosopher.” He also cites Adālaqī (Auddālaki), one of the authorities quoted in Kamasutra. The book

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Pleasing the Beloved may owe to the early medieval Indian erotic tradition, when the categories of lovers had been expanded compared to the Kamasutra, and the descriptions of women in the various categories were more specific. Daud Ali, “Padmaśri’s Nāgarasarvasva and the World of Medieval Kāmśāstra,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 39, no. 1 (2011): 45. 62. MS Aya Sofya 3836, fol. 109a; MS Fatih 3729, fol. 110b. 63. Ibid. 64. MS Aya Sofya 3836109a-b, MS Fatih 3729, fol. 110b. Al-Ghazālī repeats this idea when he emphasizes the importance of women’s satisfaction: “Once the husband has attained his fulfillment, let him tarry until his wife attains hers. Her orgasm (inzāl) may be delayed, thus exciting her desire; to withdraw quickly is harmful to the woman. Difference in the nature of [their] reaching a climax causes discord whenever the husband ejaculates first. Congruence in attaining a climax is more gratifying to her because the man is not preoccupied with his own pleasure, but rather with hers; for it is likely that the woman might be shy.” Madelain Farah, Marriage and Sexuality in Islam: A Translation of al-Ghazālī’s Book on the Etiquette of Marriage from the Iḥyā’ (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1984), 107. 65. MS Aya Sofya 3837, fol. 26b; MS Fatih 3729, fol. 121b. 66. Cf. Nadia Maria El Cheikh, “In Search for the Ideal Spouse,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 45, no. 2 (2002): 179–96. 67. MS Aya Sofya 3836, fol. 103b; MS Fatih 3729, fol. 305b. 68. MS Aya Sofya 3837, fol. 41a; MS Fatih 3729, fol. 128b. 69. Ibid., fol. 83a; MS Fatih 3729, fol. 168a. Ibn Naṣr devotes one chapter to sexual positions. 70. The representation of slave concubines in pre-modern Arabic erotic literature will be dealt with in a forthcoming study. 71. Cf. Jalāl al-Dīn ‘Abd al-Raḥmān al-Suyūṭī, Nuzhat al-Muta’ammil wa Murshid al-Muta’ahhil, ed. Muḥammad al-Tūnjī (Beirut: Dār Amwāj li al-Ṭibā‘a, 1989), 52 and Fann al-Hawā wa al-Mut‘a bayna al-Unūtha wa al-Rujūla: Al-Mawsūm Shaqā’iq al-Utrunj fī Raqā’iq al-Ghunj, ed. Ḥusayn ‘Umar Ḥamāda (Damascus: Dār al-Wathā’iq, 2008), 80–1 (attributed to al-Tīfāshī). 72. On al-Suyūṭī, cf. Haytham Sarḥān, Khiṭāb al-Jins:  Muqārabāt fī al-Adab al-ʿArabī al-Qadīm (Beirut: al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-‘Arabī, 2008), 157–67.

Bibliography ‘Alī b. Naṣr al-Kātib, Abū al-Ḥasan. Encyclopedia of Pleasure. Translated by Adnan Jarkas and Salah Addin Khawwam. Toronto: Aleppo, 1977. ——— Jawāmi‘ al-Ladhdha. MSS Aya Sofya, 3836, 3837, MS Fatih, 3729, Süleymaniye Library, Istanbul.

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures Ali, Daud. “Padmaśri’s Nāgarasarvasva and the World of Medieval Kāmśāstra.” Journal of Indian Philosophy 39, no. 1 (2011): 41–62. Bauer, Thomas. Liebe und Liebesdichtung in der arabischen Welt des 9.  und 10. Jahrhunderts: Eine literatur- und mentalitatsgeschichtliche Studie des arabischen Gazal. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1998. Bell, Joseph Norment. Love Theory in Later Hanbalite Islam. Albany:  State University of New York Press, 1979. Biesterfeldt, Hans Hinrich and Dimitri Gutas. “The Malady of Love.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 104, 1 (1984): 21–55. Cahen, Cl., and Fr. Taeschner. “futuwwa.” In Encyclopedia of Islam, Second Edition, edited by P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W. P. Heinrichs. Leiden: Brill, 1960–2005. Cheikh-Moussa, Abdallah. “La négation d’Éros ou le ʿišq d’après deux épîtres d’al-Ǧâḥiẓ.” Studia Islamica 72 (1990): 71–119. ——— A Treatise on Mystical Love. Translated by Joseph Norment Bell and Hassan Mahmood Abdul Latif Al Shafie. Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press, 2005. DeCallataÿ, Godefroid. “Brethren of Purity (Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’).” In Encyclopaedia of Islam, Third Edition, edited by Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, and Everett K. Rowson. Brill Online, 2014. Accessed 1 October, 2014. El Cheikh, Nadia Maria. “In Search for the Ideal Spouse.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 45, no. 2 (2002): 179–96. Enderwitz, Susanne. Liebe als Beruf:  al-‘Abbās ibn al-Aḥnaf und das Ġazal. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1995. Farah, Madelain. Marriage and Sexuality in Islam:  A  Translation of al-Ghazālī’s Book on the Etiquette of Marriage from the Iḥyā’. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1984. Farès, B., ed. “Murū’a.” In Encyclopedia of Islam, Second Edition, edited by P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W. P. Heinrichs. Leiden: Brill, 1960–2005. Franke, Patrick. “Before scientia sexualis in Islamic Culture:  ‘ilm al-bāh between Erotology, Medicine and Pornography.” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 18, no. 2 (2012): 161–73. Ghazi, Mohammed Ferid. “Un groupe social:  ‘Les Raffinés’ (Ẓurafā’).” Studia Islamica 11 (1956): 39–71. Giffen, Lois Anita. Theory of Profane Love among the Arabs: The Development of the Genre. New York: New York University Press, 1971. Ḥājī Khalīfa (Katib Çelebi). Kashf al-Ẓunūn ‘an Asāmī al-Kutub wa al-Funūn. Edited by Şerefettin Yaltkaya and Rifat Bilge. 2 vols. Istanbul: Maarif Matbaasi, 1941–3.

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Pleasing the Beloved Hamori, A. “Love Poetry (Ghazal).” In ʿAbbasid Belles-Lettres, edited by Julia Ashtiany et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1990), 201–18. Ibn Bakhtishū‘, Abū Sa‘īd. Al-Risāla fī al-Ṭibb wa al-Aḥdāth al-Nafsāniyya. Edited and translated by Felix Klein-Franke. Beirut: Dār al-Mashriq, 1986. Ibn Dāwūd, Abū Bakr Muḥammad al-Iṣfahānī. Kitāb al-Zahra. Edited by A. R. Nykl in collaboration with Ibrāhīm Tuqān. Beirut, 1351/1932. Ibn al-Nadīm, Muḥammad. Kitāb al-Fihrist. Edited by Riḍā Tajaddud. Beirut: Dār al-Masīra, 1988. Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya. Akhbār al-Nisā’. Edited by ‘Abd al-Majīd Ṭu‘ma al-Ḥalabī. Beirut: Dār al-Ma‘rifa, 1997. Ibn Qutayba, ‘Abdullāh b.  Muslim. ‘Uyūn al-Akhbār. Edited by Yūsuf ‘Alī Ṭawīl. 2 vols. Beirut: Dār Kutub al-‘Ilmiyya, 1985. Ibn Sīna, Abū ‘Alī Ḥusayn ‘Abdullāh. “A Treatise on Love by Ibn Sina” [Risāla fī al-‘Ishq]. Edited and translated by Emil L. Fackenheim. Mediaeval Studies 7 (1945): 208–28. Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’. Rasā’il Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’. 4  vols. Cairo:  al-Maktabat al-‘Arabiyya, 1347/1928. Jāḥiẓ, Abū ‘Uthmān b. Baḥr. Rasā’il al-Jāḥiẓ. Edited by ‘Abd al-Salām Muḥammad Hārūn. 3 vols. Cairo: Maktabat al-Khānjī, 1399/1979. Kraemer, Joel. Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam: The Cultural Revival during the Buyid Age. Leiden: Brill, 1986. Maghen, Ze’ev. Virtues of the Flesh: Passion and Purity in Early Islamic Jurisprudence. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Montgomery, James. “Ẓarīf.” In Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, edited by P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W. P. Heinrichs. Leiden: Brill, 1960–2005. Mughulṭāy, ‘Alā’ al-Dīn b.  Qīlij. Al-Wāḍiḥ al-Mubīn fī man Ustushuda min al-Muḥibbīn. Beirut: Al-Anshār al-‘Arabī, 1997. Myrne, “Discussing ghayra in Abbasid Literature:  Jealousy as a Manly Virtue or Sign of Mutual Affection.” Journal of Abbasid Studies 1 (2014): 46–65. Najm al-Dīn ‘Alī b. ‘Umar b. ‘Alī al-Kātibī al-Qazwīnī [‘Alī b. Naṣr al-Kātib], Jawāmi‘ al-Ladhdha. Edited by ‘Abd al-Badī‘. Cairo: Dār al-Bayān al-ʿArabī, 1322/2002. Pormann, Peter. “Al-Rāzī (d. 925) on the Benefits of Sex: A Clinician Caught between Philosophy and Medicine.” In O Ye Gentlemen: Arabic Studies on Science and Literary Culture in Honour of Remke Kruk, edited by Arnoud Vrolijk and Jan P. Hogendijk, 24–54. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Pormann, Peter E., and Emilie Savage-Smith. Medieval Islamic Medicine. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. al-Rāzī, Abū Bakr. “Kitāb al-Bāh Manāfi‘ihi wa Maḍārrihi wa Mudāwātihi.” In Nuzhat al-Aṣḥāb fī Mu‘āsharat al-Aḥbāb, edited by Aḥmad Farīd al-Mazīdī, 291–370. Cairo: Dār al-Afāq al-‘Arabī, 2007.

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures Rosenthal, Franz.“From Arabic Books and Manuscripts VI: Istanbul Materials for al-Kindī and as-Sarakhsī.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 76, no.  1 (1956): 27–31. ——— “Fiction and Reality:  The Sources for the Role of Sex in Medieval Muslim Society.” In Society and the sexes in medieval Islam, edited by A. L. Al-Sayyid-Marsot. Malibu, (1979), 3–22. ——— “Male and Female:  Described and Compared.” In Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Literature, edited by J. W. Wright Jr. and Everett K. Rowson. New York: Columbia University Press, (1997), 4–54. Rowson, Everett K. “The Categorization of Gender and Sexual Irregularity in Medieval Arabic Vice Lists.” In Body Guards:  The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, edited by Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub. New  York: Routledge, (1991), 50–79. ——— “Arabic:  Middle Ages to Nineteenth Century.” In Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature, edited by Gaétan Brulotte and John Phillips. New  York: Routledge, (2006), 1:43–61. Al-Samaw’al, Ibn Yaḥyā al-Maghribī. Nuzhat al-Aṣḥāb fī Muʿāsharat al-Aḥbāb. Edited by Sayyid Kasrawī Ḥasan. Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2008. Sarḥān, Haytham. Khiṭāb al-Jins:  Muqārabāt fī al-Adab al-‘Arabī al-Qadīm. Beirut: al-Markaz al-Thaqāfī al-‘Arabī, 2008. Schimmel, Annemarie. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1975. al-Shayzarī, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān b.  Naṣr. Rawḍat al-Qulūb wa Nuzhat al-Muḥibb wa al-Maḥbūb. Edited by David Semah and George J. Kanazi. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2003. al-Suyūṭī, Jalāl al-Dīn ‘Abd al-Raḥmān. Nuzhat al-Muta’ammil wa Murshid al-Muta’ahhil. Edited by Muḥammad al-Tūnjī. Beirut:  Dār Amwāj li al-Ṭibā‘a, 1989. ——— Al-Wishāḥ fī Fawā’id al-Nikāḥ. Edited by Ṭal‘at Ḥasan ‘Abd al-Qawī. Damascus: Dār al-Kitāb al-‘Arabī, 2001. ——— Fann al-Hawā wa al-Mut‘a bayna al-Unūtha wa al-Rujūla:  Al-Mawsūm Shaqā’iq al-Utrunj fī Raqā’iq al-Ghunj. Edited by Ḥusayn ‘Umar Ḥamāda. Damascus: Dār al-Wathā’iq, 2008. Vadet, Jean-Claude. L’esprit courtois en Orient dans les cinq premiers siècles de l’Hégire. Paris: G. P. Maisonneuve et Larose, 1968. al-Washshā’, Abū Ṭayyib Muḥammad b.  Isḥāq. Kitāb al-Muwashshā. Edited by Rudolphe Brünnow. Leiden: Brill, 1886.

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10 Love and Lust in the Early Islamic Republic: Amir Hassan Cheheltan’s Revolution Street Paul Sprachman

For reasons that will soon become clear, Amir Hassan Cheheltan’s Revolution Street has yet to be published in Iran.1 The book has been translated into German as Teheran Revolutionsstraße (Munich:  P.  Kirchheim Verlag, 2009), into Norwegian as Teheran Revolusjonsgaten by Nina Zandjani (Oslo: Solum Vorlag, 2013), and into English as Revolution Street (London:  One World, 2014). Having appeared in translation outside of Iran before being approved for publication in the original in the Islamic Republic, Revolution Street invites comparison to another novel banned in its native land: Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which came out in French as L’insoutenable Légèreté de l’être in 1984, years before it became commercially available in post-communist Czechoslovakia as Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí. But as Michelle Woods has pointed out, Kundera considered the French “translation” of his novel to be “more authentic” than the original and seems to have altered the Czech text based on his reading of the authoritative translation.2 Revolution Street is unusual in post-revolutionary Persian fiction for reasons other than the fact that it can only appear in foreign dress. Like many dissident (digar-andīsh) Persian writing, Cheheltan’s novel does not 237

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures shy away from taboo topics, and in doing so differs from the great mass of so-called “commissioned” or “government-sponsored” (sifārashī) works published in Iran. I have translated a few of these approved writings into English, principally fiction related to the Iran–Iraq War (1980–8) and known collectively as “sacred defense literature” (adabiyāt-i difāʿ-i muqaddas).3 Unlike those works, for which there are ample supplies of paper and willing publishers, Revolution Street crosses a number of very bright red lines between what can and cannot be said publicly in the Islamic Republic. Specifically, the novel contains an account of what went on in Iran when the new regime was in its infancy, how it evolved from a shaky alliance of interests beset by enemies at home and abroad into a confident theocratic autocracy. Cheheltan takes readers inside Evin prison, where hundreds of enemies of the regime, many of whom members of the People’s Mujāhidīn, were tortured and executed. The novel also raises such touchy issues as:  who benefitted from the revolution? How did they benefit? How did they do damage to their souls to advance and maintain their positions in the post-revolutionary hierarchy? Apart from these questions, Cheheltan’s novel also speaks about lust and love making in ways Islamic Republican censors have determined disruptive to public decency. The focus of the present chapter is how the novel speaks of the transgressive nature of sexuality in post-revolutionary Iran where, according to the narrator, “even the most innocent gesture between a man and a woman becomes erotic” (131). It should be noted that the author’s scope is limited to his beloved Tehran, the once-green and welcoming Iranian capital of his childhood, now severely deformed and degraded by years of neglect and privation. In outline form, the story of Revolution Street presents the elements of a love triangle gone terribly wrong. “Dr” Fattāḥ, a self-taught hymen repairer with a successful surgery in an unfashionable part of Tehran, falls in love with Shahrzād, a patient of his, less than half his age, from a poor family living in the neighborhood. Fattāḥ’s rival for Shahrzād’s hand is Muṣṭafā, a man closer in age and background to Shahrzād working as a guard at Evin prison. No match for Fattāḥ with his powerful political connections and enormous wealth, Muṣṭafā plans to whisk Shahrzād away from Tehran to the north of Iran where he envisions an idyllic life for the couple far from the filth and corruption of the capital. Before they can escape, however, Muṣṭafā, in an effort to keep Shahrzād from Fattāḥ, arranges for her to be 238

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Love and Lust in the Early Islamic Republic placed in a cell at Evin, seemingly an act of mercy but one with disastrous consequences for his beloved. The novel begins with a brutally intrusive look at the object of the two men’s affection. This opening scene is the antithesis but for a few can detail how the beloved appears in traditional Persian literature. Shahrzād lies with her legs splayed “on a hospital bed covered with a grimy yellow sheet, spotted with blue and purple stains faded from repeated washing” (1). She winces in anticipation of the pain Fattāḥ is about to inflict on her privates, clearly visible in the glare of a flashlight held by a female nurse. Adding to the insult, Fattāḥ – to the delight of the nurse – belittles his patient and her “ilk” in the third person as though Shahrzād were not present or had no voice of her own, “These whores! They give it away for free, but when it comes time to get married, all of a sudden they remember they’re virgins only from the neck up!” (2). Readers meet Shahrzād for the first time below the belt; the expected description of the beloved that begins with the hair and then travels to the face, mouth, shoulders, chest, and waist is missing. There is no room for the customary tropes of erotic Persian literature here. Shahrzād’s eyebrows are not bows nor are her lashes arrows with heart-piecing tips; her mouth is not a rosebud or in the shape of the Persian letter mīm (‫ ;)م‬her complexion is slightly jaundiced, not the brilliant white of the moon set off by a night-black mole on her cheek; her breasts are not pomegranates but flashes of skin in a cheap red bra that, after Fattāḥ has finally lured Shahrzād to his apartment and is about to enter her, rob him of his senses (132). This is not to say the book’s first view of the principal in the triangle is completely devoid of tradition. The narrator dwells on one feature of classic Persian beauty as she lies before Fattāḥ: the downy hairs on Shahrzād’s temples, which have been irrigated by tiny streams of nervous sweat (3). Nor is Revolution Street as a whole lacking conventional love and longing. While still at school, long before he became a rich “moral surgeon” (jarrāḥ-i akhlāqī) and a dispenser of revolutionary justice, Fattāḥ had been a lover. His yearnings were first aroused by a phantom girl whose image he is forever pursuing until he rediscovers it in Shahrzād. At the age of 15 he gets a forbidden glimpse of his neighbor’s daughter, Māhrukh (literally “moon face”) sitting on the roof of her home studying. The description of the girl observes the canonical ordering of her perfect features; 239

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures her chador falls to her shoulders revealing her hair (“black, silky” 69); her mouth opens revealing a row of teeth (“sparkling” 69); and her bare legs (“white” 69) rock idly back and forth in her plastic sandals. A sneeze from Māhrukh’s nose perfumes the air with “orange blossoms and dew” (70), and “a fine, blue down” covers her throat (one of the most erogenous of all female parts, which under normal circumstances a chador clip keeps hidden from public view (71).4 Māhrukh eventually disappears from Fattāḥ’s life, but he revisits the scene of his infatuation often, hoping to find her on the shared roof. Fakhrī, his mother, tells him that just before Māhrukh’s wedding, state security had arrested and executed the girl’s intended. He confirms the tragic disruption of the marriage by entering the home and finding a fully decked-out but long abandoned nuptial chamber. As he reminisces, this scene reminds the adult Fattāḥ of an actual event, which took place after the revolution. State security arrested a dissident poet on the eve of his wedding, and Fattāḥ, in his post-revolutionary role as regime hitman, personally administered the coup de grâce to the condemned man (72).5 The late Pahlavi period coincides with Fattāḥ’s sexual maturity. He never gets to know his biological father, who appears briefly in the novel to “knock up” his mother (84). Expelled from home for disgracing the family, Fakhrī becomes a cabaret singer and cleaner/cook at a bar in Tehran’s red light and entertainment district. At this point a jāhil, an archetypal character from popular Iranian cinema, enters Fakhrī’s life. Ḥasan Khānūm, “Miss Ḥasan” – so-called for his physical beauty – is perfect in the role of Fakhrī’s protector and Fattāḥ’s stepfather; he is a well-muscled defender of the weak, an enemy of the sinful, the generous grand marshal of his own Imam Hussein memorial procession, manfully mustachioed with a broad chest covered in hair and patriotic tattoos.6 Ḥasan gets Fakhrī to seek absolution at one of Tehran’s holiest shrines. With her newfound innocence and her husband’s help she lands a job readying corpses for burial at Bihisht-i Zahrā, Tehran’s main cemetery. In his role as strongman/father, Ḥasan also initiates Fattāḥ’s sexual awakening with bouts of homoerotic wrestling. After sending Fakhrī to a neighbor’s home, the two males get naked and practice various holds and moves, after which Fattāḥ would “put his hand between his legs, and a filmy substance like snot, but with a pungent smell, would make his fingertips gleam” (124). 240

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Love and Lust in the Early Islamic Republic In time Fattāḥ’s innocent romance with the classic roof beauty devolves into an obsession for the Iranian pop idol Googoosh (Fā’iqa Ātashīn, 1950-). Aware of his stepson’s failings as a scholar, Ḥasan finds work for Fattāḥ delivering alcohol to customers of a liquor distributor in the city (125). While on a delivery to a home at a fashionable north Tehran address, Fattāḥ experiences a “miracle”; his idol, previously only a glossy magazine image, before which he masturbates, appears in the flesh in a bathing suit (19). In depicting Googoosh emerging from a pool, the language of the novel, as it did when describing Fattāḥ’s phantom, rooftop love, waxes classical: “someone suddenly called out to her, and, like one of those autumn moons that goes in and out of the clouds during the nights of the insomnia of adolescence, she glided over, straightened her arms, and came out of the water” (21). With Fattāḥ’s delivery boy days at an end, his stepfather finds him a job cleaning in a hospital, a task he does so well he is promoted to operating room orderly. Impressed by Fattāḥ’s devotion to menial duties, the nurses teach him how to give injections, draw blood, and take patients’ temperatures so he can stand in for them when they are away (73). Soon Fattāḥ finds he has the run of the hospital and takes advantage of his position to gain enough medical knowledge there to pass himself off as an American-trained “hymenoplast” later on. In the meantime, Ḥasan, who sees his stepson’s exhausting hospital labor as a vocational dead end, introduces him to one of the neighborhood “committees” that sprang up after the revolution. The committee initially puts Fattāḥ to work as a driver for agents responsible for the disposal of “degenerate” art. Later he finds his way into Evin prison where his hospital orderly zeal can serve the revolution. Fattāḥ removes blood and gore from the torture chambers and execution grounds, delivers the coup de grâce to half-dead inmates, and trucks corpses from the prison to a nameless area outside of the capital where their relatives can retrieve them. His passion for scouring physical filth from the hospital and prison makes him an ideal soldier in the campaign to remove all traces of Pahlavi political and moral corruption from post-revolutionary Tehran. He thus becomes a cog in the “exorcism machine” designed to make Iran “a paradise on earth, pure and cleansed” (78). On a practical level this means invading homes where people celebrate in mixed company, where bareheaded and heretically made-up women dance with their husbands. Fattāḥ 241

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures also pays his revolutionary dues by manning checkpoints and hunting for contraband and drivers under the influence. He becomes adept at rounding up all manner of regime enemies, from the MEK and communists to the economic terrorists backed by the US. Fattāḥ’s rival for Shahrzād’s hand, Muṣṭafā, is of the generation that came of age after the revolution. Though not a veteran himself, many of Muṣṭafā’s friends fought and died in the Iran–Iraq War. Like Fattāḥ, Muṣṭafā is a cog in the exorcism machine – though very far down the social ladder from the august moral surgeon. He works as an interrogator under a warden at Evin named Karāmat. Muṣṭafā’s job at the prison puts food on the table, but he is no match for his rival, whose showy wealth and influence persuades Shahrzād’s family to comply with his demand for their daughter. It is this disparity that makes him so desperate to get her out of Fattāḥ’s long reach. Despite their great differences in age and status, Muṣṭafā and Fattāḥ share a tendency integral to the eroticism in Revolution Street. They both idolize and idealize Shahrzād. To them she is no ordinary girl from a poor family with two strikes against her suitability as a wife (no father, torn hymen). She represents innocence itself, and possessing her becomes a path to redemption for the two men, a means of escaping the spiritually corrosive acts Fattāḥ and Muṣṭafā must perform to maintain their positions in the machinery of repression. In telling his mother about Shahrzād, Fattāḥ uses a term from romantic fiction and popular song, calling her his “sweetheart” (khāṭir-khvāh, 85)  without a trace of irony. Shahrzād is the rooftop girl reincarnate, who is somehow in the post-modern world of the novel resurrected for him. Although as her disapproving and sarcastic moral surgeon Fattāḥ has plumbed the depths of Shahrzād’s sin and sexuality, he is capable of pitying and adoring her. Fattāḥ senses that he and his sweetheart share a bond; they are both fatherless, and Fattāḥ wonders what sort of person her father actually had been, whether it was his “handiwork” that sent the girl to his clinic (128). When he takes Shahrzād to his apartment in one of north Tehran’s luxury high-rises with the intention of spending their first night together, her presence ignites in him the “unbridled lust” that is integral to his idea of manhood (139). Fattāḥ thinks that, apart from reinvigorating him sexually, legal possession of a person less than half his age will allow him to change his ways and live with dignity. He confesses to his spiritual guide, a former carpenter-turned-ascetic 242

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Love and Lust in the Early Islamic Republic named Mīrzā Yadullāh (“Mīrzā Hand of the Lord,” who also happens to be Muṣṭafā’s grandfather), “Sir, I want to become a real man, repent, get a wife, have a family, go on pilgrimages.” Looking forward to his union with innocence, the Islamic Republican thug and plutocrat solemnly promises Mīrzā he will “say his prayers, observe the difference between what’s lawful and what’s not, never ... never offend people’s honor” (168). No less idealistically smitten by Shahrzād than Fattāḥ, Muṣṭafā also expects his life to improve immeasurably after marriage. As a low-level security agent, he uses a motorcycle to get around and is therefore less insulated from the ugly realities of Tehran than Fattāḥ who has his own car or Kirāmat, Muṣṭafā’s boss, who is chauffeured to Evin. Muṣṭafā’s commute to the prison gives the narrator an opportunity to catalog the torments of life in the fiendish capitol: The sky over the city had no horizon; there was probably some covering, some bronze dome that kept the clean, bright, and beautiful world, which had to exist above the city, from being contaminated by the rank odors and tortured sounds. The leaden atmosphere, the congestion, and the misery seemed to seep into people and, unavoidably, to become more noxious. It was a satanic city, a city feuding with the Lord; its bustling, choked thoroughfares must be like the corridors of hell (173).

Muṣṭafā works in a particularly foul part of the city: the hallways and cells of Evin where through the alchemy of torture, fear and pain reify into a miasma that soils everything and everyone it touches. Muṣṭafā’s mother remarks to her son, “Whenever I gather up your bedding, you can’t believe how horrible it smells” (49). The Tehran of Revolution Street contrasts sharply with the Shiraz of the great fourteenth-century poet Ḥāfiẓ, who famously declared his native city to be a “treasury of ruby lips and mine of beauty.”7 Cheheltan’s Tehran is purposely repulsive, its “air ... redolent with intrigue and vomit” (53); its bazaar, “a mixture of odors – the smell of the body-washers, moist earth, sweat, and bodies needing a bath” (59); and the open drains beside its broad avenues filled with “a black sludge of greengrocers’ waste, sanitary napkins, and watermelon rinds” (52). It is a city that but for the “used condoms bobbing helplessly on the water” in the 243

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures curbside ditches is devoid of the erotic (52). The Tehran Muṣṭafā knows is the corruption of the regime made manifest. The prospect of marrying Shahrzād allows him to dream of settling in an anti-Tehran, a place clean, fragrant, and quiet, poles apart from the filthy, depraved city he must endure. In Muṣṭafā’s vision of the future the couple flee to the northern part of Iran near the Caspian, where he’d be paid by the day “picking oranges and, later, harvesting rice and tea” (196). After he has Shahrzād placed in a detention cell at Evin, Muṣṭafā promises her they will “go someplace far away where no one can reach” them (195), where he pictures them living happily ever after – he a farmhand bringing home slabs of flatbread which she will dutifully lay out on the floor cloth for dinner. Revolution Street speaks volumes about the marriage fantasies of Shahrzād’s suitors, whether it be settling her in a high-rise far above the squalor of Tehran as a fossilized token of lost love or having her act as the ideal wife in a pantomime of domestic bliss in the countryside. But when it comes to the third party in the love triangle, Shahrzād, the novel is conspicuously silent. To Western readers she is a cipher, the blank slate on which Fattāḥ and Muṣṭafā project their fantasies. Even when she does have occasion to speak, Shahrzād is barely audible. A  reviewer called her “nothing more than a limp, lifeless character” and sees her characterization as one of the novel’s failings.8 But this is exactly what she must be; she cannot exist outside of the other characters in the novel because she is a device placed by the author at the center of his complex plot to bind them to one another. She is like a peep show image. Readers do not see her as a whole, rather they get glimpses of various parts of her body: her eyes, her lips, her temples, her throat, and so on. The defective body part we see when the book opens forces her to seek the services of Fattāḥ. The prospect of marriage with Muṣṭafā has made the surgery necessary, but Shahrzād’s mother cannot afford Fattāḥ’s fee. A family friend turns to Mīrzā Yadullāh, the very pious man mentioned above (Muṣṭafā’s grandfather), for help. The old man supplies the money, which – unbeknownst to Shahrzād and her family – he has received from Fattāḥ, who turns out to be the holy man’s most generous benefactor. Shahrzād is the consummation of Fattāḥ’s quest to regain the object of an adolescent infatuation, an infatuation that degenerated into an obsession for the object of his masturbatory 244

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Love and Lust in the Early Islamic Republic fantasies, the pop star Googoosh. She also represents the ideal mate to a young man who is condemned by economic necessity to be in Tehran but who desperately seeks a way out of the hellish place. The Shahrzād of Revolution Street, who aroused the ire of one reviewer, is in effect an anti-Scheherzade, a Middle Eastern woman with no story of her own. Her character is what others make of it not what she herself does or says. The logic of the novel is unmistakable here. The two rivals for her hand are attracted to Shahrzād for her likeness; they don’t want her for what she is, rather for what they can make of her. The perversity of their desire is reflected in the ways the two behave as suitors (khvāstagār). In a deliberate inversion of the traditional Persian nuptial ritual, Fattāḥ (after he has already operated on Shahrzād’s hymen) glimpses at his future intended’s face with “her long lashes and sunken cheeks” in the rearview mirror of his car (13). He is immediately struck by her resemblance to the first love in his life. Likewise, in order to get Shahrzād in a cell where he thinks she will be safe from Fattāḥ, Muṣṭafā makes up a story about her involvement in anti-revolutionary activity. The expedient fiction results in her being snatched from her home by security forces and brought hooded to Evin. Upon her arrival Muṣṭafā removes the hood from Shahrzād’s head and it occurs to him “that this was exactly what a groom does when he lifts the veil from a bride’s face” (194). The voiceless female character in Revolution Street is not, as one reviewer has argued, yet another in a long line of passive characters, who “represent” the masses of dependent women of the Middle East: this is to misread Cheheltan’s novel as sociology rather than a very self-aware and complex fiction. Shahrzād, rather, represents Cheheltan’s undermining of the idea of the classical Persian beauty. Although the first glimpse we get of her is brutally intrusive, the rest of the novel makes ironic use of the language and imagery of lust and longing in canonical literature. Cheheltan’s novel chronicles the debasement of emotional attachment in the Islamic Republic. Love has degenerated into lust, yearning into craving, eroticism into discarded prophylactics, and suitorship into a murderous competition. Just as the author’s Tehran has become the bloated corpse of a city, packed with rotting viscera, the main female character of Revolution Street is a mute sacrificial offering to depravity, the figment of innocence in a soulless state. 245

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Notes 1. The original Persian text is a typescript called Tihrān, Khiyābān-i Inqilāb. The work is also known as Akhlāq-i Mardum-i Khiyābān-i Inqilāb or “The Mores of the People of Revolution Street,” and is part of Cheheltan’s Tehran trilogy. The other volumes in the trilogy are Āmrīkā’ī-kushī dar Tihrān (“American-killing in Tehran,” translated into German as Amerikaner Töten in Teheran by Susanne Baghestani and Kurt Scharf [Munich: C.H. Beck, 2011]) and Tihrān, Shahr-i bī Āsmān (“Tehran, City without Sky”; translated into German as Teheran, Stadt ohne Himmel [Munich: C.H. Beck, 2012]). Unless stated otherwise, numbers in parentheses in this chapter refer to pages in Revolution Street (London: Oneworld, 2014). 2. Michelle Woods, Translating Milan Kundera (Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2006), 2. 3. Among the translations of works about the Iran–Iraq War is Chess with the Doomsday Machine (Shaṭranj bā Māshīn-i Qiyāmat; Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 2008), a novel by Ḥabīb Aḥmadzāda about a young Basījī (para-military) who is transformed during the defense of his native Abadan. Another translation (unpublished) is a work of what is termed the “literature of the revolution” (adabiyāt-i inqilāb), Amīr Ḥusayn Fardī’s two-volume biographical novel Isma‘īl (Tehran: Hauza-i Hunarī, 2008), which was patterned in part on the Soviet realist work by Nikolai Ostrovsky, How the Steel was Tempered (как закалялась смаль [Moscow:  Sovetskii Pisatel’,  1936]); anonymous Persian translation: Chagāna Fūlād Ābdīda Shud? (Tehran: Shabgīr, 1951). 4. A similar stretch of skin, Shahrzād’s “crystalline patch of rosy throat covered by downy hair,” captivates Muṣṭafā later in the novel (108). 5. The incident may be based on the execution of the Marxist (Fada’ī) poet and playwright Saʿīd Sulṭānpūr (also Saeed Soltanpour; 1940–1); it may also refer to the story of Siyāmak Sanjarī, who was about to be married when security forces knifed him to death (see Alī Riḍā Nurīzāda, Nā-gufta-hā…dar parvanda-yi qatl-hā-yi zanjīra’ī (Essen, Germany: Nima Verlag, 2000), 60–2. 6. Shahram Khosravi contrasts the manly jāhil to the effeminate fukulī or “Westernized” (faux col-wearing) man in Young and Defiant in Tehran (Philadelphia, PA:  University of Pennsylvania, 2008., 80–1. Ḥasan Khānūm is an ambiguously gendered version of the jāhil, embodying what Dina al-Kassim has termed “feminized masculinity” (see her epilogue to Islamicate Sexualities, ed. Kathryn Babayan and Afsaneh Najmabadi [Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2008], 322). 7. Ḥāfiẓ, Dīvān, ed. P. N. Khānlarī (Tehran: Khvārazmī, 1983), 674. 8. Daisy Wyatt in the entertainment section of the Independent (15 June 2014). Cheheltan himself admits his female character lacks a voice of her own. In an interview, he compares Shahrzād to the virtually mute Marjān in Ṣādiq Hidāyat’s Dāsh Ākul.

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Bibliography Aḥmadzāda, Ḥabīb. Shaṭranj bā Māshīn-i Qiyāmat. Tehran:  Intishārāt-i Sūra-yi Mihr, 2006. [Anonymous]. Chagāna Fūlād Ābdīda Shud? Tehran: Shabgīr, 1951. Baghestani, Susanne and Kurt Scharf, trans. Amerikaner Töten in Teheran. Munich: C.H. Beck, 2011. Chihiltan, Amīr Ḥasan. Tihrān, Shahr-i Bī Āsmān. Tehran: Nigāh, 2001. Fardī, Amīr Ḥusayn. Ismaʿīl. Tehran: Ḥauza-yi Hunarī, 2008. al-Kassim, Dina. “Epilogue to Islamicate Sexualities.” In Islamicate Sexualities, edited by Kathryn Babayan and Afsaneh Najmabadi:  322. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Khānlarī, Parvīz Nātil, ed. Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ. Tehran: Khvārazmī, 1983. Khosravi, Shahram. Young and Defiant in Tehran. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania, 2008. Nurīzāda, ʿAlī Riḍā. Nā-gufta-hā…dar parvanda-yi qatl-hā-yi zanjīra’ī. Essen, Germany: Nima Verlag, 2000. Ostrovsky, Nikolai. How the Steel was Tempered (как закалялась смаль). Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel’, 1936. Scharf, Kurt, trans. Teheran, Stadt ohne Himmel. Munich: C.H. Beck, 2012. Sprachman, Paul, trans. Chess with the Doomsday Machine: a novel. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2008. ——— trans. Revolution Street. London: Oneworld, 2014. Woods, Michelle. Translating Milan Kundera. Bristol, UK:  Multilingual Matters, 2006. Wyatt, Daisy. Independent, June 15, 2014.

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11 Tempting the Theologian: The “Cure” of Wine’s Seduction Christine N. Kalleeny

In the world of the wine poem, desire is precisely the over-reaching and unraveling of all categories and norms of thought, behavior, identity. Wine, therefore has this character as well. It too is paradoxical, unidentifiable. Yaseen Noorani1

The present contribution explores the erotic-rhetorical function of wine (khamr) in a most-celebrated polemical wine praise poem2 by the great Abbasid wine poet Abū Nuwās (d. c. 814 ce), entitled “Daʿ ‘an-ka Lawmī” (Censure me not).3 The notorious hamziyya stands out among Abū Nuwās’s repertoire in that it celebrates the anti-philosophical and erotically transgressive virtues of wine drinking within a distinctly metaphysical and dialectical framework.4 The poet extols wine by ascribing to it the doubleedged character of medicine and poison for which the experience of erotic love, specifically in the trope of the beloved, is celebrated in classical amatory verse. It is precisely as feminine erotic figure that wine transgresses “her” status as a drink that can merely be consumed, thereby supplanting the figure of the beloved in classical verse.5 Through a close reading of the poem, I illustrate how the poet’s defense of wine’s erotically transgressive 248

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Tempting the Theologian character constitutes both a reflection on and performance of the seductive and intoxicating character of poetic activity. Specifically, the poet argues – seductively and therefore non-discursively  – for wine’s desirability as a figure of seduction, a figure that violates, exceeds, and eludes the metaphysical strictures, which would presume to grasp or delimit it. Wine thus stands as more than a drink and more than a literary trope: wine is a figure for poetry itself. The poem was intended as a mock-polemical retort to Ibrāhīm al-Naẓẓām (d. 840), a leading Muʿtazili theologian said to have censured the poet for the grave sin (kabīra) of drinking wine.6 The poet’s satirical defense of wine drinking is counter-logical:  divinely sanctioned censure leads astray from God; wine is desirable for the very quality for which it is forbidden. She is the cure and the disease. Following the mood of theological disputation, the poet, as if to persuade his interlocutor by means of an irrefutable enticement, “loses his self ” in an ecstatic piece of wine praise – the “poetic space” proper – in which he exalts the otherworldly and seductive potency of wine. From the third line onward, the theologian and presumably the readers are “initiated” into the sacred-profane mysteries of wine drinking by a figure as strange and puzzling as the liquid she bears. Endowed with ambivalent erotic traits that are unique to wine, the cupbearer (sāqiyya) circles amidst reveling youths with the sole purpose of delighting them with the experience of wine. Towards the close of the poem, the poet praises the refinement of wine at the expense of the conventional tropes of the classical Arabian ode, specifically of the nasīb. Finally, and in circular style, the poet closes on the note of censure with which he began, this time censuring the theologian on account of his blasphemy. Before proceeding to a methodological sketch of my study, a brief review of relevant scholarship is in order. In his comprehensive study, Philip F.  Kennedy reads the poem as an example of an ancient poetic genre, the invective (hijā’), one which colorfully brings into play various topoi common to the tradition such as jahl (ignorance), hamm (care or worry), istighfār (repentance).7 He considers the description of wine (waṣf al-khamr) to be particularly sophisticated for its fusion of the qualities of both woman and wine. He also points out the notable circular structure of the poem’s logic. 249

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures Yaseen Noorani reads the poem as enacting a kind of dialectic of self-dissolution or transgression. According to this dialectic, the poet views the transgressive activity of wine drinking as permitting a kind of transcendence, one which allows for an experience of authenticity that both precedes and supersedes the reality of ordinary existence. Wine’s paradox is thus both transcendent and sacrilegious.8 Within this critical context, but in contrast to the principal approaches of contemporary scholarship, I argue that “Daʿ ‘an-ka Lawmī” can be read as a quintessentially poetic defense of the intoxicating, seductive and iconoclastic character of poetic activity. Specifically, I show how wine and its intoxicating experience stand for poetry itself. Drawing on the theoretical work of Baudrillard and Bataille, my study pays particular attention to the identification of the bacchic and the erotic experience in Abū Nuwās’s poem. I show, first, how the erotic experience is identified with the experience of wine and, second, how the poet’s relation to wine is itself an erotic relation, one that stages a specific erotic movement. In order to appreciate this erotic movement, one must pay attention to the peculiar character of wine:  its potent, effervescent, and, most importantly, intoxicating properties. The primary way in which erotic desire and wine are linked in this poem is the poet’s relation to wine. Wine is the erotic focal point of the poem; supplanting both the beloved of chaste erotic verse and the sacred logos of religious epistemology, “she” is the unique object of desire and veneration. Precisely as object of desire, as drink that is consumed, wine appears to present a reassuring picture of itself. Yet, in fact, wine in this poem offers a far less reassuring representation: wine figures as that which precisely can never be consumed or possessed. In the first place, wine cannot be consumed except when mixed with water. The imperative of mixing wine with water attests to its undrinkable potency. Implied in the word “potency” is the notion of potentiality: wine promises to impart to its drinker a potential for unrestricted experience. If “experience” denotes the kind of knowledge that is unfamiliar, then wine is in essence experience.9 Second, wine has a peculiarly dynamic, fiery, and effervescent character found in its bubbling. This violent bubbling of wine suggests that its dynamism eclipses its drinkability, since it can barely be contained in the vessel.10 In this regard, wine is a strange object of desire 250

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Tempting the Theologian since it can neither be contained nor grasped. Third and most importantly, wine’s effervescent character is not only literal but also rhetorical. Abū Nuwās’s wine is a “bubbling” figure that can no more be contained by the poem than it can be in the vessel. Like the dynamic and untameable activity of its bubbles, wine assimilates a profusion of contrary figures but no single figure seems to be able to contain or represent it.11 The wine of Abū Nuwās thus appears as much more than a drink; rather, wine stands for an amalgam of contrary and irreconcilable modes of experience. This idea of wine’s excess is critical to an appreciation not only of Abū Nuwās’s wine song in general but to this poem in particular. Wine is excessive insofar as it is a potent and dynamic experience that transgresses the confines of representation or figuration. Yet inasmuch as wine the drink exceeds its representation, wine eludes the grasp of language. This elusiveness of wine can be understood literally as the escaping of air bubbles when wine is being poured and rhetorically as the escaping of sense and/or meaning as we attempt to decode and decipher its vast constellation of figures. What’s more, this elusiveness of wine is a powerful indicator of the elusiveness of poetry itself, its own effervescence. If, in the poetry of Abū Nuwās, wine functions as a profuse bubbling of figures that together slip through the confines of a single representation, then poetry, an unrestricted bubbling of signs that eludes the grasp of any conclusive interpretation, functions the way wine functions in poetry. Poetry is thus as excessive, as elusive, and as intoxicating as wine. Indeed, the intoxicating character of wine is of critical importance in the study of Abū Nuwās’s wine song. For in the world of Abū Nuwās, to love wine as a drink apart from its intoxicating character is to miss the point entirely.12 My study pays particular attention to the experience of inebriation insofar as it challenges the quotidian understanding of what it means, in the first place, to “consume” an intoxicant. Presumably, when one drinks wine, one consumes and thus assimilates a substance that has intoxicating properties. But in Abū Nuwās’s wine song, the poet does not so much consume wine as he is consumed by it: “I love the cup even though it strips [me] of the means of living and diminishes my abundance.”13 The experience of intoxication thus entails a peculiar erotic dynamic between the drinker and his drink, one that challenges the underlying assumption that the subject who drinks has mastery over (can possess) the drink he desires 251

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures to consume. Rather, intoxication implies a type of possession whereby the drinker is dispossessed of his ability to master the very drink that consumes him. But what does it mean that the poet celebrates the desire for that which can never be assimilated? When we cannot fulfill a desire for a thing by way of possessing it, we experience a sense of dissatisfaction. Yet in the poetry of Abū Nuwās, the poet’s desire for wine is founded on an existential paradox which implies that he cannot consume or master the drink that he ostensibly consumes: “I have become insane for a delicate virgin who is excessively violent in the glass, headstrong.”14 The poet’s desire for wine essentially violates the conventional (metaphysical) understanding of the erotic relation between the desiring subject and the object of desire through its sublimation of nonfulfillment or radical desiring. Intoxication, for Abū Nuwās, is that hallowed moment in which desire is liberated from its metaphysical purpose or end. The poet not only loves this ongoing insatiation, his poetry is a celebration of it. If it is true that the poet celebrates drinking wine insofar as he delights in the experience of ongoing insatiation (i.e., he loves that the drink he consumes in turn consumes him), then it is also true that the poetry of Abū Nuwās celebrates wine’s erotic excess. My study pays special attention to the erotic excess that is implied by the experience of intoxication. Since intoxication is excess, and excess exceeds that which would grasp it, then excess transgresses. In transgressing ontological categories, excess eludes grasp. Yet insofar as it eludes grasp, excess first elicits it: excess is therefore a seduction. This study shows how the poet’s desire to be consumed by the intoxicating, excessive, and seductive experience of wine unleashes a movement of erotic excess, which pervades the entire space of the poem. Specifically, the poet is so seduced by the intoxicating potency of wine that he in turn acts a seducer. The seductive activity is not only literal but also rhetorical; the object or target of the poet’s seduction can range from his interlocutor to the reader. My reading of “Daʿ ‘an-ka Lawmī” thus emphasizes, first, that the poet is so intoxicated by the love of wine that he acts as a seducer, and second, that this activity of seduction is achieved through the experience of his beloved wine, the drink and the figure. On a structural plane, the game of seduction forms the organizational logic of the poem and this seduction is a function of the erotic excess that the experience of wine implies. On 252

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Tempting the Theologian a representational plane, wine (the drink) reveals itself to be a figure of seduction insofar as it cannot be domesticated or circumscribed within the confines of a particular semantic value. Precisely as a figure that violates its own apprehension in images, wine (and the experience of wine) is iconoclastic. The iconoclasm of wine is constitutive of the experience of poetry itself, since poetry, unlike the language of metaphysics, does not presume to know the truth. Rather, poetry is a celebration of the vicissitude of subjective experience; poetry celebrates the unknowable.

The Reading Da‘ ʿanka lawmī fa-inna al-lawma ighrā’u Wa dāwinī bi illatī kānat hiya al-dā’u Censure me not, for censure but tempts me; Cure me rather with the cause of my ill – Ṣafrā’u lā tanzilu al-aḥzānu sāḥata-hā law massa-hā ḥajarun massat-hu sarrā’u A pale wine whose house is not visited by sorrows, Imparting joy even to the rock that touches it; Min kaffi dhāti ḥirrin fī zayyi dhī dhakarin la-hā muḥibbāni lūṭiyyun wa-zannā’u Received from the palm of a woman clad as a man, Whose lovers are two: the fornicator and the sodomite. Qāmat bi-ibrīqi-hā wa al-laylu muʿtakirun fa-lāḥa min wajhi-hā fī al-bayti la’lā’u As she stood with her wine jug on a dark night Her face emitted a pearly light, Fa-arsalat min fami al-ibrīqi ṣāfyatan ka’annamā akhdhu-hā bi-l-ʿayni ighfā’u Casting pure [wine] from the lip of the grail – A sedative for the eye to behold; Raqqat ‘an al-mā’ ḥattā mā yulā’imu-hā laṭāfatan wa-jafā ‘an shakli-hā al-mā’u More gentle than water, which ill suits her delicate [nature]. How coarse water is!

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures Fa-law mazajta bi-hā nūran la-māzaja-ha ḥattā tawallada anwārun wa-aḍwā’u. If you were to mix light into [the wine] It would be pliant in the mixing, and become irradiant. Dārat ‘alā fityatin dāna al-zamānu la-hum fa-mā yuṣību-hum illā bi-mā shā’ū She circled amongst men to whom Time was indebted – Men afflicted by Time only as they pleased. Li-tilka abkī wa-lā abkī li-manzilatin kānat taḥullu bi-hā Hindun wa-Asmā’u For her do I cry, Not the spot at which Asmā’ and Hind once alighted – H͎āshā li-durrata an tubnā al-khayāmu li-hā wa-an taruḥa ‘alay-hā al-iblu wa al-shā‘ū No tent is set up for the wine to be visited by camels and sheep! Fa-qul li-man yaddaʿī fī al-ʿilmi falsafatan ḥafiẓta shay’an wa-ghābat ‘an-ka ashyā’u Tell him who would claim philosophy as part of his knowledge: You have learnt some things, but much more escapes you; Lā taḥẓur al-ʿafwa in kunta imra’an ḥarijan fa-inna ḥaẓr-aka-hu fī al-dīni izrā’u. Do not deprive [me] of God’s forgiveness, if you are a man who   would shame me: To deprive me of this is a blasphemy.

Erotic Antidote: More Wine! Daʿ ‘anka lawmī fa-inna al-lawma ighrā’u wa-dāwi-nī bi illatī kānat hiya al-dā’u Censure me not, for censure but tempts me; cure me rather with   the cause of my ill.

In his opening apostrophe, translated here by Kennedy, the poet participates in the conventional rebuke of the censurer using the imperative “Da‘ ” (Leave aside or cast off)15 and in so doing, offsets the tone of theological disputation with a characteristically bacchic mood of urgency and 254

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Tempting the Theologian impiety. The logic by which the poet stages his “defense” of the grave sin of wine drinking is notably circular and, as such, anti-discursive: proscription (of wine) is but an enticement;16 wine (rather than religious censure) is the antidote for the malady it causes. In order to appreciate the force of the poet’s subversive retort, it is necessary to consider first the epistemological motivation behind the theologian’s censure. The Qur’an commands that every Muslim (i.e., the whole community) encourage righteous deeds and reprove what is iniquitous:  “Al-amr bi al-maʿrūf wa al-nahī ‘an al-munkar.”17 By this decree, every Muslim has the authority to forbid any action or activity deemed sinful. The language of interdiction reflects the metaphysical imperative of containing, delimiting, or circumscribing experience (understood as “desire” and the world of objects) based on the potential harm or benefit a particular action or object poses to the desiring self. Censuring language thus operates on the epistemological premise that all experience (desire and its objects) is knowable and thereby discernible according to the pristine polarities of ḥarām / ḥalāl (unlawful/ lawful). So long as these binary values are not confused, the desiring self maintains his or her moral and spiritual integrity. If censure preserves the sanctity of the sacred (anything reflecting the godliness or goodness of the subject in question, the “self ”), it does so by means of exclusion; it banishes, does away with, or excludes those desires and objects which it deems dangerous, uncontainable, or excessive. In light of this, wine represents a particularly strange object of desire in that it is cultivated and consumed primarily for its excessive, self-consuming quality; that is, its primary reason for existence is its intoxicating potency, which consumes and debilitates the mind and body of the drinker. It is for this reason that wine, along with poetry, has been relegated by Qur’anic tradition to the suspect realm of the forbidden, cast aside as a “disease”; it is by definition excessive and therefore poses a danger to the physical and moral integrity of the drinker.18 Against the theological view that censuring bad things is morally beneficial, the poet makes a hubristic claim which brings to light the inefficacy of metaphysical language: censure tempts. That is, prohibitive language operating in the service of transcendent morality cannot, contrary to what it claims about itself, ensure that the outcome of its intention will be 255

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures morally beneficial. Rather to the contrary, censure, insofar as it arouses desire (without promising fulfillment), has the excessive effect of leading one astray from its transcendent motive and purpose, which is to keep erotic excess in check. It is on the basis of wine’s transgressive, seductive, and therefore poetic character that the poet constructs his defense of wine; not only does the poet defend this drink against the theologian’s proscription, he prescribes it (via the imperative “Cure me”) as the more authentic antidote to that “ill” (excess) for which the language of proscription knows itself to be the “cure”: “Cure me with the cause of my ill” (wa dāwinī bi illatī kānat hiya al-dā’u). As the antidote to this “disease” of religious sophistry, the poet prescribes a strange drink characterized by its liminal or erotic character; a dangerously ambiguous object of desire, wine is at once toxic and medicinal, harmful and beneficial. To desire wine is to desire a substance which has the dynamic potency and potential to transgress, exceed, and elude the binary oppositions that form the foundation of metaphysical knowledge.19 For reasons of its indigestible potency as an intoxicant, wine constitutes that which, on the level of language, cannot be contained within or defined in terms of a particular semantic value. Rather to the contrary, wine assimilates the vicissitude of values that correlate to human experience; for this reason, it is semantically both excessive and elusive: it is both – and neither – a cure and an ill! Hence, in defending wine, the poet does not defend the object of his desire so much as he defends his desire for unidentifiable, slippery, or ungraspable objects, his desire to be seduced. The poet signifies this desire for the activity of seduction when, in a play on the root letters (dāl, wāw, yā’) from which the contrary significations of “disease” and “medicine” are derived, he expresses his desire to be cured (“dāwi-nī”) by the same object that is his malady (“dā’ ”).20 Not only does this poetic potency of wine – its potential to alter or subvert the semantic body and/ or space that it pervades – cause the poet who desires it to become drunk, it pervades and transmutes him such that he himself becomes a rhetorical agent of seduction. In other words, the condition of being seduced gives way to the activity of seducing. In the first line, the poet, at once seduced and transformed by wine’s liminal and transgressive character, seduces the theologian in turn. He does so by reversing the prohibitive logic of his reproof (Thou shalt not 256

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Tempting the Theologian drink because drinking is a sin) so that religiously sanctioned reproof appears to lead astray:  censure is a seduction. The poet’s seduction begins with the customarily antiheroic rebuke of the theologian’s own rebuke: “Cast off your blame!” In declaring, “Censure me not,” the poet parodies the imperative “Thou shalt not” of the censurer’s reproof by rendering it as “Thou shalt not tell me, ‘Thou shalt not!’ ” In so doing, the poet negates the sacred “Thou shalt not” with the profane call to sin: “Thou shalt give me the cause of my ill or sin.” Hence, the poet essentially tells the theologian: “Shut up and fetch me a drink!” The force of the poet’s rebuke of the theologian lies in its playful and as such poetic subversion of the Qur’anic decree, which commands all Muslims to “encourage righteous deeds and reprove what is iniquitous.” Since the theologian’s reproof is a gesture sanctioned by the sacred text of the Qur’an, the poet, in preying upon the language of the theologian’s reproof, violates the very epistemological foundation (the Qur’an), which prescribes the activity of censuring iniquitous deeds. It is thus that the poet, at once prohibiting censure while at the same time decreeing that the censurer give him drink, parodies the inimitable rhetoric of the Qur’an and in so doing hallows the grave sin (kabīra) of wine drinking with the very language that prohibits it. Rather than a deliberative, edifying, and productive gesture, the censure called for by the Qur’an would, by the poet’s logic, operate as a temptation (ighrā’u), a seduction. Thus, in a gesture of rhetorical drunkenness, the poet unravels both the theologian’s censure and the epistemological framework within which he does so. Just as wine debilitates or undoes the moral transcendence of the self when it is imbibed, so does the poet seductively undo the moralizing logic of censure by pointing to its latent toxicity. In the ensuing wine praise, the mood of theological disputation that forms the backdrop of the opening line is consumed or sacrificed by the erotic-poetic potency of wine. No longer addressing his interlocutor or engaging him in a mock dialectic, it is as though the poet counterbalances the theologian’s prohibition of wine by turning his back on the relational aspect of dialectic all together; in so doing, the poet  allows himself, the interlocutor, and the reader along with them to become inebriated, sacrificed, and transformed by the erotic-poetic potency of wine, which takes the form of pure poetic description of wine. 257

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The Ecstasy of Wine I will cut the cords of care with the wine glass For there is no physician for care like the wine glass. – Abū Nuwās21

In a mood of wonderment, the poet praises this drink as something beyond medicinal. The potency of wine is such that she has the alchemical power to animate a stone, causing it to experience joy: Ṣafrā’u lā tanzilu al-aḥzānu sāḥata-hā law massa-hā ḥajarun massat-hu sarrā’u. A pale wine whose house is not visited by sorrows, Imparting joy even to the rock that touches it.

The description of wine thus marks an ecstatic and, as such, a poetic departure from the epistemological framework that foregrounds the opening apostrophe.22 In contrast to the burdensome, prohibitive space of moral existence, the space of wine (sāḥata-hā) is one of pure joy, unspoiled or uncontaminated by the care of human suffering. Here the poet draws on the ancient topos of hamm (care or worrying) according to which wine is the antidote to the everyday sufferings imposed by fate (al-dahr). The poet will develop this theme in line 8 of this poem, in which Time (al-zamān, which also implies fate) bows to the untameable desires of reveling drinkers on account of wine’s care-dissolving (it dissolves hamm) potency.23 The power of wine to dispel hamm and allow the self to escape from the burdens and strictures of everyday life is a testament to its erotically transgressive potency. As Noorani asserts, wine’s power to dispel suffering goes “hand in hand with moral dissolution” since “the essence of care is the constant struggle to control desire and to satisfy it in prescribed ways”; hence, he argues, “The elimination of care is therefore attended by various forms of excess.”24 The erotically transgressive character of wine is evident in the second hemistich in which the stone is touched by joy in merely “touching” the wine. The image is striking in that it suggests the transgressive nature of the erotic relation between the drinker and his drink: no sooner does wine touch the palate of the drinker that it begins to exceed its status as a potable substance, consuming and transforming him by its inebriating potency. 258

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Tempting the Theologian Wine not only induces a sensation of joy (by dispelling care); she permits an ekstasis, an erotic dispossession of self, wherein the “moral” self is taken out of its domestic peripheries. This ekstasis is signified figuratively and structurally: first in the radical departure away from the polemical backdrop of the first line and second, in the image of the stone so “touched” by wine that it is transformed in its very essence. In the ensuing lines, this subversive quality of wine is enacted by the circular movement of the erotically ambiguous figure who tempts both the theologian and the reader with the mysteries of wine.

From the Lips of the Grail: Figures of Seduction The poetic text evokes but does not make substantial what once appeared. Georges Bataille25 Min kaffi dhāti ḥirrin fī zayyi dhī dhakarin la-hā muḥibbāni lūṭiyyun wa-zannā’u Qāmat bi-ibriqi-hā wa al-laylu mu’takirun fa-lāḥa min wajhi-hā fī al-bayti la’lā’u Fa-arsalat min fami al-ibrīqi ṣāfyatan ka’annamā akhdhu-hā bi al-‘ayni ighfā’u Received from the palm of a woman clad as a man, whose   lovers are two: The fornicator and the sodomite. As she stood with her wine jug on a dark night Her face emitted a pearly light, Casting pure [wine] from the lip of the grail – A sedative for the eye to behold.

Beginning with line 3, the reader meets with a ­figure – most certainly a cupbearer (sāqiyya) – who is endowed with specific erotic traits that are unique to the experience of wine. The erotic identification of the cupbearer with wine and the way in which they are identified is crucial to an appreciation of the poetic counterprescription in the opening line. More specifically, the figure of the cupbearer – her traits and her movement in the central space of the poem – not only functions as a figure for that “undrinkable” drink 259

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures but enacts the seductive, iconoclastic, and quintessentially poetic rationale of the experience of wine. This figure is described first and foremost as a feminine figure: “From the palm of a woman” (min kaffi dhāti ḥirrin). This point is crucial since, in the Arab tradition of bacchic-erotic verse, wine is a distinctly feminine presence.26 It is in the space of the feminine that the identity of the cupbearer coalesces with that of wine.27 This fusion of the feminine qualities of cupbearer and wine is indicated in the feminine possessive pronoun “hā.” In the second hemistich of the third line, the word “li-hā” (translated as “whose”) is ambiguous, suggesting that the two lovers belong either to the cupbearer or to wine (“received from the palm of a woman”). In the second hemistich of line 4, the ambiguity of the feminine possessive pronoun (“hā”) of the word “wajhi-hā” (her face) suggests the identification of the cupbearer with wine: “fa-lāha min wajhi-hā fī al-bayti la’lā’u.” This is true when we consider that the image of wine radiating light is a topos of the Arab tradition of descriptive wine praise (waṣf al-khamr), one that can be traced back to the pre-Islamic ode. Hence, as the cupbearer rises with her wine jug in the pitch dark of night, her face emitting a pearly light, there arises the question of whose face emits the light (the cupbearer’s or that of the wine?), leading one to wonder if this figure is not herself the very embodiment of the magical liquid she bears in her palm. This ambiguity of the feminine possessive pronoun thus suggests a fusion of identity, thereby indicating that the cupbearer should be read as a figure for wine. Paradoxically, this fusion of identity (a kind of excess) implies a slipping or dissolution. When two figures can be read as one figure, when in a moment of poetic drunkenness the distinction between two forms is blurred or dissolved, this is a moment in which each signification eludes “grasp.” In the first hemistich of line 3, “From the palm of a woman” (min kaffi dhāti ḥirrin) – implying that the subject “wine” is received or poured from her palm  – there is only the suggestion of wine’s presence as it is being held by or poured from the palm of the cupbearer; that is to say, no substantial mention of wine is made. If, however, wine is indeed present both as a grammatical subject and as a poetic sign, it is so by function of the cupbearer’s palm, the unique vessel by which the precious gift of wine (both the substance and its immaterial effect, intoxication) can be received. That is to say, the cupbearer’s body (her palm) indicates or signifies wine’s 260

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Tempting the Theologian “body.” Here, the cupbearer would appear to function as the icon (image) of wine, the poetic body that renders wine visible and palpable, or rather apprehensible. Yet as I will show, the specific traits of this figure only attest to the difficulty of “containing” wine as an image or rendering it apprehensible as a sign. This feminine figure from whose palm the feminine drink of wine is served is first described in distinctly erotic terms, indicating yet another point of similarity with wine: Min kaffi dhāti ḥirrin fī zayyi dhī dhakarin la-hā muḥibbāni lūṭiyyun wa-zannā’u Received from the palm of a woman clad as a man, Whose lovers are two: the fornicator and the sodomite.

Unabashedly described as a female cross-dresser with a penchant for bi-erotic activity (fornication and sodomy), the erotic nature of the cupbearer is characterized in terms of a slippery duality: she is described first as an erotic subject possessing a gender duality, a woman dressed as a man – a transvestite. She is secondly described in terms of her duality as an erotic object:  her lovers are the fornicator and the sodomite (the latter, lūṭiyyūn, is an adjectival reference which translates as “the people of Lot”).28 Here it must be noted that in the context of male homosexual relations in medieval Islam, the passive partner was subject to intense societal disapproval, particularly if his motive for taking the passive role was sexual desire. According to Everett Rowson, “If he is indeed acting out of sexual desire for the passive role, he is most commonly called ma’būn. The word … carries strong connotations of pathology, and ubna is in fact frequently called a ‘disease’ (dā’).”29 Rowson’s observation is particularly fascinating when considering the fusion of the identities of the cupbearer and of wine, the latter of which the poet refers to in line 1 both as a medicine and disease (dā’). The poet thus constructs a radical defense of wine that hinges on the transgressive, even pathological character of wine drinking for which the cupbearer acts as a figure. The “split” in the cupbearer’s desiring nature indicates that she is a transgressive figure, a figure of excess: she is a cross-gendered being (a feminine-male subject) who participates in receiving (and perhaps even 261

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures giving) two traditionally opposed forms of erotic activity (sodomy and fornication), each of which, from the point of view of Islam, is forbidden in its own right. The erotic identity of the cupbearer thus implies movement, an oscillation to and from erotic poles; this motion of desire implies a transgression insofar as it crosses over (in the etymological sense of transgress), exceeds, and therefore violates the metaphysical distinctions that form the foundation for religious epistemology:  man-woman, subject-object, lover-beloved. In Erotisme, Georges Bataille speaks of eroticism as a space of transgression or violence:  “In essence, the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence, of violation.”30 This erotic crossing over of normative ontological and erotic categories is thus the site of a violence, signified by the split in the cupbearer’s desiring nature, her liminal or transgressive character. The ambiguous character of the cupbearer’s desiring nature – its violence – is a form of excess. But this excess, this violent or violating crossing over (which sacrifices the domestic peripheries of what it means to be a desiring subject, a man or a woman) also implies erotic munificence, plenitude, and consummation. As Bataille goes on to explain, the act of making love – what would be the moment of consummation – is analogous to the rite of sacrifice; consummation is the moment in which one being sacrifices the other, in which each partner is dispossessed of him/herself, in which their forms dissolve or die in the vertigo, the disorder of lovemaking.31 In the case of this poetic figure, the cupbearer’s erotic polarity (her “split”) implies the sacrifice of mutually exclusive erotic states or categories: categories that have become confused, swallowed up, and united in a single body. For this reason, the cupbearer signifies the experience of violation (transgression) as consummation or plenitude; for it is through the violence or split of her erotic being that she may be called a figure of excess, one in whom all boundaries of desire are traversed and confused. Woman-man, erotic subject-object, desiring and desired by women and men alike, the cupbearer is the “consummate” figure for the unrestricted and therefore transgressive activity of desire; she is the body of erotic vicissitude. The reader – and presumably the poet’s interlocutor – is thus initiated into the mysteries of wine’s seductive experience by a figure of love’s violence and consummation; a figure effervescent, uncontainable, transgressive, 262

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Tempting the Theologian exceeding ontological and erotic categories, eluding therefore all categories. Due to her cross-gender body  – a body which, in the realm of the knowable, slips the grasp of apprehension  – the cupbearer conjures and demands to be read as a hermaphrodite.32 In A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes explains, “The hermaphrodite, or the androgyne, figure of that ‘ancient unity of which the desire and the pursuit constitute what we call love,’ is beyond figuration; or at least all I could achieve is monstrous, grotesque, improbable body.”33 A body “improbable,” “grotesque,” “beyond figuration,” Barthes’s hermaphrodite is a split figure, a figure that exceeds (goes “beyond”) and violates conventional semantic categories, thereby eluding the grasp of language. As the consummate figure in whose “improbable body” contrary erotic signs are confused, the hermaphrodite breaks or splits its own signification such that it eludes the grasp of understanding; hence, it is “beyond figuration.” It is in the sense of its unknowable (it exceeds and eludes grasp) quality that the hermaphrodite may be called a seductive and therefore iconoclastic figure. This seductive, iconoclastic quality of the hermaphrodite (implied by the cupbearer’s cross-gender body) renders it a suitable figure for wine’s own seductive, iconoclastic experience. As we recall, in the opening apostrophe, the poet seduces both the theologian and the reader with the “improbable” notion that a drink is desirable for its liminal, ambiguous character. This liminality of wine’s experience – “her” violence  – the poet indicates linguistically (and semantically) by pointing to the shared etymology (the unity) of the contrary senses of “cure” and “ill.” More than a drink which from the point of view of Islam, would signify the perdition of the self, wine implies a sacred-profane experience whereby the erotic transcendence of the authentic self is consecrated by way of a transgressive sacrifice of self. The drinker-subject who consumes wine is in turn consumed (intoxicated) by this strange undrinkable object such that the drinker’s subjective self becomes indistinguishable from the object he presumably consumes. No longer is the drinker’s self authenticated by the drinker’s metaphysical awareness of his subjectivity (his mastery over objects); rather, there occurs in the moment of drunkenness a communion among contrary erotic states: the drinker and the drink, the subject and the object, the lover and the beloved all melt into one another in that “improbable body,” that “ancient unity of which the desire and the pursuit constitute what we call love.” Thus, as the poet indicates in line 1, 263

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures wine implies an experience of vicissitude and multiplicity, an experience that violates and transgresses the peripheries of the self and along with it, the metaphysical realm of the knowable. Since wine cannot be grasped or rendered apprehensible by the mastery of language, “she” is an erotically “improbable body,” a figure “beyond figuration,” a seductive, iconoclastic figure: a hermaphrodite.34 Nevertheless, it is significant that the cupbearer is described specifically as a cross-dresser (transvestite) and not a hermaphrodite; for as I  will show, the transvestite implies one who is both fascinated and seduced by the “improbable body” of the hermaphrodite and who in turn seduces by engaging in a play of signs. Although gender blurring has become increasingly recognized as a critical element in cultural studies, cross-dressers would have been undoubtedly offensive to the sensibility of the orthodox medieval theologian.35 The Arabic description of the cupbearer’s gender and sexuality is bitingly graphic: she is described as “a person who has a vagina in the clothing of a person who has a penis” (min kaffi dhāti ḥirrin fī zayyi dhī dhakarin). She is a person who not only “possesses” the sex of a woman but who, on the level of appearance, appropriates the sex of a man, making what is not her own as if it were her own. The language of the poem uncovers something deeply disturbing and equally seductive about transvestism, its gratuitous or poetic preoccupation with erotic signs, something to which the contemporary reader risks having to become immune or desensitized. In his Seduction, Baudrillard unravels the erotic-poetic fascination of the transvestite, whom he reads as a figure for seduction: “Transvestism. Neither homosexuals nor transsexuals, transvestites like to play with the indistinctness of the sexes. The spell they cast, over themselves as well as others, is born of sexual vacillation and not, as is customary, the attraction of one sex for the other … What transvestites love is this game of signs, what excites them is to seduce the signs themselves. With them everything is makeup, theater, seduction. They appear obsessed with games of sex, but they are obsessed, first of all, with play itself.”36 For Baudrillard, the transvestite is not a man who desires to be a woman or woman who wants to be a man; it is not a question of desiring or coveting the male or female sex or of satisfying the desire to merely alter one’s sexual identity in a permanent way. Rather, the desire of the transvestite is far more subversive; as the poem indicates, the transvestite desires to 264

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Tempting the Theologian usurp and play with the signs of nature such that what properly belongs to one sex (to nature) is uprooted from its proper or productive function and, at least in appearance, appropriated by a body to which this “sign” does not belong – this is the meaning of “play.” That is to say, the transvestite loves or desires the playful (unproductive or destructive) and therefore seductive activity of perverting, subverting, or inverting the logos of sexuality and leading “signs” astray: “Everything is played out in the vertigo of this inversion, this transubstantiation of sex into signs that is the secret of all seduction.”37 Baudrillard’s description of the transvestite’s seductive activity implicitly draws out its strange bacchic-poetic character: the “secret” of the transvestite’s seductive power is precisely this vertiginous (“vertigo”) game or play in which sex (the natural body) is “transubstantiated” into signs (the poetic body). The transvestite loves to seduce the signs of nature such that signifiers are led astray from their proper signification, resulting in a kind of erotic travesty of signification or hyper-signification: “Perhaps the transvestite’s ability to seduce comes straight from parody – a parody of sex by its over-signification.”38 The word “over-signification” implies an uncontainable bubbling, an effervescence of meaning which, when sought to be understood or decoded discursively, is only reducible to a kind of nonsense, suggesting the inchoateness (recall Baudrillard’s “vertigo”) both of drunken and poetic experience.39 The transvestite’s desire to seduce and be seduced – the desire to sacrifice and transmute (“transubstantiation”) the signs of sex through the sacrifice and transmutation of one’s own body  – may thus be understood both in terms of the drinker’s erotic relation to wine and the poet’s erotic relation to language. The drinker loves and is seduced by wine insofar as it suggests an experience of seduction, an experience wherein the drinker’s self (his nature) is subverted, transubstantiated into a space of alterity, a condition that eludes the grasp of the drinker’s subjective mastery. Hence, just as the transvestite loves the inversion or parody of sex, the drinker loves the inversion or parody of his self. In either case, the seductive activity of parody or inversion is nothing if not poetic: for what is poetry if not the leading astray of signs from their metaphysical servitude, the “vertigo” of inversion, the “transubstantiation” of signs that lead us from the realm of the known to the unknowable that is the “secret” of all seduction. 265

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures This is how the cross-dressing cupbearer is a figure of seduction: as a transvestite, she signifies the desire to conjure improbable figures (like the hermaphrodite), to violate and subvert the signs of sex such that what are apprehensible slips into the unknowable. It is in light of the transvestite’s obsession with the distinctly poetic activity of sacrificing and transmuting signification (a game of seduction) that the cupbearer may be read both as a figure for wine and its seductive experience and ultimately as the figure for poetry itself. In other words, it is the cupbearer’s erotically travestying quality that renders her the most powerful symbol and indicator for wine’s own iconoclastic presence. The split in her erotically “improbable” body thus bespeaks the metaphysical failure of language to substantiate (lend coherence to) the uncontainable quality of wine’s intoxicating potency, its unknowability; its poetry.

Unbearable Lightness The metaphor of light is the site wherein the “undrinkable” quality of wine is seamlessly identified with the excess of poetic experience; this distinctly poetic effervescence of wine is indicated in line 4 in which the face either of the cupbearer or of the wine – for there is ambiguity there – is described as emitting a pearly light: Qāmat bi-ibrīqi-hā wa al-laylu muʿtakirun fa-lāḥa min wajhi-hā fī wa al-laylu la’lā’u. As she stood with her wine jug on a dark night Her face emitted a pearly light.

According to the literal translation of the second hemistich, which reads “a pearly light [la’lā’u] shone forth [lāḥa] from her face in the house,” it is light rather than the face that is in the nominative case: light radiates or shines from the face. The face of the cupbearer and/or of wine is the source of the light’s shining. The verse places special emphasis on the shining activity of light, thus indicating the celestial, miraculous quality of wine. This light shining forth from the face has a blazing, ecstatic, uncontainable quality; la’lā’u, the verbal form of the noun used to denote “light,” suggests also the shining of a star, the flickering of a light, 266

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Tempting the Theologian or the blazing of a fire. More than a shining, fiery brilliance, the light of the face suggests the munificent excess of poetic activity, for la’lā’u shares the same etymology as the word for “pearl” (lu’lu’).40 The pearl, in both the Arab and Persian traditions, is the prized metaphor for the poetic figure; to string pearls in a necklace is to compose a beautiful poem. The verse thus suggests that the experience of wine signifies a kind of munificent, ecstatic emanation of poetic signs or figures. In this same verse, yet another space offers itself up to the confluence of the experiences of wine and of poetry: al-bayt, “the house.” The fiery light shines “in the house” (fī al-bayti). The image is striking for its ambiguity:  more than a house, bayt connotes the “home” of poetic verse, the stanza.41 Here we may observe the stark contrast between the pitch-dark night (first hemistich) and the ecstatic irradiance of the poetic experience of wine (second hemistich). Wine is indeed more than a drink: her “face” emits figures of poetry that shine forth luminously; this generous radiance of poetic activity is experienced in a purely poetic space, a verse of poetry or a stanza. The uncontainable quality of wine, “her” poetic effervescence, is conveyed once again in the image of the cupbearer dispatching (arsalat) wine from the mouth (fam) of the wine jug: Fa-arsalat min fami al-ibrīqi ṣāfyatan ka’annamā akhdhu-hā bi al-ʿaynī ighfā’u Casting pure [wine] from the lip of the grail – A sedative for the eye to behold.

The verb arsala (translated as “casting” in the first hemistich) signifies at once the activity of pouring or dispatching (a liquid) and using a word without restriction or signifying.42 That the pouring of wine is conveyed in terms of signifying a message suggests that wine is more than a drink: it was as if wine, proceeding from the “mouth” of the wine jug, were a message, an unrestricted emanation of signs that could no more be contained by the jug (excess) than the light that emanated splendidly from her “face.” The use of the verb arsala here is striking in that it brings to light the generosity of poetic signifying, suggesting at the same time a kind of divine emanation, a self-overflowing. 267

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures The second hemistich of line 4 describes the problem of imagining the form of wine. The excessive, luminous nature of wine is such that it cannot be grasped by the eye: ka’annamā akhdhu-hā bi al-‘ayni ighfā’u. According to the literal translation of this line (which reads, “as if seizing the wine with the eye were slumber”), the very vision of wine, or rather, the attempt to captivate or seize its image (icon) with the eyes (i.e., its ideation), amounts to the blindness of the eyes or the incapacity to see or to apprehend forms. Inasmuch as it cannot be contained as an image, wine is inapprehensible, unfathomable.43 The excess of its form, one of the distinguishing traits of Abū Nuwās’s wine, is such that it blinds, foiling and violating our capacity to form a unified idea about it, to seize or to apprehend it. As Noorani observes: “On a cognitive level, wine proves to be ungraspable … its ‘meaning’ (maʿnā) is so subtle that it can be sought only through conjecture. The eye fails in the attempt to visualize it. The imagination cannot fix it. It is impossible to form any certainty about it.”44 In drawing out the excessive-elusive paradox of wine, “her” seductive, uncontainable, or iconoclastic quality, Noorani indicates the quintessentially poetic character of wine. In the wine song of Abū Nuwās, the poetic and iconoclastic quality of wine is further indicated by her subtle form, her “unbearable lightness” that renders her “a thing to be grasped by the instinct and sensitivity of your intellect.”45 Wine is the drink of subtle intellects; this, the poet suggests, is what renders wine superior to water.46 In line 6, wine is described as a form so delicate, limpid, and pure that water, unsuited for the mixture with wine, literally recoils from its form:47 Raqqat ‘an al-mā’ ḥattā mā yulā’imu-hā laṭāfatan wa-jafā ‘an shakli-hā al-mā’u. More gentle than water, which ill suits her delicate [nature]: How coarse water is!

The verb jafā denotes at once the quality of roughness, coarseness or crudeness (in manners) and the activity of avoiding or shunning; the second hemistich of line 6 may thus be read in two ways: “the water recoiled from or shunned [wine’s] form” and “the water was too rough or vulgar for her form.” The root meaning of the verb used to describe the activity of water moreover suggests its stern, rigid, or unyielding quality, which 268

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Tempting the Theologian contrasts sharply with wine’s generously self-overflowing brilliance and limpid, pliable form. In portraying an antipathy between the vulgar, aversive, quotidian substance that is water and the ethereal (and not so substantial) munificent essence that is wine, the poet discards the “desert” aesthetic of the heroic model of poetry (the classical Arabian ode) in favor of the innovative urbane aesthetic of erotic-bacchic poetry. It is the functional quality of water that qualifies it as coarse or mundane: water is a substance that quenches thirst and ensures the continuity or longevity of the individual’s life. Wine, by contrast, exceeds its status as a thirst-slaking drink (it “satisfies”); rather, one loves wine inasmuch as it consumes, unravels, and ultimately transforms the self, granting access to a transcendent world characterized by paradox and multiplicity: Fa-law mazajta bi-hā nūran la-māzaja-ha ḥattā tawallada anwārun wa-aḍwā’u. If you were to mix light into [the wine] It would be pliant in the mixing, and become irradiant.

Thus while the combination of wine and water produces nothing worthy of mention, the combination of wine and light literally results in the engendering (tawallada) of a multiplicity of lights (anwārun wa-aḍwā’u). That wine couples well with light is a testament to her sacred, numinous, transcendent quality; at the same time, her malleability and creative potency when mixed indicate the erotically liminal character of her transcendence:  unlike the uniformity, unity, certainty, or permanence (“truth”) sought after by metaphysics, the type of knowledge that wine affords is characterized by flux and multiplicity (anwārun wa-aḍwā’u). As can be seen in the ensuing line, this insight that wine affords implies a transgression or violation of the order of Time.

The Abode of Wine Line 8 depicts a kind of counter-reality in which Time (al-zamān), the enemy of desire, caters to the drunken whims of dallying youths: Dārat ‘alā fityatin dāna al-zamānu la-hum fa-mā yuṣību-hum illā bi-mā shā’ū.

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures She circled amongst men to whom Time was indebted – Men afflicted by Time only as they pleased.

The cure-ill topos of the opening line of the poem is amplified: whereas in the first line, wine functions as the transgressive antidote to the prohibitive logic of Islamic law (and the positivist project of epistemology as a whole), here wine violates or interrupts the very temporal order that forms the foundation for religious epistemology. The gift of wine is the gift of immanence, a timeless, placeless space in which desire is liberated from the care and constraints (hamm) of everyday life. This space of drunkenness implies the unraveling of the linear temporal logic governing moral life. More than an undoing, drunkenness permits a reversal of this logic: whereas in everyday life, human desire and the possibility for its fulfillment are subject to the limitations imposed by Time and Fate (human mortality), Time is here “indebted to” (dāna al-zamānu la-hum) the desires of the drinkers. The use of the third-person feminine verb dārat (she circled) in the second hemistich describes the sensuously feminine movement of wine, her circling motion. The circular movement of wine (and/or the cupbearer) thus functions as the poetic enactment of the circular, seductive rationale of the opening line of the poem, which subverts the teleological (linear and purposeful) structure of religious epistemology. In lines 9 and 10, the poet opposes the inebriating experience of wine, its desire-unleashing potency to the experience of lost spaces, with the abandoned abodes of those heroic poet-lovers who would stand weeping before them.48 Li-tilka abkī wa-lā abkī li-manzilatin kānat taḥull bi-hā Hindun wa-Asmā’u Ḥāshā li-durrata an tubnā al-khayāmu li-hā wa-an taruḥa ‘alay-hā al-iblu wa al-shā‘ū. For her do I cry, not the spot at which Asmā’ and Hind once  alighted – No tent is set up for the wine to be visited by camels and sheep!

As Kennedy observes, the poet in line 9 invokes the names of the beloved women of Bedouin poetry only to contrast these with the quintessentially feminine presence of wine.49 The poet goes on to mock in his 270

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Tempting the Theologian characteristically mordant style those classical poets who imitate the poetry of the ancients: the “abode” of wine surpasses the vulgar, domestic encampment of the Arabs.50

More than You Know In the final two lines, the poet revisits the mood of theological disputation from the beginning with two irreverent imperatives: Fa-qul li-man yaddaʿī fī al-ʿilmi falsafatan ḥafiẓta shay’an wa-ghābat ‘an-ka ashyā’u Lā taḥẓur al-ʿafwa in kunta imra’an ḥarijan fa-inna ḥaẓr-aka-hu fī al-dīni izrā’u. Tell him who would claim philosophy as part of his knowledge: You have learnt some things, but much more escapes you; Do not deprive [me] of God’s forgiveness, if you are a man who   would shame me; To deprive me of this is a blasphemy.

The poet now commands the theologian to rebuke the sophistry of those (like the theologian himself) who lay claim to philosophic “knowledge” or truth (yaddaʿī fī al-ʿilmi falsafatan) and to prohibit such a person from the blasphemy of denying wine drinkers divine absolution. The particle “fa” (so) in the first hemistich of line 11 playfully suggests a logical continuity from the theological disputation of line 1, when in fact that space of dialectic has been interrupted or violated by the seductive, poetic space of the wine praise. A literal rendering of the second hemistich of line 11 (ḥafiẓta shay’an wa-ghābat ‘an-ka ashyā’u) draws out at once the subversive and philosophic force of the poet’s rebuke of the “false philosopher”:  “You have memorized [ḥafiẓta] one thing [shay’an] while in the meantime [simultaneity indicated by the particle wa] a multiplicity of things [ashyā’] escape you [ghābat ‘an-ka].” Through his use of the word ḥafiẓta, the poet suggests that the type of knowledge (philosophic knowledge or falsafa) which the theologian “claims” to possess (yaddaʿī fī al-ʿilmi falsafatan) is perfunctory, superficial  – that is to say, purely mimetic, since it fails to capture or apprehend a “multiplicity” of truths afforded by the intoxicating experience of wine.51 Thus by pointing to the 271

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures elusive nature of the object (of philosophical knowledge), the poet challenges the epistemological premise on the basis of which the theologian prohibits wine: “knowledge” (‘ilmi) is a “thing” (shay’an) that can no more be apprehended than the excessive experience of wine. Specifically, as the transgressive body of the poem suggests (lines 2–10), there exist truths that can neither be circumscribed nor apprehended by the metaphysical function of language. On the basis of this logic, the poet subverts the theologian’s self-righteous condemnation of him (line 12) and in so doing, attests to his ignorance (jahl): judgment is a blasphemy, a deplorable excess or hubris, in that it dares to apprehend or delimit the divine munificence of God. The poem thus closes full-circle on a note of paradox:  authentic knowing emerges from the unknowing implied by the experience of drunkenness. Knowledge (‘ilm) is not a thing to be grasped by the mastery of the desiring subject’s intent; to subscribe to such an idea betrays not only one’s ignorance, but also one’s lack of self-control (delusional self-inflatedness). The “wisdom of the vine” thus teaches that there are some truths, which exceed, elude, and break apprehension, and that poetry is the experience of this truth of seduction.

Conclusion Abū Nuwās’s polemical poem can be read as not only a reflection on, but the very performance of the intoxicating, seductive, and ultimately liberating experience of poetry. My approach to reading his poetry takes into account both the erotic qualities of wine and the erotic nature of the relation between the poet and his drink. Specifically, the poet desires wine insofar as “she” is an erotically seductive drink and figure, which stands for the seductive and ultimately iconoclastic experience of poetic activity. The poet first indicates wine’s status as an iconoclastic figure by pointing to wine’s semantically overflowing registers. More than a figure of duality, wine is a figure for the fluid and volatile passage among contrary values, the upheaval of sense and signification, which is ultimately over-signification. The erotically vertiginous figure of the cupbearer, who is wine’s double, is precisely this kind of poetic monstrosity which breaks its own figuration; an image exceeding and eluding sense and signification, the cupbearer and 272

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Tempting the Theologian wine both stand for poetic seduction, or that which violates and unravels the productive, teleological, and ethical function of language. The poet’s love for this strange, intoxicating figure (wine) both enacts and unleashes a dialectic of rhetorical seduction which pervades the space of entire poem. The physiological dialectic that occurs between the drinker and the drink (i.e., the experience of being sacrificed or consumed by a drink which one consumes) is enacted rhetorically (between the poet-lover and the “beloved” figure of wine). The poet’s desire to be consumed (intoxicated) by wine, the drink and the fi ­ gure  – his desire to be seduced  – is what allows him to seduce erotically and more importantly, poetically. In essence, the poet’s love for this excessive and inapprehensible figure is what makes him a poet. This is clearly indicated in the opening line, where the poet’s playful subversion of the sober logic of Islamic decree is coincident with his ignoble imperative that the theologian give him more wine. Wine is thus the quintessential figure for the seductive, dissolute, and ultimately immoral experience of poetry itself. Abū Nuwās’s praise of wine is therefore a celebration of poetry’s power to liberate desire (and by extension, language itself) from the rigid imperatives of ethical codes and doctrines. Just as wine as a drink implies an experience of self-undoing, in which the ontological wall that separates the self from the other (and the subject from his object) collapses, and desire is loosened from its metaphysical stronghold, poetic language too implies a sacrifice of the metaphysical function of language. The poet’s claim that “prohibiting [desire] tempts [breeds more desire]” is a striking example of how intoxicated language of poetry unravels the positivist logic of theological doctrine in such a way as to expose the false presupposition that language is somehow external to desire (i.e., it is “metaphysical”) or that it can know or domesticate desire without participating in it. By indicating the shared root letters of the contrary significations of “cure” and “disease,” the poet highlights the erotically excessive (seductive) character of language. Language conveys more than its author intends; it is deferential to “truth” but cannot encapsulate it or sum it up. The poet reaffirms this notion when he tells the sanctimonious theologian, that while he has “memorized” one form of knowledge, a multiplicity of “truths” escape him. That is, metaphysical knowledge is premised upon a counterfeit assumption about language:  that language is fundamentally transparent, temporal, or linear, and that it can therefore “imitate” 273

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures the objects it “sees” as it exists in reality. The multiplicity which eludes the theologian specifically addresses the notion that God is not greater than sin and that perhaps the philosopher is the greater sinner (exhibiting jahl or hubris based on ignorance) in presuming that God would not show mercy to the poet. At the same time, this multiplicity that eludes implies that there are truths that cannot be transcribed or circumscribed by a rational, discursive process and that poetic activity alone (signified by the rhetorical presence of wine) can convey the erotic vicissitude of human experience.

Notes 1. Yaseen Noorani, “Heterotopia and the Wine Poem in Early Islamic Culture,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 36, no. 3 (2004): 354. 2. The wine poem, or khamriyya, is a well-established poetic genre in the Arab tradition by the time Abū Nuwās was writing; this particular wine praise, insomuch as it is satirical and polemical, also belongs to the genre of hijāʿ. 3. Dīwān Abī Nuwās, ed. Aḥmad ‘Abd al-Majīd al-Ghazzālī (Beirut:  Dār al-Kitāb al-ʿArabī, 1982), 6–7; Dīwān Abī Nuwās, ed. Ewald Wagner (Wiesbaden: Kommissionsverlag Franz Steiner, 1988), 3: 2–4. English translation provided by Philip F. Kennedy, The Wine Song in Classical Arabic Poetry: Abū Nuwās and the Literary Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 267, except when a literal translation of the original text is necessary. 4. A hamziyya is a poem (modeled after the pre-Islamic ode in terms of structure and themes) whose rhyme scheme is based on the letter hamza, which forms the conclusion of each bayt. 5. Throughout this chapter, I highlight wine’s anthropomorphic, feminine character by using subject (she), object (her) and possessive pronoun (her). 6. According to al-Ghazālī, the poet and this theologian were friends before the latter embraced the principles of Muʿtazilism and became a leading figure of one of its schools; later, when the two men reunited, al-Naẓẓām censured the poet for wine drinking, warning that committing such a grave sin will warrant punishment by hellfire. Dīwān, ed. al-Ghazālī, 6. Muʿtazilis believed that good and evil could be determined rationally, without recourse to revealed evidence. Richard M. Frank, Early Islamic Theology: The Muʿtazilites and al-Ashʿarī, vol. 2 of Texts and Studies on the Development and History of Kalām, ed. Dimitri Gutas (Burlington, VT:  Ashgate, 2007), 7.  Like all Muslim theologians and jurists, Muʿtazilis deemed wine inherently evil and punishable by hellfire (i.e., a grave sin or kabīra), not merely because it is denounced in the Qur’an. According to H. S. Nyberg’s entry “al-Mu’tazila” in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, cited by Kennedy, Ibrāhīm al-Naẓẓām and theologians of his school “gave mu’tazila its essential

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Tempting the Theologian character. This theology is 1)  apologetic; 2)  strictly Qur’anic; 3) polemical; 4) speculative; it has recourse to philosophic means to refute its adversaries and formulate dogmas; 5) intellectualist.” He emphasizes that these theologians were “of the strictest school” and therefore cannot be regarded as “philosophers” or “free thinkers.” Kennedy, Wine Song, 191. 7. Kennedy, Wine Song. 8. Noorani, “Heterotopia,” 358–60. 9. In the poetry of Abū Nuwās, wine implies an amalgam of contrary or irreconcilable modes of experience. Her attributes, equally munificent, range from the sensual to the ethereal:  she has sexual attributes, as she is both a virgin (bikr) and a crone (‘ajūz). Accordingly, she is a virginal bride to be sacrificed on the eve of her consumption. See Dīwān, ed. al-Ghazzālī, 32, and Dīwān, ed. Wagner, poem 266. For a comprehensive survey of feminine imagery linked to wine in the Arab bacchic tradition, see ­chapter 1 of Kennedy’s Wine Song. Like the realm of the spirit, God, and His sublime book, she transcends any similarities or equals. See Dīwān, ed. al-Ghazzālī, 73, or Dīwān, ed. Wagner, poem 103; al-Ghazzālī, 13, and Wagner, poem 9; al-Ghazzālī, 696, and Wagner, poem 3.  Wine preexists Time and Fate. To confine wine to a single image would be, in a sense, to delimit her potentiality. Hence, wine is neither “the sun” (al-shams) nor “maiden” (bikr) nor “paradise” (al-khuld), to name but a few of the epithets common to both Abū Nuwās’s wine praise as well as the Arab wine-praise genre. Rather, wine is a presence exceeding and therefore eluding any single representation or image. 10. As Noorani observes, “When mixed with water, it erupts with foam and sparks and causes those present to sneeze. It contains a fiery strength (sawra) similar to that of the lusts and passions. It flows out of its container and mingles with the bodies of others.” Noorani, “Heterotopia,” 354. 11. As an example of wine’s contrary, excessive and elusive character, Noorani cites a poem (Dīwān, ed. al-Ghazzālī, 118, and Dīwān, ed. Wagner, poem 8) in which wine transcends the peripheries of geographical, cultural, or religious identity: Christian by lineage, Muslim by village, Syrian in domicile, Iraqi in origin. Zoroastrian, though averse to the adherents of her religion Due to her hatred of the fire they keep alighted. [“Heterotopia,” 354.] 12. As Hamori rightly points out, “Getting drunk was no allegorical business for Abū Nuwās.” Andras Hamori, On the Art of Medieval Arabic Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 56. 13. Kennedy, Wine Song, 267. 14. Ibid., 34. 15. Literally, the poet tells his censurer, “Cast aside your blame or reproof.” 16. The logic, which states that censure is a temptation (“fa-inna al-lawma ighrā’u”) is in no measure the invention of the poet but rather, and as Kennedy

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures observes, it is “derived from a well-attested topos.” Kennedy notes two possible precursors whose model the poet may be following: the Umayyad poet Harītha b. Badr and the pre-Islamic poet al-A‘shā, whose “wa-ka’sin sharibtu ‘alā ladhdhatin wa-ukhrā tadāwaytu min-hā bi-hā” is more traditionally put forward as providing the model for Abū Nuwās’s line. Concerning the former, Kennedy observes that “Fa-inna al-lawma … qad tughrī is apparently alluded to by Abū Nuwās’s fa-inna al-lawma ighrā’u.” Kennedy, Wine Song, 188. 17. Cook observes that the concurrence of the two phrases “commanding right” and “forbidding wrong” are found in eight Qur’anic verses; seldom do these two commands appear in isolation from one another. See the following passages:  3:104, 3:110, 3:114, 7:157, 9:71, 9:112, 22:41, 31:17. Michael Cook, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 13. Cook also observes that “Forbidding wrong is … one of the ‘five principles’ (al-usūl al-khamsa) of Mu’tazilism.” Ibid., 196. 18. The Qur’an takes an ambivalent attitude towards wine; it is the tradition of the Hadith (the collected sayings of the Prophet Muhammad), which institutionalize the prohibition of wine. As Kueny observes, “Unlike the Qur’an, the Hadith are consistent … in their condemnation of wine and other intoxicants. Although they still find wine to be an ambiguous substance, they no longer treat this ambiguity as having any positive qualities … Instead, wine – more specifically the intoxicating effects of wine – become a source of danger that must be contained … The Hadith seek only to identify, define, and contain what is ethically (and therefore cosmically) corrosive. As a result, the Hadith present the Prophet (or one of his companions) setting up lists of prohibited ingredients from which wine was made, doling out formulaic punishments for wine-induced transgressions ... There can be no room for ambiguous substances like wine in an orderly world, for they would contradict and undermine the very nature and structure of the cosmos.” Kathryn M. Kueny, The Rhetoric of Sobriety: Wine in Early Islam (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 26. 19. For an important analysis of the way in which meaning overflows language, see Jacques Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 61–156. In this influential study of Plato’s Phaedrus, Derrida critiques Plato’s domestication of the term pharmakon (φάρμακον), a Greek word which denotes “remedy” and “poison” and which Derrida reads as a semantic overflow that precedes, exceeds, and transgresses the binary oppositions that form the foundation of metaphysics. 20. Edward William Lane, An Arabic-English Lexicon (1863–93; repr., Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1980), s.v.v. dāwaytuhu and dawan.

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Tempting the Theologian 21. Cited and translated by Noorani, “Heterotopia,” 349. See Dīwān, ed. al-Ghazzālī, 159, and Dīwān, ed. Wagner, 3:2–4. 22. As Kennedy observes, “The weight of criticism and censure, implicit in the initial backdrop of poem, fades to insignificance.” Kennedy, Wine Song, 190. 23. As Noorani explains: “Care is the term for all the miseries of ordinary existence, the subjective experience of fate. Therefore the lifting of care signifies escape from everyday life. To be blissful perpetually in spite of fate (‘alā al-dahr), means to escape time and fate, and hence to be care-free. Wine is the privileged means to this condition.” Noorani, “Heterotopia,” 349. 24. Ibid. 25. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess:  Selected Writings 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 241. 26. Kennedy, Wine Song, 26. Here Kennedy mentions some of the feminine epithets for wine that date from the pre-Islamic period, observing that poets of the later periods develop this imagery in their wine poetry. See “Feminine Imagery” in ­chapter 1 of Wine Song for a general survey of the development of the feminine imagery of wine in the Umayyad period through the early Abbasid period. 27. The link between the feminine character of wine (and the cupbearer) and “her” transgressive quality is further illuminated by Sander’s comment that “Women were presumed to be a major site of social disorder (fitna) by medieval jurists and commentators as well as in popular literature.” Paula Sanders, “Gendering the Ungendered Body: Hermaphrodites in Medieval Islamic Law,” in Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender, ed. Nikkie R. Keddie and Beth Baron (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 75. 28. In the Qur’an (11:77–80), the people of Lot sought to have male-male sex with Lot’s guests, who were angels. According to Rowson, “Liwāṭ, formed from Lūṭ, is the general as well as legal term for homosexual anal intercourse, and technically may refer to the ‘activity’ of either partner; lūṭī, on the other hand, a term rare in the legal literature but otherwise common, always refers to the active partner, who, at least from Abbāsid times, was inevitably exposed to less intense societal disapproval than the passive partner and indeed, those desires, if not his acts, were widely considered normal from at least the fourth/tenth century.” Everett K. Rowson, “The Effeminates of Early Medina,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 111, no. 4 (1991): 685. 29. Ibid. 30. Georges Bataille, Erotism:  Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986), 16. 31. Ibid., 17–18.

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures 32. For a fascinating study of gender and cross-gender in medieval Islam, see Sanders, “Gendering the Ungendered Body.” 33. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse:  Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 227. Barthes references one of the speeches in the Symposium of Plato, that of the comedian Aristophanes; more precisely, Barthes muses upon the poet’s famous double-sexed humanoids who, after being sliced in half as a punishment for their hubris, spend their lives in the desperate search to be united with their missing or “other half.” See Symposium 189c4–d6. 34. It is in the “grotesque,” “improbable,” seductive, and therefore iconoclastic body (“beyond figuration”) of the hermaphrodite that wine reaches its apotheosis, conjuring in the image of the hermaphroditic wine god Dionysos (Διόνυσος) and along with him the “grotesque,” seductive, hubristic figure of the satyr (σάτυρος). Concerning Dionysus’s blurry sexuality, Walter Otto cites classical authorities:  “In Aeschylus he is called contemptuously ‘the woman one’ … in Euripides, the ‘womanly stranger’ … At times he is also called ‘the man-womanish.’ ” Walter F.  Otto, Dionysos:  Myth and Cult, trans. Robert B. Palmer (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1981), 176. 35. Sanders, “Gendering the Ungendered Body,” 74. “No aspect of life in medieval Islamic societies was free from considerations of sex. The boundary between male and female was drawn firmly and was deeply embedded both in views of the cosmos and in social structures.” 36. Baudrillard, Seduction, 13 (emphasis added). 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 14 (emphasis added). 39. “Nonsense is the outcome of every possible sense.” Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany:  State University of New  York Press, 1988), 101. 40. Lane, An Arabic-English Lexicon, s.v.v. “la’la’a” and “lu’lu’atun.” 41. See footnote 9 of c­ hapter 16 in Agamben’s important study on the topology of erotic desire, phantasm, and poetry: “The usage of the word ‘stanza’ to indicate a part of the canzone or poem derives from the Arabic term bayt, which means ‘dwelling place,’ ‘tent,’ and at the same time ‘verse.’ According to Arab authors, bayt also refers to the principal verse of a poem composed in praise of a person to whom one wishes to express desire, and in particular the verse in which the object of desire is expressed. (See the entry for bayt in E.W. Lane, Arab-English Dictionary.).” Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L.  Martinez (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 130–1. 42. Lane, An Arabic-English Lexicon, s.v. “ ʾirsālun.” The term also means “setting loose, unbinding or liberating,” which is befitting for this bacchic context since, in the poetry of Abū Nuwās, wine is preserved for the consummate moment in which it can be poured out of its container and consumed by the drinker.

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Tempting the Theologian 43. In fact, the logic of ideating wine parallels the logic of ideating the sun. More than a drink that can merely be consumed, the excessive brilliance of wine renders it sun-like, and yet the beauty of wine exceeds and supersedes the sun: “Hiya al-shamsu ilā anna li al-shamsi wa qudwatan wa qahwatuha fī kull ṣusnin tafūquhā” (She is the sun, though the sun burns and our wine exceeds it in every beauty). English translation in Kennedy, Wine Song, 266. The poem is cited in Arabic in Wine Song, 275. 44. Noorani, “Heterotopia,” 354 (emphasis mine). 45. Translation cited in Kennedy, Wine Song, 267. 46. Barthes in his Mythologies remarks on the antipathy between water and wine:  “Bachelard has given ‘substantial psycho-analysis’ of this fluid … and shown that wine is sap of the sun and earth, that its basic state is not the moist but the dry, and that on such grounds the substance which is most contrary to it is water.” Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 58. 47. A topos of the Nuwasian wine song and of the wine-song genre overall is the unhappy mixture or “marriage” of water and wine, which most often results in the effervescent, often violent bubbling and/or foaming of wine. For a comprehensive survey of this kind of imagery, see J.  Bencheikh, “Poésies bachiques d’Abū Nūwās: Thèmes et personnages,” Bulletin d’études orientales 18 (1963): 42–7. 48. Here the poet is drawing on an ancient topos of the classical ode (qaṣīda), that of the aṭlāl or the traces of the abandoned abode, where, traditionally, the poet-lover would weep after his beloved’s departure. Kennedy observes that in the qaṣīda, this nostalgic moment has the rhetorical function of inciting the poet-lover to take solace in wine drinking; at times, the poet may even reject the aṭlāl in favor of wine drinking. Kennedy, Wine Song, 40. Here Abū Nuwās radicalizes this motif by choosing to weep over wine rather than the beloved – canonical – figures of ancient tradition. 49. “Asma’ and Hind are proverbial names of loved ones in the antique nasīb; Durra, by contrast was the servant-girl of Abu Nuwas. Wine is a sensuously feminine entity (‘whose house is not visited by sorrow,’ unlike the proverbial Asma’ or Hind), and ‘she’ is described in such a way as to blend with the cross-dressed ghulamiyya:  light irradiates blindingly from both.” Kennedy, Abu Nuwas: A Genius of Poetry (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005), 68. 50. “If a joke is intended in line ten, one senses that it is at the expense of the poet’s adversary: ‘Perish the thought that the vine should have a tent set up for her and that camels and sheep should alight there.’ This verse is antagonistic, ridiculing the urban poets who continued to compose in the manner of their Bedouin predecessors, and thus provides a natural transition to the sharp critique contained in the final phase of the poem.” Kennedy, Wine Song, 190.

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures 51. Kennedy notes that the second hemistich of line 11 “expands a commonplace topic – jahl, which contrasts the adversary’s claim to knowledge within what in the ‘Abbasid period was the new-found context of philosophical discussion: (11a) qul li-man yaddaʿī fi al-‘ilmi falsafatan (Tell him who would claim philosophy as part of his knowledge …).” Kennedy, Wine Song, 190. The term jahl literally signifies “ignorance”; accordingly, the pre-Islamic era is known as Jāhiliyya or the “Age of Ignorance”; Noorani observes that jahl also refers to the violent or passionate excess or lack of self-control. Noorani, “Heterotopia,” 347. Hence in suggesting that his censurer lacks knowledge, the poet is implying that he is not only ignorant (of religion) but also hubristic or excessive.

Bibliography Abū Nūwās, Al-Ḥasan b. Hānī. Dīwān Abī Nuwās. Edited by Aḥmad ‘Abd al-Majīd al-Ghazzālī. Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-ʿArabī, 1982. ——— Dīwān Abī Nuwās. Edited by Ewald Wagner. 4  vols. Wiesbaden: Kommissionsverlag Franz Steiner, 1988. Agamben, Giorgio. Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. Translated by Ronald L. Martinez. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse:  Fragments. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978. ——— Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. London: Paladin, 1972. Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939. Edited by Allan Stoekl. Translated by Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie Jr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. ——— Erotism: Death and Sensuality. Translated by Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986. ——— Inner Experience. Translated by Leslie Anne Boldt. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988. ——— Theory of Religion. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1992. Baudrillard, Jean. Seduction. Translated by Brian Singer. New  York:  New World Perspectives, 1990. Bencheikh, J. “Khamriyya.” In Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, edited by P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W. P. Heinrichs. Leiden: Brill, 1960–2004. ——— “Poésies bachiques d’Abū Nūwās: Thèmes et personnages.” Bulletin d’études orientales 18 (1963): 7–84. Cook, Michael. Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

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Tempting the Theologian Frank, Richard M. Early Islamic Theology: The Muʿtazilites and al-Ashʿarī. Vol. 2 of Texts and Studies on the Development and History of Kalām. Edited by Dimitri Gutas. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. Hamori, Andras. “Examples of Convention in the Poetry of Abū Nūwās.” Studia Islamica 30 (1969): 5–26. ——— On the Art of Medieval Arabic Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974. ——— “Form and Logic in Some Medieval Arabic Poems.” Edebiyât 2, no. 2 (1977): 163–72. Harb, F. “Wine Poetry (Khamriyyāt).” In ‘Abbasid Belles-Lettres, edited by J. Ashtiany et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 219–34. Kennedy, Philip F. The Wine Song in Classical Arabic Poetry: Abū Nūwās and the Literary Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. ——— Abu Nuwas: A Genius of Poetry. Oxford: Oneworld, 2005. Kueny, Kathryn M. The Rhetoric of Sobriety:  Wine in Early Islam. Albany:  State University of New York Press, 2001. Lane, Edward William. An Arabic-English Lexicon. Edited by Stanley Lane-Poole. 8 vols. 1863–93. Reprint, Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1980. Lowry, Joseph E. “Lawful and Unlawful.” In Encyclopaedia of the Qur’ān, edited by Jane Dammen McAuliffe. Leiden: Brill, 2001–06. Noorani, Yaseen. “Heterotopia and the Wine Poem in Early Islamic Culture.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 36, no. 3 (2004): 345–66. Otto, Walter. Dionysos:  Myth and Cult. Translated by Robert B. Palmer. Dallas: Spring Publications, 1981. Rowson, Everett K. “The Effeminates of Early Medina.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 111, no. 4 (1991): 671–93. Sanders, Paula. “Gendering the Ungendered Body:  Hermaphrodites in Medieval Islamic Law.” Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender, edited by Nikkie R. Keddie and Beth Baron (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1993).

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Dialectical Love

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12 Lovers in the Age of the Beloveds: Classical Ottoman Divan Literature and the Dialectical Tradition Mehmet Karabela

When we say, “God is love,” we are saying something very great and true. But it would be senseless to grasp this saying in a simple-minded way as a simple definition, without analyzing what love is. Hegel1

Introduction The debate over the relationship between literature and philosophy has intensified in the past decade, with the growth of modern literary theory in the wake of deconstruction and an increasingly philosophical approach to the interpretation of the text. However, as this debate intensified in modern Western academia, there has been no large-scale application of philosophical analysis to literature, particularly Middle Eastern literatures. This chapter is an attempt to fill that gap by analyzing traditional archetypes of divan literature – ‘āşık (lover), ma‘şūk (beloved), and rakīb (opponent) – to reveal the presence of a dialectical discourse in Ottoman love poems written between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In both style and 285

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures content divan poems display a comprehensive understanding of the postclassical Islamic philosophical conception of dialectic and argumentation theory, known as ādāb al-baḥth wa al-munāẓara. The focus on Ottoman love poetry and Islamic argumentation theory in this paper aims to demonstrate (a) how the love poetry that developed in Ottoman culture in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is more dialectical in form and content than Ottoman literary studies have recognized heretofore and (b)  that philosophy and literature are not fully distinct entities in Middle Eastern literatures. This short study focuses on the three main figures in Ottoman divan poetry  – ‘āşık (lover), ma‘şūk (beloved), and rakīb (rival)2  – in order to demonstrate the existence of a dialectical discourse in which love becomes a competition between ‘āşık and rakīb for the ma‘şūk, the object of love.3 Such a dialectical framework is helpful for identifying conceptual oppositions in love and the use of antithetical language, such as that between ‘āşık and rakīb. Our concentration on love poems will also provide a useful starting point for future research on the relationship between literature and philosophy in Ottoman literary studies.

Debates on Philosophy and Literature The relationship between philosophy and literature has long been contested by philosophers and poets, going as far back as Plato.4 Over the past decade, the debate over whether philosophy and literature are one and the same or not has intensified.5 The attempt to clarify the relationship between these two domains has become more urgent. For writers like Octavio Paz, philosophy and poetry were entirely different modes of approaching reality, while for others, like the analytic philosopher Richard Rorty, the traditional divisions between philosophy as the realm of “reason” and poetry as the realm of “emotion” were problematic.6 In this context there has been an increased interest in literary theory, especially in the era of a postmodernist and poststructuralist turn against the modernist view of art as irrational and philosophy a strictly rational realm.7 As a result of deconstructionist literary criticism, the concept of “the text” has been expanded, summed up by Jacques Derrida’s famous claim that “there is nothing outside the text.”8 Derrida pointed out that 286

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Lovers in the Age of the Beloveds modernist thinkers place philosophy above literature since they see philosophy as rational and not involved in the use of rhetorical tropes or metaphorical language. Derrida, by contrast, did not see any difference between philosophy and literature in this respect, and so he argued that literature can be used in philosophy to the same extent that philosophy can be categorized as literature.9 The result of these theoretical debates has been a broader application of literary theories to any kind of text, whether philosophical, historical, religious, or political, or the inverse:  applying philosophical analysis to literary texts to show how philosophy can benefit from literature.10 Some scholars have focused on the dialectical nature of literature by highlighting specific examples of the role of contradictions (thesis and antithesis) in medieval and modern literature. James A. W. Rembert showed that the question-and-answer method, which he calls the “dialectical tradition,” is the one Jonathan Swift (d. 1745), for example, used in his works.11 Rembert compares Swift’s method of argument and reasoning to the Aristotelian model expressed in detail in Aristotle’s Topics.12 Recently, Ksana Blank, in Dostoevsky’s Dialectics and the Problem of Sin, analyzed the dialectical nature of Dostoevsky’s works, including Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, Notes from Underground, and “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man.”13 Blank borrows from ancient Greek, Chinese, and Christian dialectical traditions to show a dynamic aspect of Dostoevsky’s dialectics as a philosophy of compatible contradictions. These studies found the concept of truth in literature to be based not on logic, but on dialogue and contradiction, even though the authors were very well aware of Aristotelian logic and dialectic.

Dialectical Discourse in Ottoman Divan Love Poetry However, these developments took place exclusively in the context of European and North American academic circles.14 In this respect, classical Ottoman literature has not been thoroughly examined, especially when compared with Western scholarship in the field to date.15 This chapter will use traditional archetypes of divan literature as “core samples,” namely, the ‘āşık (lover), the ma‘şūk (beloved), and the rakīb (opponent), in order to show 287

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures dialectical forms in Ottoman love poems that have a clear philosophical underpinning.16 We will see how the divan poets consciously constructed a dialectical discourse through the extensive use of binary opposition. In Islamic argumentation theory, the objective of dialectical discourse is to test the foundations of opposite points of view.17 According to this theory, the dialectic between the questioner (sā’il) and the respondent (mu‘allil) occurs in order to find the truth (ṣavāb) in the argumentation and the real concern is to distinguish the strong (true) argument from the weak (false) one.18 There are two sides in argumentation, questioner and respondent, with one side defending a thesis while the other attacks it.19 In Ottoman divan poetry, likewise, there are two sides in love: the ‘āşık and his opponent the rakīb. Both want to win the ma‘şūk. The ‘āşık makes his claim as a thesis – “I love this girl”20 – and the rakīb consistently challenges until the ‘āşık gives up or is silenced so that the rakīb wins the beloved although the rakīb is not as ambitious as the ‘āşık. Nineteenth-century dictionaries, such as Lügât-ı Nâcî and Kâmûs-u Türkî, define rakīb as someone who loves another person’s lover, or, an intruder who does not value the union of two hearts.21 In most cases, the rakīb is a male who chases someone else’s female lover instead of finding one of his own. Ahmet Atillâ Şentürk, in his study Rakīb’e Dair (On rakīb), mentions the great struggle and confusion over the role and meaning of the rakīb in the game of love. He says that until the sixteenth century, the role of rakīb in poetic texts was that of a protector or guardian of the girl against the pseudo-lovers (weak arguers).22 However, from the sixteenth century on, the perception of the old rakīb changes: as attested in divan poetry, the rakīb was now seen as the enemy of lovers (adū’/aʿdā) or the “other” (ghayr/aghyār).23 This change is accounted for in the rakīb’s behavior, as he begins to openly challenge the ‘āşık by claiming proprietorship over the ma‘şūk. The following examples from Ottoman divan poetry reveal this tension between the three players in love: Yār içūn aghyār ile merdāne ceng itsem gerek İt gibi murdar rakīb ölmezse yār elden gider24 For my love, to fight bravely against the enemy is a must If the rakīb does not die like a dog, my lover will go [from  my hands]

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Lovers in the Age of the Beloveds Bular birbirinun ışkına hayran Rakīb ortada fitne sanki şeytan25 They cherish their love for each other Rakīb is a trouble-maker between us like Satan26 Ara yirde rakīb itden çoğidi Ol iki ‘āşıka rahat yoğidi27 There were more rakībs than dogs There was no rest for the two lovers

These poems contain a specific collection of polar opposites since dialectical discourse in these poems gives readers a clear choice between good (the ‘āşık) and evil (the rakīb). The rakīb is often described as a mainstay figure, who always poses a potential threat – and challenge to the lover – to the two lovers. Halīlī (d. 1485), in his Fürkatnāme (Book of separation), writes: Bana çekdürdi cevr ile cefāyı Rakībe sürdürdi zevk ü sefāyı28 She made me suffer And she gave rakīb a good time

Analysis of the Dialectical Discourse in Poems While early Greeks used dialectical discourse to explore the truth, divan poets used it to declare the truth, as evidenced by the frequent use of imperatives in their text. The truth is a foregone conclusion in the works of these poets: the ‘āşık deserves the girl.29 Albeit the ‘āşık does not question the logic of his entitlement to the beloved, he does not question why the beloved is still more attracted to the less pure persona depicted as the rakīb.30 The poet is confident that the ma‘şūk, is in fact attracted to him, and rakīb is merely a well-utilized diversion. Poets often attempt to convince the reader that were there no rakīb, the ‘āşık and the ma‘şūk would live happily ever after. As such, the rakīb was characterized as a mere obstacle for the absolute union of “true lovers.”31

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures Since it is almost impossible to escape the threats posed by the rakīb, the only way to be relieved of that anxiety (rakīb) was to wait for his death. Necātī (d. 1509) thought that this was futile because “one dog [rakīb] will die, but there will be other dogs who come along soon.”32 The only way to get rid of this demon figure, the famous Ottoman poet Bākī (d. 1600) says, is to snuff him yourself instead of waiting for his death: Ser-i kūyunda ger gavgā-yı uşşāk olmasın dirsen Rakīb-i kāfiri öldür ne ceng ü ne cidāl olsun33 If you want there to be no fighting among lovers Kill the infidel rakīb so that there is no war and quarrel

In this sense, divan literature also attempts to understand the nature of love by seeing it as an open-ended question between the ‘āşık and the rakīb. The rakīb tries to infiltrate amorous space occupied by Leylā and Mecnūn, Hüsrev and Şirin, or Vāmık and Azra.34 Dialectic in love is distinct in the sense that it could be called “speech between two opposing emotions.” Two opposing emotions are created in the heart of the beloved (ma‘şūk) by two real participants (‘āşık and rakīb) to test which one is truer. The rakīb always questions both the lover and the beloved, and his role is to push the ‘āşık to define the nature of ‘aşk (love), simply by token of his opposition. The point here is that the dialectic between the lover and his opponent is meant to distinguish strong, true love from weak, false love. This is akin to the tenets of Islamic argumentation theory, whose principal concern is to distinguish the strong (true) argument from the weak (false) one. In Persian poetry, among others, the words ṣaḥīḥ (true), saqīm (false), ḥaqq (truth), and bāṭil (falsity) are used to differentiate between true and false love. For rakīb, in the ādāb al-baḥth wa al-munāẓara the following terms should be of interest: māni (Ar. māniʿ, “stopper/hinderer”), müdde‘i (Ar. mudda‘ī, “opponent/perpetrator”) and mu‘ārız (Ar. mu‘āriḍ, “opponent/nay-sayer”) were used. Ottoman poetry has been greatly influenced by Arabic and Persian poetry in terms of rhetorical terminology.35 The dialectical relationship between ‘āşık, ma‘şūk, and rakīb can also be described as a verbal battle against an opponent in which the poet makes the participants – the proponent of love (‘āşık) and the questioner 290

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Lovers in the Age of the Beloveds of love (rakīb) – debate a thesis (love), answer objections (to the accusation of not loving), and offer evidences of their fealty. In fact, divan love poetry is more like a public debate than a convivial joinder among the participants. The term “Lover” in divan poetry highlights the real dilemma of whether the rakīb opposes the nonfigurative concepts of love and the figurative lover.36 As indicated, according to the Islamic ādāb al-baḥth wa al-munāẓara theory, the objective of argumentation is to find the truth even in the hands of one’s opponent37 Does the rakīb want, then, to demonstrate the fallacy of the ‘āşık’s thesis (his love for the ma‘şūk), or to demolish him and win the girl for himself? In other words, keeping in mind the terms of ādāb al-baḥth, is the rakīb trying to find the truth, or is he aiming at victory? Although the answer is ambiguous, it makes one thing clear: dialectical discourse in divan poems refers to a philosophy of conflict rather than a reciprocal relationship between binary opposites, since the three archetypes in the game of love (‘āşık, ma‘şūk, and rakīb) are not in a mutual relationship but instead opposed to each other. In this respect, there are two major antimonies that can be highlighted in divan love poetry, each containing a thesis and an antithesis. The first is the antimony of love, which cannot be attained by mere mortals like the ‘āşık. The first, begs the question as to why one would want to take such a path, peppered with incompatibility and pain and destined for unrequited love. The second is the antinomy of truth: the ‘āşık is aware of the inequality that exists in the dynamics of this relationship, yet he genuinely feels that he knows how to love his beloved better than his opponent. The ‘āşık presents a resistance to the rakīb (the intervening villain), but not to the ma‘şūk. The ‘āşık knows that the ma‘şūk is happy with the rakīb, but justifies lying with the maʿşūk, and continues to place all blame on the rakīb. Although the ‘āşık questions himself, he never questions the authority of the ma‘şūk: she has the final say. In more illustrative terms, the ‘āşık is depicted as a helpless servant to the ma‘şūk. The figure of the ma‘şūk is likened to a sadomasochist who enjoys his pain.38 Therefore, reconciliation is never in the cards. If we look at the ‘āşık and the ma‘şūk from a Hegelian dialectical perspective, the master (the ma‘şūk) and the slave (the ‘āşık) remain so inter-dependent that coexistence becomes all but the only option.39 This in turn demands that the master be recognized by the servant; consequently the master becomes 291

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures the slave and the slave becomes the master (of the master). Furthermore, the choice between freedom and bondage is no choice at all as the slave consciously, if paradoxically, chooses bondage. The paradox in the lover’s pursuit of union seems to be that domination, separation, and servitude are necessary for personal growth, but the final goal of achieving unity, nay oneness, with the ma‘şūk may not be possible.40

Conclusion As we have seen, Ottoman divan love poetry accommodates both literary and philosophical approaches to reading texts, validating the postmodernist view of the relationship between literature and philosophy. The tripartite nature of love (‘āşık–ma‘şūk–rakīb) in divan love poems raises fundamental questions about the relationship between philosophy and literature as well. If philosophy revolves around truth, intellect, and the literal use of language, and the literature focuses on fiction, emotion, and metaphorical language, then how do we interpret the divan love poems, particularly the dialectical discourse that exists among the role players? The overlap of philosophy and literature in the Ottoman intellectual history displays hybrid forms of cultural production. The dialectical discourse in classical Ottoman literature, suggested in this study, is based on the philosophical insights of Islamic dialectic and argumentation theory. It explains how the divan poets use this philosophical genre to create a plausible structure for the reader. This dialectical discourse analysis of ‘āşık, ma‘şūk, and the rakīb can better accommodate the use of the dual languages of philosophy and literature than previous scholarship in this field has allowed. Although philosophy and literature seem to be distinct, both can be exemplified in the very same text. Such combinations may have the potential to achieve more than the sum of the two parts. Philosophical approaches can account for the power of literary works that are not overtly philosophical. This chapter shows also that Ottoman divan poets developed a dialectical understanding of love in which love (‘aşk) creates and sustains differences between ‘āşık, ma‘şūk, and rakīb. The main point in these poems is that love does not obliterate the differences, but uses them for ma‘şūk’s benefit in the most effective way. In evaluating Ottoman divan love poetry and 292

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Lovers in the Age of the Beloveds its philosophical foundations, the future research may benefit immensely from seeking answers in theoretically based comparative literature studies about the following two questions. The first question being how does Ottoman love poetry compare with the medieval European conception of amour courtois (courtly love) to discern what might constitute differences or similarities between those genres? And the second question the Hegelian master-slave dialectic:  how does the treatment of dialectics in Hegel allow us to widen the field of literary formats in which we look for and develop philosophical concepts in classical Ottoman literature?

Notes 1. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, trans. P. C. Hodgson, R. F. Brown, and J. M. Stewart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 418. 2. These are the Turkish pronunciations of the Arabic terms ‘āshiq, ma‘shūq, and raqīb, respectively. 3. This study will also examine some terms used in Arabic and Persian poetry, especially given that the latter influenced the Ottoman divan literature. On the enemies of love in an Arabo-Andalusian context, see Patrizia Onesta, “Lauzinger-Wāshī-Index, Gardador-Custos:  The ‘Enemies of Love’ in Provençal, Arabo-Andalusian, and Latin Poetry,” Scripta Mediterranea 19/20 (1998–9): 119–42. 4. On the quarrel between philosophy and literature (or poetry) in antiquity leading up to the contemporary conversations and polemics between the two disciplines, see Susan B. Levin, The Ancient Quarrel between Philosophy and Literature Revisited:  Plato and the Greek Literary Tradition (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2001); Raymond Barfield, The Ancient Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Grace Ledbetter, Poetics before Plato:  Interpretation and Authority in Early Greek Theories of Poetry (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2003); Ramona Naddaff, Exiling the Poets: The Production of Censorship in Plato’s Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Colin Davis, Critical Excess:  Overreading in Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas, Žižek and Cavell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). 5. For these debates in detail, see Richard Eldridge, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2009); Arthur C.  Danto, “Philosophy as/and/of Literature,” in Literature and the Question of Philosophy, ed. Anthony J.  Cascardi (Baltimore:  John Hopkins University Press, 1987), 3–23; Jorge J.  E. Gracia, “Borge’s ‘Pierre Menard’:  Philosophy or Literature?” in Literary Philosophers: Borges, Calvino, Eco, ed. Jorge J. E. Gracia,

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures Carolyn Korsmeyer, and Rudolph Gasche (New York: Routledge, 2002), 85–107; William Irwin, “Philosophy and the Philosophical, Literature and the Literary, Borges and the Labyrinthine,” in Literary Philosophers, 27–45; Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction and Literature (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2002); Stein Haugom Olsen, “Thematic Concepts:  Where Philosophy Meets Literature,” Philosophy and Literature 16 (1983): 75–93; Hans Peter Rickman, Philosophy in Literature (Madison, NJ:  Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996); Berel Lang, The Anatomy of Philosophical Style: Literary Philosophy and the Philosophy of Literature (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1990); Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays in Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); and Ole Martin Skilleås, Philosophy and Literature: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001). 6. For Paz’s thought on the relationship between philosophy and poetry, see Hugo Moreno, “Octavio Paz’s Poetic Reply to Hegel’s Philosophical Legacy,” in Octavio Paz:  Humanism and Critique, ed. Oliver Kozlarek (Bielefeld:  Verlag, 2009), 217–30. For Rorty, philosophy becomes a kind of literature, which means a philosophical text becomes a literary text – a text offering a particular philosopher’s worldview. Rorty developed his ideas in his two books: Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1989)  and Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1991). For Rorty’s views on philosophy and literature, see Lothar Bredella, “Richard Rorty on Philosophy, Literature, and Hermeneutics,” in Literature and Philosophy, ed. Herbert Grabes, REAL:  Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 13 (Tübingen:  Verlag, 1997), 103–24. Recently, philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum, Peter J. McCormick, Bernard Harrison, and Richard Wollheim have made a turnaround with a more accommodating attitude toward literature, especially the novel, to seek answers for philosophical problems since philosophy was unable to tell the whole story. 7. An increasing interest was initiated in the wake of Rorty’s The Linguistic Turn (1967), which was largely influenced by the theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Later, in the 1970s, the broader disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, shaped by Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralism and the poststructuralism expounded by Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, recognized the importance of language as a structuring agent, further popularizing the notion of the linguistic turn. The power of language in historical discourse, particularly its rhetorical tropes and use of metaphors, has been clearly illustrated by Hayden White. Language has also become a central focus in the history of ideas to which Quentin Skinner’s work on recent intellectual history attests. For debates over the relationship between philosophy and literature (or the linguistic turn in philosophy that challenged the foundation of philosophy), see Raman Selden and Peter Widdowson, A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), 125–202.

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Lovers in the Age of the Beloveds 8. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 158. 9. For Derrida’s ideas on the relationship between philosophy and literature, see the interview section in his Acts of Literature, edited by Derek Attridge (London:  Routledge, 1992), 33–75. There have also been studies on Derrida’s thought about the dichotomy between philosophy and literature:  Mark Edmundson, Literature against Philosophy:  Plato to Derrida (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Geoffrey H. Hartman, Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981); and Simon Glendinning and Robert Eaglestone, eds, Derrida’s Legacies: Literature and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2008). 10. Donald Kelley, “What Is Happening to the History of Ideas?” Journal of the History of Ideas 51 (1990): 3–25. 11. James A.  W. Rembert, Swift and the Dialectical Tradition (New  York:  St. Martin’s, 1988). 12. For example, in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, when Gulliver finishes his long discourse, his Majesty raises many doubts, queries, and objections. The nature of the king’s questions and comparison of accounts and subsequent answers serve to point out the many problems in Gulliver’s representation in the pursuit of finding the truth. 13. Ksana Blank, Dostoevsky’s Dialectics and the Problem of Sin (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010). 14. In the past decade, there have also been efforts to open new departments under the title “Philosophy and Literature” or “Program in Literature and Philosophy” in North American and European universities. 15. Even though the hierarchical relationships between the ma‘şūk, ‘āşık, and rakīb have been studied in the context of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s famous “court metaphor” (saray istiaresi) concept by Neslihan Koç Keskin, her study mainly focuses on the impact of the political structure of the Ottoman state and not the philosophical analysis of the literature. See Neslihan Koç Keskin, “Maşûk, Âşık ve Rakip Arasındaki Hiyerarşik İlişkiler,” Turkish Studies:  International Periodical for the Languages, Literature and History of Turkish or Turkic 5, no. 3 (2010): 400–20. 16. Up until now, there has not been a single study on the dialectical tradition in Ottoman literature. However, there have been two important studies that engage with different aspects of the ma‘şūk and the rakīb. See Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloved: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); and Matthias Kappler, “The Beloved and His Otherness: Reflections on ‘Ethnic’ and Religious Stereotypes in Ottoman Love Poetry,” in Intercultural Aspects in and around Turkic Literatures.

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures Proceedings of the International Conference Held on October 11th–12th, 2003 in Nicosia, ed. Matthias Kappler (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006), 37–48. For an analysis of the archetype of the rakīb, see Ahmet Atillâ Şentürk, rakîb’e Dair (Istanbul: Enderun Kitabevi, 1995) and Metin Akkuş, Nef ’î Divanı’nda Tipler ve Kişilikler (Erzurum:  Atatürk Üniversitesi Fen-Edebiyat Fakültesi Yayınları, 1995). 17. On ādābü’l-bahs ve’l-münāzara in postclassical Islamic intellectual history within a broader context, see Mehmet Karabela, “Development of Dialectic and Argumentation Theory in Post-classical Islamic Intellectual History” (PhD diss., McGill University, 2011). 18. The influence of argumentation theory on the Ottoman legal system shows not only the existence of competing doctrines and opinions, but also the level and hierarchy of opinions in legal practice. There was a real contest regarding which doctrine (mezheb) or which answer (cevāb) to a question (mesʾele) was the strongest or the best. This was one of the reasons why Ottoman judges were required to pass their judgments according to “the soundest opinions of the Ḥanafi jurists (eṣaḥḥ-ı akvāl), never the weak ones.” Any judgment that had been based upon weak opinions in the Ḥanafi school of law was deemed invalid, meaning that the case in question could be reheard. See Ebussuud Efendi, “Ma‘rûzât” in Osmanlı Kanunnameleri (Istanbul: Fey Vakfı, 1992), 4:39–50. 19. Taşköprüzâde, “Risāla fī Ādāb al-Baḥth,” MS 4430, Ayasofya Collection, Süleymaniye Library, Istanbul, fols. 1b–2b; Taşköprüzâde, “Sharḥ,” MS 4430, Ayasofya Collection, Süleymaniye Library, Istanbul, fols. 3b–5b. On Taşköprüzâde (d. 1561) and his theory in detail, see Karabela, “Development of Dialectic and Argumentation Theory,” 165–9. 20. Although the gender of the ma‘şūk (beloved) is not clear in the divan love poetry, since the ma‘şūk is characterized sometimes as a female and sometimes as a male, I  have chosen to present the ma‘şūk as female. The rationale for my choice is that poets, most of the time, provide female body figures as the idealized form of the ma‘şūk. However, the reader should be aware of the fact that the ma‘şūk lacks gender and is rather an idealized body form, which includes a slim waist, long hair, and plump lips. See Ömer Faruk Akün, “Divan Edebiyatı,” in TDV İslam Ansiklopedisi, (Istanbul:  Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, 1988), 9:416–17 and Nevin Gümüş, “Yahya Nazım Divanında Sevgiliye Ait Güzellik Unsurları ile Aşık-Maşuk-Rakip Münasebeti,” Erciyes Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi 17 (1997): 231–48. 21. Cited in Şentürk, Rakîb’e Dair, 1. The original definitions of rakîb in the two Ottoman dictionaries are as follows: (a) Lügat-ı Nâcî: “Diğerini men” ile kendi işini tervîc etmeğe çalışan, engel,” and (b) Kâmûs-u Türkî: “Diğeriyle aynı şeye tâlib ve hâhişger olan, bir mahbūbeye dildāde olan aşıkların yekdiğerlerine nisbeten beheri.” For the Arabic definition of raqīb, see Edward William Lane, Arabic-English Lexicon, 3:1134.

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Lovers in the Age of the Beloveds 22. In some cases, the rakīb was hired by the beloved’s husband or the girl’s parents for the duty of surveillance. This was an Arabic custom with roots in ancient Bedouin society; see Onesta, “Lauzinger-Wāshī-Index, Gardador-Custos,” 129. 23. Şentürk, Rakîb’e Dair, 11–15. 24. Avnī (Fātiḥ Sulṭān Meḥmet), Divān, ed. Kemal Edip Ünsel (Ankara:  Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, 1946), 46; also cited in Ahmet Atillâ Şentürk, “Klasik Osmanlı Edebiyatında Tipler–Rakîb,” Türkiyat Mecmuası 20 (1997), 342. 25. Akşemseddînzâde Hamdullah Hamdī (d. 1504), “Leyla ve Mecnun,” İstanbul Üniversitesi Library, MS Türkçe Yazmalar 800, fols. 20a; cited in Şentürk, Rakîb’e Dair, 22. 26. Satan was seen as the rakīb in divan literature due to his opposition to Adam, in the Fall narrative. It is worth mentioning here that the Muslim theologian and heresiographer Shahristānī (d. 1153), in his Kitāb al-Milal wa al-Nihal (The book of religion and sects), portrays Satan as a skeptic questioner (sā’il) asking questions of angels and God (depicted as mujīb or “respondent”), providing the debate in argumentation (munāẓara) format. See ‘Abd al-Karīm al-Shahristānī, Kitāb al-Milal wa al-Nihal (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Azhār, 1947), 12–17. 27. Akşemseddînzâde, “Leyla ve Mecnun,” fols. 20a. Also cited in Şentürk, Rakîb’e Dair, 22. 28. Halîlî, Fürkat-Nāme, couplet 931–2. See Orhan Kemal Tavukçu, ed., Halîlî and His “Fürkat-nāme”:  Introduction, Analysis, Critical Edition, Facsimile (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 29. For these examples, see Şentürk, “Klasik Osmanlı Edebiyatında Tipler,” 395–411. 30. Şentürk, Rakîb’e Dair, 20–4. 31. Ibid., “Klasik Osmanlı Edebiyatında Tipler,” 386–8. 32. Ibid., Rakîb’e Dair, 78. 33. Cited in Şentürk, “Klasik Osmanlı Edebiyatında Tipler,” 384. The poet’s full name is Maḥmūd Abdülbākī (1526–1600), and he came to be known as Sulṭān al-Shuʿarā’ or “Sultan of poets” in Ottoman literature. 34. Akkuş, Nef ’î Divanı’nda Tipler ve Kişilikler, 31. 35. In this respect, see Julie Scott Meisami’s study Medieval Persian Court Poetry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 268–70. For some examples, see Şentürk, Rakîb’e Dair, 7–21 and Şentürk, “Klasik Osmanlı Edebiyatında Tipler,” 388–96. 36. Akkuş, Nef ’î Divanı’nda Tipler ve Kişilikler, 24–31. 37. Taşköprüzâde, “Risāla fī Ādāb al-Baḥth,” fols. 1b–2a. 38. On the divan psychology of love, see Akün, “Divan Edebiyatı,” in TDV İslam Ansiklopedisi 9:415–16. 39. The master-slave relationship provoked philosophical commentary from Aristotle to Derrida, who questioned it in his Of Grammatology and The Politics

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures of Friendship. However, no single philosopher has explored the political, historical, and psychological implications of this basic human power struggle for recognition in more depth than Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1804). 40. “Hiç neyleyeyim bu dil-i âvâreyi bilmem. Ne vuslata kâdir sana ne firkate sâbir.” See Nev’î, Divân, ed. Mertol Tulum and M.  Ali Tanyeri (Istanbul:  Istanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Yayını, 1977), 237.

Bibliography ‘Abd al-Karīm al-Shahristānī. Kitāb al-Milal wa al-Nihal. Cairo:  Maṭbaʿat al-Azhār, 1947. Akkuş, Metin. Nef ’î Divanı’nda Tipler ve Kişilikler. Erzurum: Atatürk Üniversitesi Fen-Edebiyat Fakültesi Yayınları, 1995. Akşemseddînzâde, Hamdullâh Hamdî. Leyla ve Mecnun. MS 800 Türkçe Yazmalar Collection, İstanbul Üniversitesi Library. Akün, Ömer Faruk. “Divan Edebiyatı.” In Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi, (Istanbul: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, 1988–2014), 44 vols., 9:389–427. Andrews, Walter G., and Mehmet Kalpaklı. The Age of Beloveds:  Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Avnî (Fātiḥ Sulṭān Meḥmet). Divân. Edited by Kemal Edip Ünsel. Ankara:  Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, 1946. Blank, Ksana. Dostoevsky’s Dialectics and the Problem of Sin. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010. Bredella, Lothar. “Richard Rorty on Philosophy, Literature, and Hermeneutics.” In Literature and Philosophy, ed. Herbert Grabes. REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 13. Tübingen: Narr, 1997, 103–24. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. ——— Acts of Literature. Edited by Derek Attridge. London: Routledge, 1992. Efendi, Ebussuud. “Maʿrûzât.” In Osmanlı Kanunnameleri, ed. Ahmet Akgündüz, 4 vols. Istanbul: Fey Vakfı, 1992. Gümüş, Nevin. “Yahya Nazım Divanında Sevgiliye Ait Güzellik Unsurları ile Aşık-Maşuk-Rakip Münasebeti.” Erciyes Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi 17 (1997): 231–48. Halîlî. Halîlî and His “Fürkat-nāme”:  Introduction, Analysis, Critical Edition, Facsimile. Edited by Orhan Kemal Tavukçu. Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2008. Kappler, Matthias. “The Beloved and His Otherness:  Reflections on ‘Ethnic’ and Religious Stereotypes in Ottoman Love Poetry.” In Intercultural Aspects in and around Turkic Literatures:  Proceedings of the International Conference

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Lovers in the Age of the Beloveds Held on October 11th–12th, 2003 in Nicosia, edited by Matthias Kappler. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006, 37–48. Karabela, Mehmet. “Development of Dialectic and Argumentation Theory in Post-classical Islamic Intellectual History.” PhD diss, McGill University, 2011. Kelley, Donald. “What Is Happening to the History of Ideas?” Journal of the History of Ideas 51 (1990): 3–25. Keskin, Neslihan Koç. “Maşûk, Âşık ve Rakip Arasındaki Hiyerarşik İlişkiler.” Turkish Studies:  International Periodical for the Languages, Literature and History of Turkish or Turkic 5, no. 3 (2010): 400–20. Meisami, Julie Scott. Medieval Persian Court Poetry. Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1987. Moreno, Hugo. “Octavio Paz’s Poetic Reply to Hegel’s Philosophical Legacy.” In Octavio Paz:  Humanism and Critique, edited by Oliver Kozlarek, 217–30. Bielefeld: Verlag, 2009. Nev’î. Divân. Edited by Mertol Tulum and M. Ali Tanyeri. Istanbul:  Istanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Yayını, 1977. Nussbaum, Martha C. Love’s Knowledge:  Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Onesta, Patrizia. “Lauzinger-Wāshī-Index, Gardador-Custos:  The ‘Enemies of Love’ in Provençal, Arabo-Andalusian, and Latin Poetry.” Scripta Mediterranea 19/20 (1998–9): 119–42. Rembert, James A. W. Swift and the Dialectical Tradition. New York: St. Martin’s, 1988. Selden, Raman, and Peter Widdowson. A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993. Şentürk, Ahmet Atillâ. Klasik Osmanlı Edebiyatı Tiplerinden Rakîb’e Dair. Istanbul: Enderun Kitabevi, 1995. ——— “Klasik Osmanlı Edebiyatında Tipler – Rakîb.” Türkiyat Mecmuası 20 (1997): 333–413. Taşköprüzâde. Risāla fī Ādāb al-Baḥth. MS 4430. Ayasofya Collection, Süleymaniye Library.

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13 The Semantic Field of Love in Classical Arabic: Understanding the Subconscious Meaning Preserved in the Ḥ ubb Synonyms and Antonyms through Their Etymologies A.Z. Obiedat

Abstract: Unlike literary, religious, or philosophical approaches to the definition of love, this chapter attempts to bring attention to the importance of the semantic analysis for understanding love and the beloved in the Arabic language. It argues that mapping out the etymology of the ḥ-b-b root, the semantic network established by its antonyms and synonyms, and the resulting hierarchy offers significant insights into the cognitive and emotional content of the notions of “love” and “beloved” in Arabic. One of this study’s findings is that the semantic field of “love” is a spectrum with two edges, both of which have several levels. Furthermore, Arabic treats love as a phenomenon with 14 complex stages, starting with inclination, leading to growth and proliferation, and ending with losing one’s mind or sacrificing oneself for the sake of the beloved. It is worth noting that the ratio between the morphological derivations of “lover” and “beloved” is five to four, possibly because love is an active emotion taken wholeheartedly and thus mostly on the side of the lover, not the beloved. Just as love resembles the attraction between electric charges, on the hatred spectrum the central idea of the “love” antonyms is the repulsion between one person 300

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The Semantic Field of Love in Classical Arabic and another. Hate behaves in the opposite direction: the anti-love semantic field starts with mere disinterest towards the other, then moves to stronger negative feelings, and finally the strongest words shift to active intentions to harm the hated one. The common idea in this spectrum is that love leads to multiplying existence while hate ends with annihilation.

1. Introduction1 Due to the internal logic of English morphology, “the beloved” is in a mutual relationship with “the lover”; both nouns are derived from the “love” verb, which has as its antonym, the “hate” verb. This is one of the ways an English semantician would initiate the analysis of the notion of the beloved. The goal here, for which I need to present a short justification, is to apply the same semantic analysis to Arabic. The phenomenon of human writing generally aims at expressing thoughts and feelings and reporting events for the purposes of communication. However, writing eventually functions as a historical record of the thoughts, feelings, and events encoded in its words and sentences. Arabic literatures, in other words, embody these thoughts, feelings, and events as people perceived them or hoped they had occurred; insofar as they record the meanings of particular notions and their varied usages, lexicons function as literary building blocks, historical documents, and conceptual repositories. Thus, if particular meanings are repeatedly preserved in specific lexicons and are assigned both antonyms and synonyms, then these ones cover a large scope of meaning. This tripartite relationship between a lexicon and its antonyms and synonyms leads to the expansion and multiplication of meaning. So, once a lexicon of this type is communicated, it gets associated with its antonyms and synonyms in the mind of the recipient. Between a lexicon, its antonyms, and its synonyms lies a horizontal field, which is described in this paper as a “semantic field.” In addition, the plenitude of a lexicon’s synonyms can lead to the existence of a vertical dimension in which meanings can depart from those contained in the original lexicon. Therefore, a semantic field can be composed of several horizontal semantic fields on top of each other forming layers that together constitute the larger semantic space of a lexicon. The task here will be to investigate the semantic variety that exists in relation to the words 301

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures “love” and “beloved” in Arabic lexicons. Comparing the morphological and semantic variations of “love” and “hate” will lead to a greater understanding of the somatic and affective levels of these emotions for Arabs. Moreover, it will demonstrate their awareness of the liminality and fluidity of such paradoxical emotions, contrary to stereotypical approaches to the so-called “Arabic mind.”2 Lexicons of all languages, with their formulated semantic fields and spaces, preserve cultural meaning in their early usages in a manner similar to historical relics worthy of archaeological investigation. Given these methodological premises, it is worth investigating how the recorded usages of the Arabic language in classical and modern dictionaries encode on etymological and morphological levels the cognitive and emotional content (whether literary or mundane) of the notions of “love” and “beloved.” Canonical classical Arabic dictionaries, such as Quṭrub’s Kitāb al-Aḍdād, Ibn Fāris’ Mu‘jam Maqāyīs al-Lugha, Ibn Manẓūr’s Lisān al-ʿArab, al-Zabīdī’s Tāj al-ʿArūs, are invaluable lexical resources for understanding the literary citations and historical meaning of “love” and the peculiarity of “the beloved.” This is why this chapter aims at investigating the semantic variety of the roots ḥ-b-b, ‘-sh-q, t-y-m, h-w-ā, ṣ-b-b, and some 20 others. Mapping out these roots and the semantic network established by their antonyms, synonyms, and hierarchies should contribute to an understanding of both Arabic language and culture in their deep historical origins.

2. The Root ḥ -b-b and the Underlying Coherence of Its Different Usages In order to achieve a firmer semantic understanding of the concept of “love” in Arabic, etymological analysis must go beyond definitions that are based on psychological, social, literary, theological, or philosophical grounds. An example of a psychological definition of love is “an attachment to something where joy occurs in being close to the beloved and sadness from being away from him/her.”3 An example of a literary description is provided by Muʿādh b. Sahl, who writes that love is “the hardest of all things to ride, the most intoxicating of drinks, the most discontinued thing of these sought after, the sweetest of things craved for, the most painful of 302

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The Semantic Field of Love in Classical Arabic stomach aches, and the most desired of what is declared [to the public].”4 The Andalusian philosopher-mystic Ibn ‘Arabī, a monumental figure in the classical Arabic heritage for the scope and inventiveness of his discussions of love, says that love occurs on three levels: “A natural love that is the love of the masses and its goal is animal union … spiritual love that its goal is imitating the beloved and appreciating its value, and divine love that is the love of God for his servants and this is the love of the human to God.”5 In a similar line of thought, the highly polemical Andalusian literalist jurist Ibn Ḥazm affirms that love occurs in the heart by the way of compulsion, not choice.6 These psychological, literary, theological, and philosophical descriptions and definitions are valuable, but the semantic method takes a different route to define meanings. The meanings that include “love” or its related synonyms are plentiful in Arabic. Let us start with a very common verbal noun for “love” in Arabic, ḥubb. Ibn Fāris states that the combination of the radicals ḥā’ and bā’ (that is, ḥabb and ḥubb) generally refers to three meanings:  (1)  “smallness in size”; (2) “shortness”; and (3) “fixation and perseverance.”7 An example of the first one is found in ḥabb, which means “seeds,” as in the case of grain seeds. The singular of ḥabb is ḥabba, which can be “a drop of water,” “a pellet of hail,” or “a white tooth.” An example of the second, which is not as common as the first and third meanings, is ḥabḥāb. This refers to “a short man.”8 An example of the third usage is the word ḥubb, referring to “love.”9 Here it is quite difficult to grasp inferentially or intuitively the connection between the three usages of the radicals ḥā’ and bā’. I propose the following suggestion as the connection between the three usages. Seeds are small, thus the metaphorical usage of the second meaning, since a short man can be imagined to be as small as a seed. As for the third meaning, love is considered analogous to the life of a seed. So, metaphorically, love can grow like a plant from a seed and can branch out like a tree by procreation. Yet all of this originates in an imperceptible intention in the heart as in an unseen seed under the surface of the ground. In short, the letters of the ḥ-b-b root preserve the notion that love is an invisible act of growth and proliferation. The unity of these usages appears in the verb aḥabba, which literally means “he loves,” while at the same time it suggests a wheat crop whose seeds have started to germinate.10 Interestingly, if ḥabba is “a drop of water,” then ḥubb, the very word for love, al-Farāhīdī tells us, can mean 303

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures “a jar of water.” In this case, ḥubb means “love” in the common usage, but also has been used to mean “a jar of water” at the same time. Clearly, a jar of water collects drops as love collects these related human emotions. Here, the verb ḥabbaba is used when an animal quenches its thirst completely11 and the action of iḥbāb as in when the camel sets down.12 Quenching thirst is similar to the act of loving and an animal setting down is analogous to sexual intercourse. This variety of usages is for one trilateral root only, ḥ-bb. Let us see how Arabic further expands on this root by creating a large field of derived verbs and nouns.

3. The Derivational Variety of Love, ‘ḥ ubb’ In this section, let us concentrate further on the root ḥ-b-b when it primarily means “to love.” This will generate a large field of meanings. It is important to note that Arabic generally uses ten basic verbal forms for every trilateral root. This mechanism allows us to express nearly ten dimensions of meaning for any action in a single verb rather than adding more words to the verb itself. For historical and pragmatic reasons, some of the roots do not have an actual meaning for all of the ten forms. Within Arabic phonotactic restrictions, however, derivation and coinage are open possibilities, which has helped to keep Arabic alive for some 17 centuries, if not more. These ten verbal forms and their basic meanings are listed below:13 Fa‘ala “To act” :‫ فع َل‬.1  Fa‘‘ala “To act with intensity” :‫ فَ ّع َل‬.2 “To interact with something or someone else” Fā‘ala  :‫ فَا َع َل‬.3  Af ‘ala “To act on someone or something (transitive)” :‫ أَف َع َل‬.4  Tafa‘‘ala “To act on oneself with intensity (reflexive)  :‫ تَفَ ّع َل‬.5  Tafā‘ala “To mutually interact (reflexive)”  :‫ تَفَا َع َل‬.6 Infa‘ala “To react or act on oneself (passive in meaning but not in :‫ انفَ َع َل‬.7 form)”   Ifta‘ala “To overact or create an action (reflexive of form one :‫ افتَ َع َل‬.8 above)”   If ‘alla “To change in color or essence”  :ّ‫ اِف َعل‬.9  Istaf ‘ala “To seek an action or transform one’s essence” :‫ اِستَ ْف َع َل‬.10

The point to recognize behind this morphological structure of the basic verbal forms is that Arabic presumes that:  (1)  the direction of the verb 304

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The Semantic Field of Love in Classical Arabic goes to oneself, another, or is in mutual relationship; and (2)  the intensity of these directions comes in degrees, from light to intense actions. In other words, verbs have directions and degrees that can be expressed in one single verbal form rather than a lengthy expression. For example, the verb istansara, as modeled on the tenth form istaf ‘ala, means “he sought to transform his form or essence into an eagle,” implying that he is becoming courageous. Here, istansara conveys all these meanings in a single word. This is an important aspect of Arabic’s capacity for brevity. However, this makes verbatim translation difficult since the meaning is very condensed and needs further explanation. Let us now apply the general meaning of the ten basic verbal forms above to the trilateral root of our concern, ḥ-b-b. For this task, it is necessary to flesh out the trilateral root ḥ-b-b in the morphological structure of the ten verbal forms and see the semantic field they constitute:  To love, ḥabba : ّ‫حب‬ َ .1 To make an effort to make someone love someone else or something, :‫ّب‬ َ ‫ َحب‬. 2 ḥabbaba  To engage in affection (hugging and kissing), ḥābaba :‫ب‬ َ َ‫ حاب‬.3  To love someone or something with intensity, aḥabba : َ‫ أ َحب‬.4 َTo express actions that show love faithfully or hypocritically, :‫ تَ َحبّب‬.5 taḥabbaba To engage in mutual affection (hugging and kissing) faithfully or :‫ب‬ َ َ‫ تحاب‬.6 hypocritically, taḥābaba To change one’s relation to others by being loved by someone, : ّ‫ اِ ْن َحب‬.7 inḥabba  Iḥtabba is not used from the root ḥ-b-b but from ḥ-b-ā : ّ‫ اِحْ تَب‬.8  Not used since the verb is transitive, iḥbabba  : ّ‫ اِحبَب‬.9 To seek to love someone, something, or mostly an idea, istaḥabba : ّ‫ اِستَ َحب‬.10

Clearly, these ten morphological forms (or eight actually existing usages) provide us with an important account of eight dimensions of “love” actions in Arabic. Here, Arabic recognizes: (1) the direction of love to oneself, to another, or reciprocally and (2) the degree of intensity and truthfulness of these directions. There might be additional ways of performing, expressing, and faking love on top of these eight possibilities but that is another discussion outside the scope of the present discussion. 305

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures Let us now turn to how the nouns denoting “lover” and “beloved” are formulated beyond the ten verbal forms. There is a historical debate in the Arabic grammatical tradition as to whether the noun or the verb is the original form.14 There is no space to reproduce the arguments for both views here, but in this paper I presume that the verb form of “love” is the origin for all noun forms of “love,” such as “lover” and “beloved.” The reason for this choice should be clear after seeing the derivational procedure below. Again, the basic verbal forms provide us with a platform for deriving the nouns for “lover” and “beloved” through the derivation of the active participle and the passive participle. These morphological nominal patterns are called Ism al-Fāʿil, “the noun of the doer,” and Ism al-Mafʿūl, “the noun of the object.” Arabic assigns each of the two nouns to the ten verbal forms leading to 20 active and passive participles for the root ḥ-b-b. Not all of these 20 nouns happen to be used. However, they are still open for usage from a derivational point of view as illustrated below (the underlined nouns are ones that occur commonly in Arabic):

Ism al-Mafʿū l (Passive Participle) – Ism al-Fāʿil (Active Participle) – Verb maḥbūb  ‫  محبوب‬ḥābb ّ‫  حاب‬ḥabba : َّ‫ َحب‬.1 The noun of the doer is not commonly used,15 but the noun of the object is used and it means “beloved.” muḥbbab  ‫   ُم َحبّب‬muḥabbib  ‫   ُم َحبّب‬ḥabbaba :‫ّب‬ َ ‫ َحب‬.2 The noun of the doer refers to the one who makes an effort to make someone love someone else or something. For the second noun, it means the recipient of this kind of action (i.e., the beloved). muḥābab  ‫   ُمحابَب‬muḥābib  ‫   ُمحابِب‬ḥābaba :‫ب‬ َ َ‫ حاب‬.3 The noun of the doer refers to the one who engages in affectionate behavior (e.g., hugging and kissing). The second noun refers to the recipient of this kind of action. Neither noun is commonly used. muḥabb  ّ‫   ُم َحب‬muḥibb  ّ‫   ُم ِحب‬aḥabba : َ‫ أَحب‬.4 The noun of the doer refers to the one who loves someone or something with intensity. The second noun refers to the recipient of that sort of action, but is not commonly used. 306

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The Semantic Field of Love in Classical Arabic mutaḥabbab   ‫   ُمتَ َحبّب‬mutḥabbib  ‫   ُمتَ َحبّب‬taḥabbaba :‫ّب‬ َ ‫ تحب‬.5 The noun of the doer refers to the one who performs actions that show love faithfully or hypocritically. The second noun refers to the recipient of that sort of action. mutaḥābab  ‫   ُمت َحابَب‬mutaḥābib  ‫   ُمت َحابِب‬taḥābaba :‫ب‬ َ َ‫ تحاب‬.6 The noun of the doer refers to the one who engages in mutual affection (hugging and kissing) faithfully or hypocritically. The second noun refers to the recipient of this kind of action, but is not commonly used. munḥabb  ‫   ُمن َحب‬munḥibb  ‫نحب‬ ِ ‫   ُم‬inḥabba : ّ‫ اِ ْن َحب‬.7 The noun of the object refers to the one who changes one’s relation to others by being loved by someone, while the first noun is that of the doer of this action. Given the reflexive nature of this form, the boundary between the doer and the object is erased. Both meanings are hard to conceive; hence neither is used. iḥtabba  Not used from the root ḥ-b-b but from the root ḥ-b-ā : ّ‫ اِحْ تَب‬.8 iḥbabba  Not used since the verb is transitive : ّ‫ اِحبَب‬.9 mustaḥabb  ّ‫   ُمستَ َحب‬mustaḥibb  ّ‫   ُمست َِحب‬istaḥabba : ّ‫ اِستَحب‬.10 The noun of the doer refers to the one who seeks to love someone, something, or an idea. The second noun refers to the recipient of that sort of action. One takeaway of this morphological presentation is that the ten basic verbal forms can, in principle, generate 20 nouns of the doer and object, though not all are used. In fact, only the nine nouns which are underlined above occur with any frequency in Arabic. Six of these nouns are related both to the doer of the actions of love and to the beloved. Moreover, only one noun, that is, maḥbūb, signifies the recipient of such actions without an equivalent for the doer. In other words, out of the nine verbal forms expressing the directions and intensities of love, only three verbs have full active participles and passive participles. These are the second, fifth, and tenth forms, as in the following: • One who causes love to happen to himself or between others (‫ ُم َحبّب‬, muḥabbib). The beloved is the one who receives love with intensity, that is, with effort (‫ ُم َحبّب‬, muḥabbab).

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures • One who expresses actions that show love faithfully or hypocritically (‫ ُمتَ َحبّب‬, mutaḥabbib). The beloved here is the one who is loved faithfully or hypocritically (‫ ُمتَ َحبّب إليه‬, mutaḥabbab ilayhi). • One who seeks love consciously, by contrast with unconscious love ( ّ‫ ُمست َِحب‬, mustaḥibb). The beloved here is that person or thing loved consciously ( ّ‫ ُمستَ َحب‬, mustaḥabb). The remaining four verbal dimensions that express other varieties of the “love” verbs (forms three, seven, eight, and nine) have no commonly used active participles or passive participles. Some other verbal forms generate a derivation for the noun of the doer but without the noun of the object, like forms four and six: the lover ( ّ‫ ُم ِحب‬muḥibb) and the mutual love seeker (‫ ُمت َحابِب‬, mutaḥābib). Only the first form is dedicated to express a simple notion of the beloved (‫محبوب‬, maḥbūb). Arabic does not derive the active participle ( ّ‫حاب‬, ḥābb) from that first and most simple form, perhaps because Arabs see that the simple act of love does not happen without intensity. In this vein, love that happens intentionally and at will needs to be derived from other forms that signify stronger active will or further intensity. Indeed, it is quite astonishing that Arabs derived more nouns that implied intensity and directions/ states for lovers than they did for the beloveds. The ratio is five types of lovers to four types of beloveds. The reason for this, I contend, is that love is an emotion felt wholeheartedly and thus mostly on the side of the doer, not the recipient. In other words, one can observe the lover’s intention in pursuit of love but not that of the beloved. This might be the rationale why the lover has more derivations than the beloved in this chart. The derivation of Arabic nouns is not limited to the two nouns of the doer and the object. There are other types of derivations such as ṣīghat al-mubālagha and al-ṣifah al-mushabbahah. In other words, by using other derivational means one can make up for the shortage of derivations for the beloved as a passive participle. This is why ḥibb, ḥubāb, ḥibban, and ḥabīb all refer to the beloved.16 The differences in meaning among them are relatively minor. These explanations about the nominal derivations for the root ḥ-b-b root are not stated explicitly in the dictionaries; rather, they are implied 308

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The Semantic Field of Love in Classical Arabic by the morphological logic of derivation. The semantic analyst must make explicit the logic behind deriving the varieties of lover and beloved. Language itself is silent about the cognitive or contextual operations that generate meaning, so the task of semanticians is to speak amidst this silence. We have seen quite a wide variety of usage and derivation of the ḥ-b-b root. We can now expand this investigation for the conception of love in other roots.

4. The Synonyms of “Love” Surveying several modern dictionaries such as al-Munjid by al-Yasū‘ī or al-Mu‘jam al-Wasīṭ; and several classical ones such as Mu‘jam Maqāyīs al-Lugha by Ibn Fāris and Lisān al-‘Arab by Ibn Manẓūr, a plethora of suggestions concerning the synonyms of the “love” lexicon – albeit without strong consensus or substantial enumeration of synonyms – can be found.17 Not surprisingly, the most comprehensive list of the “love” synonyms found is offered by the classical Andalusian lexicographer Ibn Sīda in his thematic lexicography al-Mukhaṣṣaṣ, which entails a comparative cross-referencing to older dictionaries.18 Interestingly, the “love” field is listed by Ibn Sīda not under, ḥubb, but rather under the more poetic word ‘ishq, “extreme love.”19 Conversely, there is near consensus for the antonym of the ḥubb word. Al-Farāhīdī points out that bughḍ, “hate,” is the antonym of “love.”20 Before getting into the issue of antonyms, let us proceed carefully and with a prelude. First, the notion of love considered here is that which in Arabic generally refers to the relationship between a man and a woman of maturity on the psychological, not the physical, level. This is why the compassion of the mother-child relationship or the friendliness of market transactions between buyer and seller is excluded from our analysis of the words synonymous with love. Although highly relevant, expressions of lust, seduction, and physical intimacy that may occur without love are not considered here as direct synonyms of “love.” Love can indeed be related to both friendship and lust, but why not include equally relevant notions such as brotherhood, motherhood, and worship? If we do not set these limitations, then we will end up with massive and diverse semantic fields that will hurl us into infinite regress and distract the proposed investigation. Needless to 309

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures say, love is so central to human affairs that studying it thoroughly will pull up the totality of the web of human life itself, something for which we do not have space in this chapter. For the same reason, the Arabic verb raghiba, “to desire,” which is close to the verb “to love,” was excluded from the list of synonyms for “love.” Second, we need to map out the synonyms of the “love” word by arranging the following hierarchy based on elevations in the degree of love, followed by suggested translations and a hint on the relation to the etymology. This hierarchical arrangement of the increased degrees of love is solely mine and many readers might disagree. This is why the reader is invited to contemplate these meanings based on their specific roots first, and then some inferences and an explanation for this hierarchy will be presented. I attempt here to provide literal translations to be close to the entries provided in the dictionaries. Arabic

English

H  ow the Root Is Utilized to Generate This Common Usage Metaphorically

1. Hawā Passion

 awā, inclination towards something or h someone. It originally refers to hawā’, “air,” and in relation to this void, hawā becomes “falling in the hole.” This makes it clear why the second sense of hawā refers to falling into the passions of the psyche. Hawā in this context refers also to falling in love where that notion of falling carries the negative connotation of falling into evil, a trap, or a predicament, which is not easy to escape.21 The implication here is that one should not approach an act of hawā as it leads to a fall. 2. Wudd Friendliness wadda, expressing the wish to get close to or to love someone.22 3. Ḥubb Love aḥabba, a psychological state similar to a hidden seed that grows and proliferates. 4. Shaghaf  Passionate love shaghafa, the skin of the heart similar to wholehearted love.23 310

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The Semantic Field of Love in Classical Arabic Arabic

English

H  ow the Root Is Utilized to Generate This Common Usage Metaphorically

5. Ṣabāba  Strong love

t aṣabbaba, spilling the essence of one’s heart, that is, emotions, onto someone, symbolizing deep faithfulness in love.24 6. ‘Ishq Extreme love ‘ashiqa, the quality of being inseparable from another object (here, the beloved).25 7. Walaʿ   Obsessive love tawalluʿ, a psychological state resembling catching fire or the pathogenic skin discoloration.26 8. Gharām  Fondness ghruma, the inescapable worry of indebtedness that is similar to being preoccupied by loving someone all times.27 9. Huyām Intense love hāma, a psychological state similar to a camel’s thirstiness which is an extreme feeling given how long the camel can go without water in the hot and dry desert.28 10. Taym Extreme love tatayyama, a psychological state similar to losing one’s mind as being lost in the desert.29 11. Walah Lost in love waliha, a psychological state resembling losing something (here, one’s mind).30 12. Jawā Burning love jawā or ijtawā, a psychological state similar to feeling a stomach ache or acid burn.31 13. Fitna32 Burning love iftutina or infatana, a psychological state similar to the process by which gold is smelted in the furnace.33 34 14. Tawq Longing love tāqa, fighting one’s psyche for the sake of the beloved to the extent of sacrifice.35 The common word for love, ḥubb, by no means denotes the highest level of love. Ḥubb – and its higher forms expressed in shaghaf, ṣabāba, and ‘ishq – lies between the two extremes in the list above (i.e., the weakest being the first and the second stages of love on the one hand and the thirteenth and fourteenth extreme stages of love on the other). In other words, the etymological roots and conceptual traces contained in these vocabularies 311

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures show that Arabic treats love as several complex stages starting with inclination and ending with losing one’s mind or self-sacrifice. However, these actions go through several transformations. They are reflected in an invisible act of growth and proliferation that might transform into wholehearted love and spilling one’s heart out in trust and feeling inseparable from the beloved. These transformations are the ones that have no danger. In the case of taking forms other than the ones described, this love is either in the weak or dangerous forms. A possibly clearer perception to the synonyms of “love” would involve ranking these 14 levels of love in a curve where love climbs in six steps and reaches its peak, then declines from steps seven to 14.36 Increase in positive love – Increase in negative love or decline in positive connotations 6. ‘Ishq 5.Sabāba . 4. Shaghaf 3. Hubb . 2. Wudd 1. Hawā

7. Wala‘ 8. Gharām 9. Huyām 10. Taym 11. Walah 12. Jawā 13. Fitna 14. Tawq

Again, the common word for love, ḥubb, is by no means the lowest level of love. Lower levels of love start by showing an inclination to someone (hawā), moving then to the level of expressing love (wudd). This situation might in turn lead to ḥubb, that is, fruitful intention leading to growth or increase. After this third stage (ḥubb), there are only three higher stages of love that are without negative connotations. These are the act of wholehearted love (shaghaf), the act of spilling the blood of one’s heart (ṣababa); and being inseparable from the beloved (‘ishq). The last word happens to be the common expression of love used by the mystics in order to signify love to God and love from God, al-‘ishq al-ilāhī. It is equally important to recognize that these conceptual registers in the string of the seventh through fourteenth word conceal connotations that imply bodily harm. Although poets, mystics, and storytellers equally celebrate these lexemes in the classical and modern literatures, the original roots indicate condemnation, warning, and advice. This criticism is not explicit since these lexemes reflect strong love in the literatures. The 312

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The Semantic Field of Love in Classical Arabic connotation is evidently preserved in the original root meaning that was used by the Arabic speaker for usages irrelevant to love. In particular, the Arabic speaker had in mind that love can be similar to: (7) being attacked by pathogenic skin disease (wala‘); (8) bearing the pain of indebtedness (gharām); (9) being lost and extremely thirsty (huyām); (10) losing one’s way in the desert (taym); (11) losing one’s mind (walah); (12) suffering the stomach burning (jawā); (13) suffering the burning of smelting (fitna); and (14) an internal struggle leading to sacrificing oneself (tawq). Obviously these cases of strong, intense, and excessive lexical understandings of love are associated with dangerous scenarios where the early Arab speaker could consciously perceive the negativity of these emotional predicaments. Early Arabs perceived the danger of losing oneself in love in the works of poet-lovers such as Jamīl Buthayna and Majnūn Laylā. As lexical usage evolved, literary figures used these strong lexemes unconsciously to express intense cases of love. However, few of the modern Arabic users of these intense “love” words would worry about these connotations. In line with our search for love’s variety of meanings, we are now in a better position to speak about “the beloved.” The following list provides the derivations to all the nouns of object or passive participles (ism al-mafʿūl) to the ḥubb synonyms. Love Synonyms Derived Passive Possible Translation Participle 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Hawā Wadda Aḥabba Shaghafa Taṣabbaba

mahwī fī mawdūd maḥbūb mashgūf bi mutaṣabbab fī 

6. 7. 8. 9.

‘Ashiqa Tawalla‘ Ghruma Hāma

ma‘shūq mutawallu‘ fī maghrūm bi mahīm fī

The recipient of passion The befriended The beloved The recipient of passionate love The beloved strongly (but the ṣabb derivation for both the lover and beloved is more common) The extremely beloved one The obsessively beloved one The recipient of fondness The intensely beloved one 313

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures Love Synonyms Derived Passive Possible Translation Participle 10. Tatayyama mutatayym bi The extremely revered beloved 11. Waliha mawlūh The one being lost in his/her love 12. Ijtawā mujtawā The one being burnt internally for his/ her love (not commonly used) 13. Iftutina muftatan The one being burnt externally for his/ her love (but the maftūn derivation is more common) 14. Tāqa matūq ilā The longed-for to the extent of sacrifice Here, what is said about the verbal levels of love is directly implied in the passive participle. This is why conceiving the beloved would involve ranking these 14 levels of “beloveds” in a curve where the beloved’s stature climbs in six steps and reaches its peak, then declines from seven to 14.

5. The Antonyms of “Love” Unfortunately, several important classical references on antonyms such as Quṭrub’s Kitāb al-Aḍdād and Ibn al-Anbarī’s Mu‘jam al-Aḍdād were of no help in determining the antonyms of the “love” words.37 This is why I had to construct these by tracing the antonyms of the “love” words’ synonyms individually and by tracing synonyms of “hate.” First, the notion of a “love” antonym discussed here is one that refers to intentions and emotions of hatred in most, if not all, of its degrees. Acts of violence are more than emotional hatred. This is why “animosity,” which could be associated with physical violence, is not considered a synonym of “hatred” and thus not a direct antonym of “love.” Also, intentions that do not imply hatred in any sense, such as ‘azafa ‘an (shying away from someone), or na’ā ‘an (staying away from someone), are not considered here as antonyms of “love.” The “love” antonyms surveyed here are the following: ‘ayaf, majaj, inkār, sakhaṭ, shana’ān, kurh, bughḍ, maqt, ḥiqd, ḍaghīna, naqama, qilā, and ghill. Such arrangement is solely mine and many readers might object to such a hierarchy. The reader is invited to contemplate these meanings mainly based on their root as some inferences will be presented with an explanation for the hierarchy. 314

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Arabic

English How the Root is Utilized to Generate This Metaphorical Usage

1. ‘Ayaf Distaste

2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

‘Āfa, a psychological state resembling the reaction of disgust to a food, later utilized for all kinds of dislike.38 Majaj Distaste Majja, a psychological state resembling the reaction to disliking a drink and spitting it out, later utilized for all kinds of dislike.39 Inkār Repugnance  Nakar or Ankara, a verb with a vast variety of seemingly unrelated meanings. The simplest form, nakīr, refers to an alert person. Yet munkar is an ugly thing or a customarily and religiously unacceptable behavior. The connection could be that an alert man is aware of faulty things and bad actions. A third derivational variety is ankara, which refers to denial or hiding knowledge that can be associated with tanakkur, that is, hiding the truth of one’s identity or feelings. In both cases, the person here is aware of the ugliness or faultiness, but he/she is hiding that fact. At least in the munkar form it means “repugnance,” which is relevant to hate.40 Sakhaṭ Abhorrence Sakhiṭa, rankle that develops into hatred towards a property of something or someone.41 Shana’ān Hate Shana’a, a psychological state derived from disgust or seeing an ugly face, all of which amounts to dislike.42 Kurh Hatred  Kariha, physical resistance, hardship, and being forced into a bad situation, especially war.43 Bughḍ Loathing Abghaḍa, the feeling of hatred (uniquely, this word is without an earlier stated use in the dictionaries consulted).44

316

Arabic

English How the Root is Utilized to Generate This Metaphorical Usage

8. Maqt Resentment 9. Ḥiqd Vengefulness46

 aqata, the strongest level of hatred.45 M Ḥaqada, a psychological state resembling a mine hiding its minerals or clouds holding back rain, which are metaphors for concealing hatred and waiting for opportunities for revenge.47 10. Ḍaghīna Vengefulness Ḍaghana, an act of covering the two sides of one’s open cloak around one’s belly and hiding one’s weapon under the arm or a psychological state resembling an animal that refuses to go straight after being whipped. These usages are the origins of the metaphors for hiding hatred and waiting for opportunities for revenge.48 11. Naqama Vengeful resentment  Naqama, to reject, hate, or punish due to a former grudge.49 12. Qilā Strong hatred Qalā, a psychological state resembling the harsh treatment or whipping of a stubborn camel. The verb became more commonly associated with the strong treatment of meat and legumes by frying in a pan. In both cases, the metaphor came to mean the strong treatment of something or someone in reaction to objectionable properties.50 13. Ghill Satisfying revenge Ghalla, a psychological state of being thirsty for revenge, resembling heat felt in the throat when seeking to quench one’s thirst. This hate is felt in the lead-up to acts of violence.51

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The Semantic Field of Love in Classical Arabic The common antonym for “love,” kurh, is by no means the highest or the lowest level of hate. Just as love resembles an attraction between electric charges, the central theme in the “love” antonyms is repulsion between one person and someone or something else. We may divide this semantic field of “repulsion” into three levels based on the increasing intensity of repulsion. In the first level, the first three words show disinterest in someone or something else. In this line, (1)  ‘ayaf and (2)  majaj indicate distaste for someone, while (3)  munkar finds ugliness or unacceptable behavior in that person. On this level, the focus is on the objectionable aspects of the thing disliked, which leave an ephemeral residue in the memory of the person feeling repulsion. In other words, the hating one is not here the active agent. It is rather the repulsion-causing properties that are the focus. In the second level of the “hate” semantic field, however, the focus is on the self that has strong and memorable negative feelings about someone or something else. The memory here is alert and engaged in its repulsion beforehand, even before the other aggressively acts. In this line, (4) sakhaṭ leads to hating a property; (5)  shana’ān is disgust that is associated with hate; (6) kurh is a hatred that resembles bodily agitation; (7) bughḍ is loathing; and, finally, (8) maqt is said by Ibn Fāris to be revenge and torture, while Ibn Manẓūr says it is punishment.52 On the third level, attention shifts from the act of repulsion in the ephemeral or engaged manners to the intention to seek to harm the hated one. In other words, this is not a matter of avoidance but rather of desiring to hurt the other or one of his or her hated properties. On this highest level of hatred, (9)  ḥiqd and (10) ḍaghīna share the sense of concealing hatred and waiting for opportunities for revenge. Yet (11) naqama takes the feeling further, to an explicit hate that seeks to punish. Finally, (12) qilā is hate that leads to strong treatment of something and (13) ghill is that strong hate in which the self is thirsty for revenge like the body thirsty for water. In line with our search for love and the beloved, we are now in a better position to speak about “the hated one” in contrast to “the beloved.” The following lists all the past participles (ism al-maf ‘ūl) from the “love” antonyms. 317

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures Hate Verb Derived Passive Possible Translation Participle

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

‘Ayaf Majaj Inkār Sakhaṭ Shana’ān Kurh Bughḍ Maqt

9. Ḥiqd 10. Ḍaghīna 11. Naqama 12. Qilā 13. Ghill

ma‘īf min mamjūj munkar maskhūt ‘alā mashnū’ makrūh mabghūḍ mamqūt mahqūd ‘alā maḍgūn manqūm min maqlī maghlūl

The disliked one The distasteful one The repugnant one The abhorred one The hated one The hated one The loathed one The hated one in the strongest level of hatred The one targeted by vengefulness The one targeted by vengefulness The one targeted by vengeful resentment The one targeted by strong hatred The one targeted by satisfying revenge

What has been said about the three verbal levels of “hate” synonyms is directly implied in the derived nouns of passive participles. On the first level, the nouns of the object (1–3) reflect the one or thing that is the subject of disinterest. On the second level (4–8), however, the focus is on the hated one that left strong and memorable negative feelings. On the third level (9–13), the attention shifts from that object of repulsion in the ephemeral or engaged manners to the one against whom harm is intended. These three stages of hate move from the shunned one, to the one who is memorably hated, and finally to the hated one upon whom ill is wished. If the first list or field of Arabic etymological and conceptual relationships presented above shows that Arabic sees love as 14 complex stages spanning inclination, growth and proliferation, and ultimately losing one’s mind or self-sacrifice, then hate behaves in the opposite direction. In particular, the semantic field of “hate” starts with mere disinterest caused by the other, moves to negative memorable feelings about someone, and finally shifts to an active intention to harm the hated person. It is worth noting that where love is distinguished by fruitfulness or proliferation, hate is characterized by its negativity and destructiveness. Love, in the benign 318

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The Semantic Field of Love in Classical Arabic forms, leads to multiplying existence by proliferation while hate ends with annihilation. Love can start with mere inclination, leading to fruitfulness, and end with self-sacrifice. Hence, love ascends and descends. Yet, hate only descends into destruction, for Arabs did not see any good in hate. Jean-Paul Sartre may have been surprised to learn that Arabic had already contemplated the major theme of his Being and Nothingness, where love leads to being and hate to nothingness.53 Love sometimes carries its own negation in itself, in its extreme form, and it can easily turn to hate. Oddly enough, the word in its evolutionary journey might end up to mean its opposite! An example here is the word, jawā, which can mean both “love” and “hate.” Most of the words derived from the root j-w-ā refer to hate; however, one usage is assigned to love! This leads one to speculate that there is a connection between these contradictory meanings. This connection, I suggest, is when the lover becomes sick of the troubles associated with love and longing for the beloved to the extent that love brings hatred upon itself. In other words, the lover hates how love consumes him or her – which, in due time, leads to hatred. This is not a rare psychological phenomenon, nor is it surprising that a word should signify such a paradoxical feeling. Here, jawā is the word of choice that succeeds in crossing the barrier between love and hate, articulating the liminality and confluence of these two emotions.

Notes 1. I am grateful to Professor Ramzi Baalbaki, Margaret Weyerhaeuser Jewett, Chair of Arabic at the American University of Beirut, and Dr Nārt Qākhūn of Al al-Bayt University in Jordan for kindly reading an earlier draft of this chapter. Their wide knowledge, deep insights, and sharp corrections were extremely valuable. 2. Raphael Patai states “We exaggerate in both love and hate. We are emotional rather than coldly analytical.” Raphael Patai, The Arab Mind (New York: Scribner, 1983), 52. 3. Muḥammad Sa‘īd Ramaḍān al-Būtī, al-Ḥubb fī al-Qur’ān wa Dawr al-Ḥubb fī Ḥayāt al-Insān (Damascus: Dār al-Fikr, 2009), 18. 4. Aḥmād Taymūr Bāshā, al-Ḥubb ‘ind al-‘Arab (Sūsa, Tunisia:  Dār al-Ma‘ārif li al-Ṭibā‘a wa al-Nashr, 1993), 13. 5. Rafīq al-‘Ajam, Mawsū‘at Muṣṭalaḥāt al-Taṣawwuf al-Islamī (Beirut: Maktabat Lubnān, 1999), 275.

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures 6. This is a paraphrasing from Zakariyya Ibrāhim, Mushkilat al-Ḥubb (Cairo: Maktabat Miṣr, 1969), 268. The original statement is “you give away yourself not by choice but by the compulsion of [love]”. In Ibn Ḥazm, Ṭawq al-Ḥamāma (Cairo: Mu’assasat Hindāwī, 2014), 61. 7. Ibn Fāris, Mu‘jam Maqāyīs al-Lugha (Cairo: Dār Iḥyā‘ al-Kutub al-ʿArabiyya, 1946), 2:26. 8. Ibid., 2:28. 9. Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-ʿArab (Cairo: Dār al-Ma‘ārif, n.d.), 10:745. 10. Majma‘ al-Lugha al-ʿArabī bi al-Qāhira, Al-Mu‘jam al-Wasīṭ, 4th ed. (Cairo: Maktabat al-Shurūq al-Dawliyya, 2004), 150. 11. Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-‘Arab (Cairo: Dār al-Ma‘ārif, n.d.), Vol. 10, 746. 12. Ibid., 10:746, 10:744. 13. Some of these definitions are inspired by a summary of the ten verbal forms made available by the Academic Consortium of Global Education (ACGE) in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2012. 14. Ibn al-Anbārī, al-Inṣāf fī Masā’il al-Khilāf bayna al-Baṣriyyīn wa al-Kūfiyyīn (Cairo: Maktabat al-Khānjī, 2002), 192–201. 15. Ḥābb does not exist as derived from love (ḥ-b-b), but it does exist when it is derived from the verb ḥāba to mean “an arrow that misses its target.” 16. Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-‘Arab, 10:744, 10:746. 17. Rafa’īl Naḥla al-Yasū‘ī, al-Munjid fī al-Mutarādifāt wa al-Mutajānisāt (Beirut: Dār al-Mashriq, 1986) 36; Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-‘Arab, 10:742. 18. Ibn Sīdah al-Naḥwī al-Andalusī, al-Mukhaṣṣaṣ (Beirut:  Dār al-Kutub al‘Ilmiyya, 2005), 4:59–63. 19. Unfortunately, al-Jāhiẓ in a section entitled “The Types of Love” did not offer a sufficient numeration of the love synonyms. Abu ‘Uthmān ‘Amr b.  Baḥr al-Jāhiẓ, Rasā’il al-Jāhiẓ (Beirut: Dār wa Maktabat al-Hilāl, 2002), 3:93. 20. “I loved him, aḥbabtuh, is the opposite of I hated him, abghaḍtuh.” al-Khalīl b. Aḥmad al-Farāhīdī, Kitāb al-‘Ayn Murattaban ‘Alā Ḥurūf al-Mu‘jam (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyya, 2003), 1:277. ‘Abd al-Malik Qarīb al-Aṣma‘ī adds that hiqd is an antonym of “love.” Mā Ikhtalafat Alfāẓuh wa Ittafaqat Maʿānīh (Damascus: Dār al-Fikr, 1985), 55. 21. Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-‘Arab, 51:4728 and Ibn Fāris, Mu‘jam Maqāyīs al-Lugha, 6:15–16. 22. Ibn Fāris, Mu‘jam Maqāyīs al-Lugha, 6:75. 23. Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-‘Arab, 26:2285. 24. The noun ṣabb is used as an equivalent to the “beloved” and the verbal noun ṣabāba as a verbal noun, maṣdar, for “love.” Yet the verb taṣabbaba is mostly used in relation to the root that is the action of pouring a liquid. Ibn Fāris, Mu‘jam Maqāyīs al-Lugha, 3:281. 25. Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-‘Arab, 33:2958. Ibn Fāris notes also that ‘ishq is “exceeding the stage of love.” Muʿjam Maqāyīs al-Lugha, 4:321.

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The Semantic Field of Love in Classical Arabic 26. Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-‘Arab, 55:4916. 27. Ibn Fāris, Mu‘jam Maqāyīs al-Lugha, 4:419. 28. Ibid., 6:26. 29. Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-‘Arab, 5:461. 30. Ibn Fāris, Mu‘jam Maqāyīs al-Lugha, 6:139–40. 31. Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-‘Arab, 9:734 and Ibn Fāris, Mu‘jam Maqāyīs al-Lugha, 1:491. Amazingly, this very word, jawā, which refers to love, can also refer to the opposite, hatred. So the verb jawāytu means “I hated.” We can speculate that the ground that provides the foundation for both opposites is pain that can be generated by both love and hatred. For the “hatred” meaning, see Ibn Sīdah al-Naḥwī al-Andalusī, al-Mukhaṣṣaṣ, 12:317–18. 32. Ibn Fāris, Mu‘jam Maqāyīs al-Lugha, 4:473. 33. It is true that fitna has been used to mean an “examination” of one’s belief or intentions, but this is a metaphorical shift from the notion of examining ore by extracting the potential gold from it through the smelting process. A second metaphorical shift happens when fitna means great social “sedition.” Still, this is derived from the notion of burning or a social test of perseverance and rightfulness. These synonyms are listed in Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-‘Arab, 37:3344. 34. Abū al-Ḥasan ‘Alī b. ‘Īsā al-Rūmmānī, Al-Alfāẓ al-Mutarādifatu al-Mutaqāribatu al-Maʿnā (al-Manṣūra, Egypt: Dār al-Wafā li al-Ṭibāʿa wa al-Nashr, 1987), 71, 84. 35. Ibn Fāris, Mu‘jam Maqāyīs al-Lugha, 1:358. 36. Dr Nārt Qakhūn brought to my attention other synonyms for the “love” word that are less commonly used compared to the ones stated above, such as shajw, wamaq, khilla, tadilla, kalaf, and laʿaj. He helpfully noted that I forgot shaghaf and jawā, which I have now included in the list above. 37. Abū ‘Alī Muḥammad b.  al-Mustanīr Quṭrub, Kitāb al-Aḍdād (Riyadh:  Dār al-‘Ulūm, 1984), 155–61; ‘Īsā Ḥasan al-Jarājira, Tahdhīb Mu‘jam Aḍdād Ibn al-Anbārī (Amman: Manshūrāt Amānat ‘Ammān al-Kubrā, 2007), 273–303. 38. Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-‘Arab, 36:3193. 39. Ibid., 46:4136–7. 40. Ibid., 50:4539–40. 41. Ibid., 22:1964. 42. Ibid., 27:2335–6. 43. Fayrūzbādī, al-Qāmūs al-Muḥīṭ (Damascus: Mu’assasat al-Risāla, 2005), 1252; Majma‘ al-Lugha al-‘Arabī bi al-Qāhira, Al-Mu‘jam al-Wasīṭ, 785; Ibn Fāris, Mu‘jam Maqāyīs al-Lugha, 5:172–3. 44. Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-‘Arab, 5:319–20. 45. Ibid., 48:4242. 46. Ibid., 12:938. 47. Ibid., 12:939. 48. Ibid., 92:2593.

321

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The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures 49. Ibn Fāris, Mu‘jam Maqāyīs al-Lugha, 5:464. Also, Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-‘Arab, 50:4531. 50. Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-‘Arab, 42:3731–2. 51. Ibid., 37:3285. 52. Ibn Fāris, Mu‘jam Maqāyīs al-Lugha, 5:464; Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-‘Arab, 50:4531. 53. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E.  Barnes (New  York: Washington Square Press, 1965). This book has been translated into Arabic twice, by ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Badawī as al-Wujūd wa al-‘Adam (Beirut:  Dār al-Ādāb, 1966)  and by Nīqūla Mattīnī as al-Kaynūna wa al-‘Adam (Beirut: al-Munaẓẓama al-‘Arabīyya li al-Tarjama, 2009).

Bibliography al-‘Ajam, Rafīq. Mawsū‘at Muṣṭalaḥāt al-Taṣawwuf al-Islamī. Beirut:  Maktabat Lubnān, 1999. al-Andalusī, Ibn Sīdah al-Naḥwī. al-Mukhaṣṣaṣ. Photocopied from the Egyptian Amīriyya edition, 1898. Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyya, 2005. al-Aṣma’ī, ‘Abd al-Malik Qarīb. Mā Ikhtalafat Alfāẓuh wa Ittafaqat Ma‘ānīh. Ed. Mājid al-Dhahabī. Damascus: Dār al-Fikr, 1985. Bāshā, Aḥmād Taymūr. al-Ḥubb ‘ind al-‘Arab. Sūsa, Tunisia:  Dār al-Ma‘ārif li al-Ṭibā‘a wa al-Nashr, 1993. Bunge, Mario. “The Centrality of Truth.” In Evandro Agazzi, Right, Wrong and Science: The Ethical Dimensions of the Techno-Scientific Enterprise, edited by Craig Dilworth. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004, 233–42. al-Būṭī, Muḥammad Sa‘īd Ramaḍan. al-Ḥubb fī al-Qur’ān wa Dawr al-Ḥubb fī Ḥayāt al-Insān. Damascus: Dār al-Fikr, 2009. al-Farāhīdī, al-Khalīl b. Aḥmad. Kitāb al-‘Ayn Murattaban ‘Ala Ḥurūf al-Mu‘jam. Ed. ‘Abd al-Ḥamīd Hindāwī. Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyya, 2003. Fayrūzābādī, Muḥammad b.  Ya‘qūb. al-Qāmūs al-Muḥīt. Ed. Muḥammad al-‘Irq Sūsī. Damascus: Mu’assasat al-Risāla, 2005. Ibn al-Anbārī, Abū al-Barakāt. al-Inṣāf fī Masā’il al-Khilāf bayna al-Baṣriyyīn wa al-Kūfiyyīn. Ed. Jūda Mabrūk Mabrūk. Cairo: Maktabat al-Khānjī, 2002. Ibn Fāris. Mu‘jam Maqāyīs al-Lugha. Ed. ‘Abd al-Salām Harūn. Cairo:  Dār Iḥyā’ al-Kutub al-‘Arabiyya, 1946. Ibn Ḥazm, ‘Alī. Ṭawq al-Ḥamāma. Cairo: Mu’assasat Hindāwī, 2014. Ibn Manẓūr. Lisān al-‘Arab. Ed. ‘Abd Allāh ‘Alī al-Kabīr et  al. Cairo:  Dār al-Ma‘ārif, 1984. Ibrāhim, Zakariyyā. Mushkilat al-Ḥubb. Cairo: Maktabat Miṣr, 1969. al-Jāḥiẓ, Abū ‘Uthmān ‘Amr b.  Baḥr. Rasā’il al-Jāḥiẓ. Ed. ‘Alī Abū Mulḥim. Beirut: Dār wa Maktabat al-Hilāl, 2002.

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The Semantic Field of Love in Classical Arabic Majma‘ al-Lugha al-‘Arabī bi al-Qāhira, Al-Mu‘jam al-Wasīṭ. 4th ed. Cairo: Maktabat al-Shurūq al-Dawliyya, 2004. Quṭrub, Abū ‘Alī Muḥammad b. al-Mustanīr. Kitāb al-Aḍdād. Ed. Ḥannā Ḥaddād. Riyadh: Dār al-‘Ulūm, 1984. al-Rummānī, Abū al-Ḥasan ‘Alī b. ‘Īsā. Al-Alfāẓ al-Mutarādifatu al-Mutaqāribatu al-Ma‘nā. Al-Manṣūra, Egypt. Ed. Fatḥ Allāh Sāliḥ al-Miṣrī. Dār al-Wafā’ li al-Ṭibā‘a wa al-Nashr, 1987. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes. NY: Washington Square Press, 1965. Arabic translation by ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Badawī as al-Wujūd wa al-ʿAdam. Beirut: Dār al-Ādāb, 1966. al-Yasūʿī, Rafa’īl Naḥla. Al-Munjid fī al-Mutarādifāt wa al-Mutajānisāt. Beirut: Dār al-Mashriq, 1986.

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‫‪Appendix I1‬‬ ‫ي تَيَّ َمتني وحي ُد‬ ‫يا خلِيلَ َّ‬ ‫غادةٌ زانها من الغصن قدٌّ‬ ‫وزهاها من فرعها ومن الخد‬ ‫أوقد الحسنُ ناره من وحي ٍد‬ ‫فَ ْه َي برْ ٌد بخدِّها وسال ٌم‬ ‫تضرْ ُّ‬ ‫قط وجهها وهو ما ٌء‬ ‫لم ِ‬ ‫ما لما ٍء تصطليه من وجنتيْها‬ ‫مث ُل ذاك الرضاب أطفأ ذاك الو‬ ‫وغرير بحسنها قال ‪ :‬ص ْفها‬ ‫ٍ‬ ‫يسهل القول إنها أحسن األشْ‬ ‫شمسُ دَجْ ٍن ِكال المني َريْن من شم‬ ‫تتجلّى للناظرين إليها‬ ‫ظبية تسكن القلوب وترعا‬ ‫تتغنّى ‪ ،‬كأنها التغنّى‬ ‫ال تراها هناك تَج َحظُ ٌ‬ ‫عين‬ ‫من هد ٍُّو وليس فيه انقطاع‬ ‫م َّد في شأو صوتها نفَسٌ كا‬ ‫وأر َّ‬ ‫ق الدال ُل وال ُغ ْن ُج منه‬ ‫فتراه يموت طَوراً ويحيا‬ ‫فيه َو ْش ٌي وفيه َح ْل ٌي من النَّغْ‬ ‫طاب فُوها وما تُ َرجِّ ُع فيه‬ ‫ثغبٌ ينقع الصدى وغنا ٌء‬ ‫فلها ال َّده َر الث ٌم م ْستَزي ٌد‬ ‫في هوى ْ‬ ‫ُّ‬ ‫يخف حلي ٌم‬ ‫مثلها‬ ‫ماتعاطى القلوب اال أصابت‬ ‫ضا ٍه‬ ‫ف في يَ َديْها ُم َ‬ ‫َوتَ ُر ال َع ْز ِ‬ ‫ب يوما ً‬ ‫وإذا أ ْنب َ‬ ‫ض ْتهُ لل ّشرْ ِ‬ ‫ْج‬ ‫م ْعبَ ٌد في الغناء ‪ ،‬وابنُ سُري ٍ‬ ‫ت األحْ ـ‬ ‫ع ْيبُها أنّها إذا غنّ ِ‬ ‫واستزادت قلوبهم من هواها‬

‫ففؤادي بها معنّى‪ ‬عمي ُد‬ ‫ومن الظّبي مقلتان‪ ‬وجي ُد‬ ‫ين ذاك السواد والتوريد‬ ‫فوق خ ٍّد ما شانَهُ ْ‬ ‫تخدي ُد‬ ‫وهي للعاشقين ج ْه ٌد‪ ‬جهي ُد‬ ‫القلوب وه َي‪ ‬حدي ُد‬ ‫وتذيبُ‬ ‫َ‬ ‫غي ُر ترشاف ريقها‪ ‬تبريد‬ ‫ج َد لوال اإلباء والتصريد‬ ‫قلت ‪ :‬أمران ‪ :‬هي ٌِّن‪ ‬وشدي ُد‬ ‫يا ِء ط ّراً ‪ ،‬ويعس ُر التحدي ُد‬ ‫س وب ْد ٍر من نُورها يستفي ُد‬ ‫ٍ‬ ‫فشق ّى بحسنها‪ ‬وسعيد‬ ‫ها ‪ ،‬وق ْم ِريَّةٌ لها‪ ‬تغري ُد‬ ‫األوصال وهي‪ ‬تجي ِد‬ ‫سكون‬ ‫من‬ ‫ِ‬ ‫ِ‬ ‫لك منها وال يَدرُّ‪ ‬وري ُد‬ ‫وسجو وما به‪ ‬تبليد‬ ‫ٍّ‬ ‫ف كأنفاس عاشقيها‪ ‬مديد‬ ‫وبَراهُ ال َّشجا فكاد‪ ‬يبي ُد‬ ‫مستل ٌّذ بسيطه والنشيد‬ ‫ِم َمصو ٌ‬ ‫غ يختال فيه القصي ُد‬ ‫َي ٍء لها بذاك‪ ‬شهي ُد‬ ‫كلُّ ش ْ‬ ‫عنده يوجد السرورُ‪ ‬الفقيد‬ ‫ولها الدهر سامع م ْستَعي ُد‬ ‫راج ٌح ْ‬ ‫حلمه ‪ ،‬ويَغوى‪ ‬رشي ُد‬ ‫ُ‬ ‫َّ‬ ‫حيث‪ ‬تُري ُد‬ ‫منهن‬ ‫بهواها‬ ‫َّ‬ ‫َوتَ َر الزحْ ف فِي ِه سه ٌم‪ ‬شَدي ُد‬ ‫أيقن القو ُم أنها‪ ‬ستصيد‬ ‫وهي في الضرب زلزلٌ‪ ‬وعقيد‬ ‫رار ظلّوا وه ْم لديها‪ ‬عبيد‬ ‫بِرقاها ‪ ،‬وما لَدَي ِه ْم‪ ‬مزي ُد‬ ‫‪324‬‬

‫‪325‬‬

‫‪Appendix I‬‬ ‫وحسان عرضن لي ‪ ،‬قلت ‪ :‬مهلاً عن وحي ٍد فحقّها التوحيد‬ ‫ٌ‬ ‫فلها في القلوب حبٌ ‪ ‬وحيد‬ ‫حسن وحيد‬ ‫حسنها في العيون‬ ‫ّ‬ ‫ضل عنه التوفيق والتسديد‬ ‫ونصيح يلومني في هواها‬ ‫ُ‬ ‫المستريث والمستزيد‬ ‫وهو‬ ‫لو رأى من يلوم فيه ألضحى‬ ‫وهي ْ‬ ‫تزهُو حياتَه‪ ‬وتكي ُد‬ ‫ضلة للفؤاد يحنو عليها‬ ‫عنده والذمي ُم منها‪ ‬حميد‬ ‫سحرته بمقلتيها فأضحت‬ ‫قت ف ْتنةً ‪ :‬غنا ًء وحسْنا ً‬ ‫ُخلِ ْ‬ ‫مالها فيهما جميعاً‪ ‬نديد‬ ‫ف ْه َي نُعْمى يمي ُد منها كبي ٌر‬ ‫وه َي بلوى يشيب منها‪ ‬ولي ُد‬ ‫من هواها وحيث َحلَّ ْ‬ ‫لِ َي حيْث انص َر ُ‬ ‫فت عنها رفيقٌ‬ ‫ت قَ ِعيدُ‬ ‫مي وخلفي‪ ،‬فأين عنه‪ ‬أحي ُد‬ ‫عن يميني وعن شمالي وقُ ّدا‬ ‫َّ‬ ‫إن شيطان حبّها ل َم ِريدُ‬ ‫س َّد شيطانُ حبّها ك َّل ف ٌج‬ ‫ّ‬ ‫ك َّرةَ الطرْ ف مبدى ٌء وم ِعي ُد‬ ‫ليت شعري إذا أدام إليها‬ ‫أم لها ك َّل ساعة‪ ‬تجديدُ‬ ‫أهي ش ٌئ التسأم العين منه ؟‬ ‫بل هي العيش ال يزال متى استعْـ رض يملي غرائبا ً ويفِي ُد‬ ‫ٌ‬ ‫ــو عتا ٌد لما ي َحبّ ‪ ‬عتيد‬ ‫معان ‪ ،‬من اللهـ‬ ‫م ْنظَ ٌر ‪َ ،‬مس َم ٌع ‪،‬‬ ‫ـقص من عَقد سحْ رها تَوكي ُد‬ ‫ال يدبُّ المال ُل فيها وال ي ْنـ‬ ‫ٌ‬ ‫حبٌ‬ ‫فلها في القلوب ‪ ‬جديد‬ ‫حسن جديد‬ ‫حسنها في العيون‬ ‫منك ما يأخذ المديلُ‪ ‬المقيد‬ ‫أخذ هللا يا وحي ُد لقلبي‬ ‫ِ‬ ‫َح ُّ‬ ‫وحظي البكا ُء والتَّسْهي ُد‬ ‫ظ غيري من وصل ُك ْم قُ َّرةُ العيْـ ـن‬ ‫ِّ‬ ‫ت خال ّ‬ ‫لهن‪ ‬وعيد‬ ‫غير أني م َعلِّ ٌل منك نفسي‬ ‫بعدا ٍ‬ ‫ٌ‬ ‫ٌ‬ ‫لي مميت ‪ ،‬ونظرة‪ ‬تخليد‬ ‫ما تزالينَ نظرةٌ منك َموت‬ ‫نتالقى فلحْ ظَةٌ منك و ْع ٌد‬ ‫بوصال ولحظةٌ‪ ‬تهدي ُد‬ ‫ت الصِّحاح مرْ ضى يميدُو ن نُ ً‬ ‫حوال وأنت ُخوطٌ‪ ‬يميدُ‬ ‫قد تر ْك ِ‬ ‫ٌ‬ ‫ألحاظ ِه صريعٌ‪ ‬جلي ُد‬ ‫بين‬ ‫ضعيف‬ ‫والهوى ال يزال فيه‬ ‫ِ‬ ‫بالرقاد النسيب فهو‪ ‬طريد‬ ‫ضافَنِي ُحبُّك الغريبُ فألوى‬ ‫عجبا ً لي ‪َّ ،‬‬ ‫بين جنب ّى ‪ ،‬والنسيب‪ ‬شريد‬ ‫الغريب مقي ٌم‬ ‫إن‬ ‫َ‬ ‫نشتهيه‪ ،‬فهلْ له‪ ‬تجريدُ‬ ‫شي مليح‬ ‫قد مللنا من ستر ْ‬ ‫ـم الثريا فهو القريب‪ ‬البعيد‬ ‫هو في القلب وهو أبعد من نجـ‬

‫‪325‬‬

326

The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures 1. O my [two] friends, Waḥīd has enslaved me.           My heart is besieged, ruined by her love. 2. Lithe. She is adorned with the grace of a soft bough,           And the neck and eyes of a gazelle. 3. Her hair glimmers with blackness           And her cheeks, in redness. 4. Beauty sparked its fire from Waḥīd           Over a cheek unblemished by hollowness. 5. Coolness and peace, her cheek are,           Though for her lovers she is a difficult challenge. 6. Like tranquil soft water, her features are never disturbed,           Though she has melted hearts as hard as iron. 7. The fire that her beauty has kindled           Can only be cooled by the savoring of her kisses 8. Such kisses would have soothed this passion of mine,           Were it not for her blowing hot and cold. 9. Another one mesmerized by her beauty has said: ‘Describe her!’           I said: ‘that is easy and difficult, at the same time.’ 10. It is easy to say she is invariably the most beautiful of creatures,           But difficult to say precisely how. 11. She is the sunshine on a cloudy day; the sun and moon           Both draw their light from hers. 12. When she appears before her audience,           Her beauty torments some and leaves others in delight. 13. A gazelle that lives in men’s hearts, she grazes in them,           A twittering turtledove. 14. She sings so effortlessly, it seems as though she is not singing,           And she sings so beautifully. 15. You do not see her eyes bulge there to you           Or her neck-veins gush from strain. 16. There is a gentleness in her voice that is not disrupted,           And a calm that is not dulled. 17. When she sings, her breath always reaches the end of the phrase;           It is long, like the sighs of her lovers. 18. Coquetry makes her voice even more delicate,           And emotions thin it till it almost disappears. 326

327

Appendix I 19. You see, her voice seems to die at times, and comes to life at others,           It is delightful whether soft or raised. 20. Her voice is embroidered jewelry crafted from the melody,           Where the verses strut across. 21. What a sweet mouth! With everything in it!           Everything bears witness to this. 22. Her kisses, like fresh clear water, quench thirst,           A song from her brings back long-lost joy. 23. An eternity of her kisses is not enough;           An eternity of her songs is not enough! 24. Her love would make poised men           lose their composure; the virtuous are seduced. 25. She does not stretch a hand at hearts with her love           Without having victims wherever she wishes. 26. A lute-string in her hands is as deadly           as the bowstring in a battle, with a sharp arrow ready and set. 27. If one day she draws it, aiming at the drinkers,           Everybody is certain that she will hit her mark. 28. When she sings, it is as if Maʿbad and Ibn Surayj were singing,           As if Zalzal and ‘Aqīd were playing.2 29. Her only flaw is that when she sings           The freeborn become her slaves. 30. She casts a spell that increases the love felt for her,           Though hearts cannot take it anymore. 31. Beautiful women offered themselves to me, but I said:           ‘There is no one except Waḥīd.’ 32. Her beauty is incomparable;           And the love felt for her is exclusive. 33. Many an earnest advisor, lacking sound judgment,           Has reproached me for loving her. 34. Yet if one of those who reproach me were to see her,           He would patiently listen and ask me to tell him more. 35. She lays waste the heart that is unwavering in loving her,           A waste beyond recompense, and she deceives it 36. Her eyes bewitched him, until for him           Her blameworthy traits became admirable. 327

328

The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures 37. A living temptation: her singing, her beauty           She is entirely without a rival. 38. A blessing that causes mature men to sway,           And a curse that turns the hair of newborns white. 39. Wherever I leave her, I find an associate in love for her,           Wherever she goes, a companion sitting by. 40. To my right, to my left, in front of me and behind,           How do I get around him? 41. The devil of her love blocked every path!           The devil of her love is vicious! 42. I wish I knew when someone looks at her repeatedly,           Once, and then again. 43. Does the eye not tire of her?           Or does it always discover something new? 44. In fact, she is life, critically examined           Still providing more marvels, more benefits. 45. What a vision she is! Her song! And the atmosphere and setting!           A reservoir of lovely entertainment 46. Boredom never creeps in with her,           Nor do her magical spells cease to work. 47. Her beauty renews itself every time,           So every time, there is new love for her. 48. Waḥīd, May God recompense my heart from you           A recompense similar to that of the avenging victor! 49. Others rejoice in delight by a union with you,           And I am left to tears and sleeplessness. 50. Still I divert myself with your promises,           That hide among them a warning. 51. I still find that once glance from you is deadly,           While another makes me immortal. 52. When we meet, one glance from you is a promise of union,           While another is forbidding. 53. You leave healthy men love-sick, trembling from emaciation,           While you are as graceful as a swaying bough. 54. Love still looks at those who cannot handle it,           There a defeated one, there someone strong and steadfast. 328

329

Appendix I 55. I played host to your love, an unfamiliar stranger,           It kicked out and banished my sleep. 56. How odd it is that the stranger dwells in my heart,           While the familiar one is displaced. 57. Tired of hiding the lovely object of desire,           Will it ever be disclosed? 58. It is in the heart, and yet is farther than the Pleiades;           It is at once both near and far.

Notes 1. I thank Professor Muhammad A.S. Abdel-Haleem for his valuable insights and translation suggestions on some parts of the poem. 2. I could not get hold of this edition, but according to Faruq Aslim’s explanation in his edition of the Dīwān, Maʿbad and Ibn Surayj were famous singers in the Ummayad period. Zalzal and ‘Aqīd were also famous entertainers known for their excellent instrument playing skills. Cited in Akiko Motoyoshi, “Sensibility and Synaesthesia: Ibn al-Rūmī’s Singing Slave-Girl” Journal of Arabic Literature 32, no. 1 (2001): 6, fn.18.

329

‫‪330‬‬

‫‪Appendix II‬‬ ‫ستم هجر تو زین روی که عالم‪ ‬بگرفت‬ ‫ترسم آشوب از این دور زمان‪ ‬برخیزد‬ ‫پای شمشاد ز شرم تو بماند‪ ‬در‪ ‬گل‬ ‫در چمن گر قد سرو تو چمان‪ ‬برخیزد‬ ‫ترک وصلت نکنم تا بودم جان‪ ‬در‪ ‬تن‬ ‫ور به یکیباره ام ا ّمید ز جان‪ ‬برخیزد‬ ‫فتنه برخیزد ار آن گلبن نو‪ ‬بنشیند‬ ‫سرو بنشیند ار آن سرو روان‪ ‬برخیزد‬ ‫شمه ای گر ز غم حال جهان بر‪ ‬خیزد‬ ‫ای بسا نعره که از پیر و جوان بر‪ ‬خیزد‬ ‫‪III‬‬ ‫ز پادشاهی ایرانزمینش ننگ‪ ‬آید‬ ‫کسی که شد به سر کوی غمزدای‪ ‬شما‬ ‫‪IV‬‬ ‫ای گشته در الملک جان یغمای بغدادی‪ ‬پسر‬ ‫افکنده شوری در جهان غوغای بغدادی‪ ‬پسر‬ ‫‪V‬‬ ‫قدرت بلند باد و ز لطفت در این‪ ‬جهان‬ ‫قدرم بلند کن که ندانند‪ ‬قدر‪ ‬من‬ ‫‪VI‬‬ ‫به رسم تضمین این بیت دلکش‪ ‬آوردم‬ ‫ز شعر شیخ که جانم به طبع دارد‪ ‬دوست‬

‫‪Persian texts‬‬ ‫‪I‬‬ ‫مژده وصل تو کو کز سر جان‪ ‬برخیزم‬ ‫طایر قدسم و از دام جهان‪ ‬برخیزم‬ ‫به ولی تو که گر بنده خویشم‪ ‬خوانی‬ ‫از سر خواجگی کون و مکان‪ ‬برخیزم‬ ‫یا رب از ابر هدایت برسان‪ ‬بارانی‬ ‫پیشتر زان که چو گردی ز میان‪ ‬برخیزم‬ ‫بر سر تربت من با می و مطرب‪ ‬بنشین‬ ‫تا به بویت ز لحد رقص کنان‪ ‬برخیزم‬ ‫خیز و بال بنما ای بت شیرین‪ ‬حرکات‬ ‫کز سر جان و جهان دست فشان‪ ‬برخیزم‬ ‫گر چه پیرم تو شبی تنگ در آغوشم‪ ‬گیر‬ ‫تا سحرگه ز کنار تو جوان‪ ‬برخیزم‬ ‫روز مرگم نفسی مهلت دیدار‪ ‬بده‬ ‫تا چو حافظ ز سر جان و جهان‪ ‬برخیزم‬ ‫‪II‬‬ ‫پیش روی تو دلم از سر جان‪ ‬برخیزد‬ ‫جان چه باشد ز سر هر دو جهان‪ ‬برخیزد‬ ‫عاشق سوخته گر بر سر خاکش‪ ‬گذری‬ ‫از لحد نعره زنان رقص کنان بر‪ ‬خیزد‬ ‫در میان من و تو پیرهنی مانده‪ ‬حجاب‬ ‫با کنار آی که آن هم ز میان بر‪ ‬خیزد‬ ‫چند در خواب رود بخت من‪ ‬شوریده‬ ‫وقت آن است که از خواب گران‪ ‬برخیزد‬

‫‪330‬‬

‫‪331‬‬

‫‪Appendix II‬‬ ‫‪VII‬‬ ‫چشم کوته نظران بر ورق صورت‪ ‬خوبت‬ ‫خط همی بیند وعارف قلم صنع‪ ‬خدا‪ ‬را‬

‫‪XV‬‬ ‫از خاتونی که قصه ویس و رامین خواند و‬ ‫امردی که بنگ و شراب خورد مستوری و‬ ‫کون درستی توقع‪ ‬مدارید‬ ‫‪XVI‬‬ ‫گر غزلهای جهان روزی به هندستان‪ ‬رود‬ ‫روح خسرو با حسن گوید که این کس گفته‪ ‬است‬ ‫‪XVII‬‬ ‫جهان خاتون غر است و شعر‪ ‬او‪ ‬غر‬ ‫عزیزان بشنوید اشعار‪ ‬غرا‬ ‫‪XVIII‬‬ ‫هر مرد که او گشت گرفتار‪ ‬بلیی‬ ‫زنهار یقین دان که ز کردار زنان‪ ‬است‬

‫‪VIII‬‬ ‫در روی دل افزون تو چون آینه‪ ‬پیداست‬ ‫الطاف خداوندی و آثار‪ ‬سعادت‬ ‫‪IX‬‬ ‫بنگر در صفت صنع الهیت‪ ‬دوست‬ ‫در رخ جون خور دلبر چه نظرهاست‬ ‫که‪ ‬نیست‬ ‫‪X‬‬ ‫مانند سکندر منم و چشمه‪ ‬حیوان‬ ‫در ظلمت گیسوی تو جویم دگر‪ ‬بار‬

‫‪XIX‬‬ ‫چون زنان زنهار بدعهدی‪ ‬مکن‬ ‫عشقبازی عادت مردان‪ ‬است‬

‫‪XI‬‬ ‫گر بنده محمود ایازیست‪ ‬حقیقت‬ ‫این بنده ایازیست که محمود‪ ‬ندارد‬

‫‪XX‬‬ ‫زنان مانند ریحان‪ ‬سفالند‬ ‫درون سو خبث و بیرون سو‪ ‬جمالند‬ ‫نشاید یافتن در هیچ‪ ‬برزن‬ ‫وفا در اسب و در شمشیر و‪ ‬در‪ ‬زن‬ ‫وفا مردی است بر زن چون توان‪ ‬بست‬ ‫چو زن گفتی بشوی از مردمی‪ ‬دست‬

‫‪XII‬‬ ‫از دهان یوسفم حاصل نشد کامی‪ ‬چو‪ ‬گرگ‬ ‫لب به خون آلوده و خالی دهان افتاده‪ ‬ام‬ ‫‪XIII‬‬ ‫نه مرد عشق تو بودم ولی چه چاره‪ ‬کنم‬ ‫به عشق روی توام اختیار ممکن‪ ‬نیست‬

‫‪XXI‬‬ ‫ماه از آن گفتم کاندر لغت و لفظ‪ ‬عرب‬ ‫چشمه روز بود ماده و مه باشد‪ ‬نر‬

‫‪XIV‬‬ ‫نه مرد عشق او بودم‪ ‬ولیکن‬ ‫بود فرق تمام از مرد‪ ‬تا‪ ‬مرد‬

‫‪331‬‬

‫‪332‬‬

‫‪The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures‬‬ ‫‪XXII‬‬ ‫ابكار معانی را به ذكور حروف دهیم در‬ ‫خلوات‪ ‬الكلم‬

‫‪XXVII‬‬ ‫اگر تو طعنه زنی بر جهان که بدمهر‪ ‬است‬ ‫امید مهر و وفا در جهان که را‪ ‬باشد‬ ‫‪XXVIII‬‬ ‫گفتم ای جان جهان بر ما نظر فرمای‪ ‬گفت‬ ‫با جهان کی انس گیرم کو نه در فرمان‪ ‬ماست‬ ‫‪XXIX‬‬ ‫از جهانداریت ار نیست مللی‪ ‬صنما‬ ‫چه شود گر تو بگویی که جهان زان‪ ‬منست‬ ‫‪XXX‬‬ ‫تو دلبر در جهان جان‪ ‬جهانی‬ ‫جهان را بی تو خود جان و دلی‪ ‬نیست‬ ‫‪XXXI‬‬ ‫ز استخوان نکنم مهر تو برون‪ ‬ای‪ ‬جان‬ ‫اگر زنند ز خاک جهان جهانی‪ ‬خشت‬ ‫‪XXXII‬‬ ‫اگر جهان همه گلزار میشود‪ ‬باری‬ ‫به دست دل ز فراق تو خار‪ ‬می‪ ‬آید‬ ‫اگر نه عشق تو باشد مرا چه نام‪ ‬نهند‬ ‫جهان ز نام تو با اعتبار‪ ‬می‪ ‬آید‬

‫‪XXIII‬‬ ‫عروس جهان گر چه در حد حسن‪ ‬است‬ ‫ز حد می برد شیوه بیوفایی‬ ‫‪XXIV‬‬ ‫مجو درستی عهد از جهان سست‪ ‬نهاد‬ ‫که این عجوزه عروس هزار داماد‪ ‬است‬ ‫‪XXV‬‬ ‫وزیرا جهان قحبه بی‪ ‬وفاست‬ ‫ترا از چنین قحبه ای ننگ‪ ‬نیست‬ ‫برو کس فراخی دگر را‪ ‬بخواه‬ ‫خدای جهان را جهان تنگ‪ ‬نیست‬ ‫‪XXVI‬‬ ‫وزیرا جهان قحبه بی‪ ‬وفاست‬ ‫ترا از چنین قحبه ای ننگ‪ ‬نیست‬ ‫برون زین فراخی دگر را‪ ‬بخواه‬ ‫خدای جهان را جهان تنگ‪ ‬نیست‬

‫‪332‬‬

333

Appendix III Jahān Malik Khātūn’s introduction to her Divān. Translated by Domenico Ingenito (see contribution in this volume: “Jahān Malik Khātūn:  Gender, Canon, and  Persona in the Poems of a Premodern Persian Princess,” 177–212. May be infinitely praised, thanked and exalted the Creator (Exalted be His Glory) who ennobled humans among other creatures by bestowing upon them the honor of language, eloquence and the perfect mastery of speech: The Almighty who converted the earthly-natured Adam Into the object of worship for the angels holding the divine throne. The Painter who depicted the virgin images of thoughts upon the primordial pages of the hearts: The Divine whose powerful hand moulded The image of the soul in the most beautiful shape. The omniscient who – through the power of speech – converted a chunk of flesh into the treasure of the mysteries of science. The munificent who adorned the most distinguished personalities of all contingent creatures with the robe of peculiar wonders: He once decorated the mouth of a child with a life-giving miraculous breath, and eventually he entrusted to the eloquence of an illiterate the salvation of this world and of the after-life: This is the only person who deserves kingship Not anyone can penetrate the divine secret. Limitless blessings and countless benedictions for the elected Muḥammad, the glorious and resplendent holy garden adorning the crown on the head of all Prophets: The shining sun in the sky of religion In whose epoch the world found salvation. 333

334

The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures The most elegant blessing and the most perfect benediction may be addressed to him, whose morning of prophecy purified the earth’s surface from the darkness of ignominy and whose radiant guidance polished and gave luster to the rusty mirror of the hearts. May abundant pardons and boundless paradises embrace the soul and the spirit of his family and friends: Those nightingales of the heavenly lote-tree, whose mellifluous songs Fortified the palace and the orchard of Muḥammad’s faith. It is clear to the heart of all erudite and virtuous people that the ultimate aspiration of wise men is poured into the effort of leaving on the surface of the pages of time a permanent trace attesting to the signs of their existence. And this, in order to contrast both the dust of oblivion, which through the coming and going of days dissipates any sign of our presence, and the revolution of times which erases all traces of it. It is hence necessary to be engaged with the edification of a permanent sign of memory able to immortalize our name after the disappearance of our physical existence. And all learned men know very well that the foundation of speech cannot be demolished by the tempest of the epochs: the signs of speech remain solid and permanent on the pages of time and it constitutes the most precious essence that can be vaunted by the Creator and his creatures, as it is the ultimate miracle giving access to the supreme truths: Speech was sent from the turquoise vault Speech descended upon us from the heavens If a pure essence existed more precious than speech That would have descended instead of speech. Therefore, no witness of remembrance can be considered superior to verse or prose compositions Because whenever passionate persons read poetry They would extinguish with its water the flames of sorrow The wise man derives from poetry his advices And solace gains from it the learned heart. As a consequence of these premises, this woman, Jahān, daughter of King ‘Masʿūd, having witnessed the tyranny of time, sought to embrace salvation 334

335

Appendix III through the practice of contentment and turned her heart towards the direction of inner tranquility. Thus this line became my refrain: Choose unity and don’t look for a companion among your friends Stay alone, don’t seek confidantes among your people. For any shape that appeared in front of my eyes, thousands of thoughts would emerge to the surface of my mind. Despite all the afflictions caused by the painful cycle of days and nights, I occasionally composed – as a form of entertainment for my spirit – a few fragments which were as desperate as the condition of lovers, as troubled as the heart of ardent whisperers, as broken and scattered as the heart of the Lords of gazes, and futile, blindly futile as the unfulfilled wishes of the Lords of Desire. By composing such lines I was giving shape to transcendental reality by the means of mundane metaphors and thus I appeased the burning sorrow of the days with the refreshing water of the [poetic] description of my inner condition. And all this, in spite of some people who, absolutely deprived of any sacred flame or elevated aspiration, would dwell on the surface of those shapes and consider despicable the mundane reflection of those marvels. In fact, because of the loose strength of their gaze, they couldn’t draw aside the veil from the object of their contemplation: Not all gazes can dare to stare at the sun Nor all drops know how to unify with the sea. But to all the scholars who are able to penetrate truth and ponder its intricacies, it is clear that the ultimate purpose of speech is not its external meaning but rather the comprehension of mysteries. The poetic expression of metaphors is the main vehicle to grasp and describe the ultimate truths of the spirit. And it is for this reason that they state that “metaphors are a bridge toward transcendental reality.” Among scholars and intellectuals it is well known that if the art of poetry were not distinguished by excellent virtues able to confer pre-eminence, the great personalities of the past and the most renowned men of wisdom (may God be satisfied by them) would have not poured all their fruitful efforts into the path set by this practice. Nevertheless, just following the common sense and since very few Persian women have been engaged in 335

336

The Beloved in Middle Eastern Literatures the art of poetry, this lady thought that any renown in this practice might have been considered a defect and I therefore abstained from it. But after some time I realized that many notable women of Persia and Arabia have become famous with this art. And if poetry were forbidden [for women], the beautiful beloved of the Prophet Muhammad, the moon whose standard is the sun, the pearl of the treasure of modesty, the Lady of the Day of Resurrection, Fāṭima, wouldn’t have ever composed poetry or recited verses such as: Indeed women are fragrant flowers created for you May you smell the fragrance of their petals. And all the women of Arabia have composed poetry, among the Persians I can cite the name of ‘Āysha Muqriyya, who was also one of the initiates to the path of faith and one among the birds of the sky of truth. She became famous for her quatrains, among which I  can quote the following ones: How splendid if I could enjoy our encounter And splendidly I would welcome your arrows into my chest But I know how impossible it is for me to reach you Hence splendid will it be just to pass through your thoughts. I have been used to suffering for you during my entire life From you concealed, I have practised a thousand loves with you. But I never told you all this, Because I never felt worthy of your Presence. And many other Persian poetesses, like Pādshāh Khātūn, Qutlughshāh Khātūn, and so on, according to their own talent have slackened the reins of their poetic art. I too, although a woman, have followed the example of their boldness, although, as they say: Not everyone can compose verses Virtue is needed for poetry Without wisdom no poetry can ever be composed. I now address the all-embracing favor of all learned men, intellectuals and scholars and hope that whenever they face the modest talent and the poor 336

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Appendix III poetic good of this Lady, with no hesitation may they express their opinion without hiding their disapproval. And wherever they find my imperfections and stylistic mistakes, I hope they will bestow upon me the honor, if possible, of correcting my lines, so that the poetry of this woman may no longer dwell in the darkness of mediocrity.

337

338

Index Abāẓa, Tharwat, 79n23 Abbasid Empire, 166 Abbasid love poetry, 15 ‘Abd al-Qādir, Fārūq, 69, 78n4 abode of wine, 269–71 Abraham, 21, 114–16 Abū Nūwās, Al-Ḥasan b. Hānī, 7–8, 50, 248–74 acceptance, social, 194 active participles, 306 adab writings, 13, 18 Adam, 85–91, 98n2, 297n26 aesthetic arrest, 16 aesthetic experience, 22 affection, 218 affect theory, 3 afterlife, 181, 202 Agamben, Giorgio, 278n41 agency in seduction, 69 of women, 7 Aḥmad, Jalayrid, 178 Aḥmadzāda, Ḥabīb, 246n3 Al-Ahrām newspaper, 79n23 Akhbār al-Adab journal, 74 Akhbār al-Yawm Foundation, 70 ‘Alī b. Naṣr al-Kātib, Abū al-Ḥasan, 216 alienation, 135–142, 149 ‘Ālim, Rajā’a, 6, 102–123 Allāh, 115 see also God; male god Allāt, 114–16 ambivalence, 177, 179 Amīn, Muṣṭafā, 70

amphibology, 203 anatomy, 224 al-Anbārī, 167 al-Andalusī, Ibn Ḥazm, 2–3 anecdotes, 169, 173 angels, 85–92 animosity, 314 al-Anṭākī, 164–5 anthologies, 164 antimonies, 291 antonyms, 300–2, 309, 314–19 Anvarī, 186 anxiety, 140 Arabic language, 300, 306 Arabic letters, 14, 36n59 archetypes, 285 argumentation theory, 285–93, 296n18 El-Ariss, Tarek, 77n1 aristocratic code of conduct, 222 Aristophanes, 278n33 arsala (casting, pouring), 267 art emotions regulated by, 32 state funding of, 75 artifice, lack of, 147 ‘Arūḍ (prosody), 25–6 al-A‘shā, 28 ‘āshiq (deranged lover), 171–3 ‘āşık (lover), 8, 286–92 Asīr (Farrukhzād), 6, 133–4 al-‘Askarī, 171–2 al-Aṣma‘ī, 215 aspiration, 92

338

339

Index astral worship, 114 al-Aswānī, ‘Alā’, 70 ‘Aṭṭār, Farīd al-Dīn, 96, 186 authenticity, 147 author, historical, 179, 190–4 autobiography, 178 awakening, sexual, 43–4 awareness, 148 ‘ayaf (distaste), 315 Azerbaijan, 178 bā’ (radical), 303 Baghdad, 165, 185, 221 Bakhtīshū‘, Abū Sa‘īd, 217 Bākī, 290 Balkh, 14 banā (to build), 111 al-Bannā, Rajab, 79n23 banned novels, 237 Barthes, Roland, 263, 278n33, 279n46 Basra, 215 Bataille, Georges, 8, 250, 259, 262 Baudrillard, Jean, 64, 66, 76, 78n10, 250, 264 Bauer, Thomas, 32 bayt (house), 267, 278n41 beauty classical Persian, 239, 245 cruel, 21 experience of, 16 of God, 190 renewed, 20 Bedouins, 215–16 Being and Nothingness (Sartre), 319 Beirut, 123 beloved as blank slate, 244 deification of, 103 descriptions of, 239 idealized, 157, 190, 242 idolization of, 103–4, 242 memories of, 156

powerful, 14 union with, 23, 94, 120, 219 “Bidāyat ma‘araka jadīda” (al-Bannā), 79n23 Biesterfeldt, Hans Hinrich, 229n18 binary opposites, 291 biography, 172, 178 bird imagery, 136, 151n9 Blachère, Régis, 159–60 Black Stone, 107, 125n26 Blank, Ksana, 287 blank slate, beloved as, 244 blasphemy, 95, 271–2 blessing, love as, 21–2 blocking path of mystics, 95 blood, Satan flowing in, 87 body cross-gender, 263 improbable, 263–4 Oriental, 45–8, 54, 57 poetic, 260 transformations of, 110 breath, 24–5 Brethren of Purity, 89, 219–20 Brookshaw, Dominic, 185 bubbling of wine, 250–1, 275n10 bughḍ (loathing), 315 building, 111–12 Bürgel, J. Christoph, 33n5 Būyid rule of Baghdad, 222 Byron, Lord, 51 Cairo, 43 camel, meaning of, 49 canon, female poets and, 196 care, lifting of, 277n23 Caspian Sea, 244 censure, 254–7 challenges from patrons, 15 chaste love, 215–16, 220–2 Cheheltan, Amir Hassan, 237–45 Chelhod, Joseph, 115–16

339

340

Index Chess with the Doomsday Machine (Aḥmadzāda), 246n3 children, warnings to, 64 Chinese objects, 53 Chittick, William C., 120 chivalry, 97, 222, 231n50 circular movement, 270 circumambulation, 102–5, 116–18 civilization, enjoyment of, 148 classical world, 146 coexistence, 291 coherence, imposition of, 161 Cole, Juan, 51 colonialism, 5, 41–5, 51–7 colors, mastery of, 112–13 commanding right, 276n17 command of God, 90–2 communion, emotional, 17 comparative literature, 293 see also literary theory composite texts, 170 compulsion, 23, 303 concubines, 226 conditional reflexes, 46 conflict, 54, 150, 291 connotations of words for love, 312–13 conquest, 44 conspiracy theories, 68–9 constancy, 146 consummation, 262 consumption of wine, 251–2 contempt, 146 contentment, 182 “Contributi alla Interpretazione di Ġamīl” (Gabrieli), 159–60 conventional love, 239 conventions, poetic, 192–3 conversation, 226 cordiality, 222 Cordoba, 166 corruption, 88

counter-reality, 269–70 courage, masculine, 191 courtly love, 157, 171, 198, 215, 293 court metaphor, 295n15 crafts, worldly, 113 creative femininity, 121 creativity, literary, 194 cross cultural approaches, 1 cross-dressing, 8, 264 cultural politics, 61, 74–7 cupbearers (sāqiyya), 249, 259–66, 272–3 cure, wine as, 256 curiosity, 52, 66–7 curse, love as, 21–2 Czechoslovakia, 237 “Da‘ ‘an-ka Lawmī” (Abū Nūwās), 248–74 ḍaghīna (vengefulness), 316 danger, 17–18, 313 dangerous love, 4–5 Dante Aligheri, 182 Dasenbrock, Reed Way, 56 Dāsh Ākul (Hidāyat), 246n8 Davaran, Ardavan, 139, 141 Dawud, Muhammad Ibn, 2 Dāya, Najm-al-Dīn, 87–9 al-Daylamī, 216 death imagery, 181 deception, 45 deification of beloved, 103 Derrida, Jacques, 276n19, 286–7, 295n9, 297n39 descriptions of beloved, 239 despair, 24, 27 destructiveness, 318–19 deviance, 63–8, 79n23, 116 Dhū al-Nūn, 120 dialectics, 8, 25, 285–93 dialogic techniques, 71 dichotomies, 20–2

340

341

Index dictionaries, classical Arab, 302 al-Dimashqī, Najm-al-Dīn, 117 Dionysus, 278n34 disapproval, social, 135–42, 152n13 disease, love as, 2, 5, 14–15, 18 disinterest, 317 disobedience, 86 displaced sexuality, 41, 45–50, 56–7 display, 65 dissident writings, 237 dissolution of identity, 260 Dīvār (Farrukhzād), 134 divine attributes of humanity, 88, 91 divine love, 5, 186, 303 dīwān of Jamīl, 159–60 domination, 44, 55–6, 145, 292 Dostoevsky’s Dialectics and the Problem of Sin (Blank), 287 al-Du’alī, Abū al-Aswad, 36n59 duality, 22, 92, 261–2 dyeing, craft of, 112–13 Earth, Adam created from, 86–8 East-West stereotypes, 42–3 ecstasy, 258–9 Eden, Garden of, 85–6, 137–8 “The Effeminates of Early Medina,” 277n28 effervescence, 251, 265 Egypt, 4, 43, 51, 70, 159 Egypt’s Culture Wars (Mehrez), 75 ejaculation, 232n57 elite, ethics for, 221–3 elusiveness, 76, 251, 256 emanation, divine, 267 emotions art regulating, 32 intensity of, 23–4 levels of, 17 love classified according to, 2 opposing, 290 Empire and Sexuality (Hyam), 51

Encyclopedia of Pleasure (‘Alī b. Naṣr al-Kātib), 215–27 engagement, 77 England, 43 English language, 301 enslavement (tatayyum), 17, 19, 25, 31 envy. see jealousy Ernst, C.W., 94 Erotisme (Bataille), 262 essentialism, 44 ethics, 221–3 etiquette, courtly, 221 Europe, masculinization of, 51 Eve, 85–6 Evin prison, 237, 241–5 excess, 251–2, 273–4 excessive love, 216–17 exhausting motifs, 28–32 exorcism machines, 241–2 exoticization, 47, 49–50 expansion of texts, 168 experience circumscribing, 255 irreconcilable modes of, 251, 275n9 extradiegetic level of text, 194 extratextual reality, 184–5 falsity, 290 Fanon, Frantz, 54 fantasies, 44, 49, 55, 244 Faqīh, ‘Imād, 187 al-Farāhīdī, al-Khalīl b. Aḥmad, 26 Fardī, Amīr Ḥusayn, 246n3 Farrukhzād, Furūgh, 6, 133–50 fate, 258 “Fatḥ-i Bāgh” (Farrukhzād), 135–42, 150 Fāṭima, 195 female deities. see goddesses female worship, 102–23 feminine divine, 6 feminine nature of wine, 260

341

342

Index femininity, creative, 121 feminism, 103–4 feminization of the East, 43, 48 feminized masculinity, 246n6 fertility goddesses, 108–9 Fī al-Riwāya al-‘Arabiyya al-Mu‘āṣira (al-Qādir), 78n4 fiqh al-lugha (secrets of language), 27 Firdausī, 3 fire imagery, 21 Satan created from, 86 first person voice, 179 fitna (burning love), 311, 321n33 Flaubert, Gustave, 51 floods, 119–20 folk traditions, 116–17 forbidden, realm of, 255 forbidding wrong, 276n17 fornicators, 260 “Forugh Farrokhzad’s Romance with Her Muse” (Sandler), 151n5 Foucault, Michel, 51–2 foundations, 79n22 four elements, 86, 88 framing of topics, 4 free wives, 226 French courtly literature, 106 friendship, 218 Frye, Northrop, 16 Fulk of Toulouse, 182 Fürkatnāme (Halîlî), 289 future tense, 30 Gabriel (archangel), 95 Gabrieli, Francesco, 159–60, 164, 167–73 Galen, 224 games, cultural, 77 “Ġamīl al-‘Udrī: Studio Critico e Raccolta dei Frammenti” (Gabrieli), 159–60

garden, meaning of, 137–40 Garden of Eden, 85–6, 137–8 gaze, addictive, 19 Gelder, Geert Jan van, 31 gender ambiguity, 7 of author, 190–1 cross-gender body, 263 metaphors, 121 in Persian language, 200 and poetry, 194–9 role reversal, 143–4 genres, 165 geographical references, 185 gharām (fondness), 311 Ghazālī, Ahmad (Aḥmad), 89–92, 96, 188, 200 al-Ghazālī, Muḥammad, 188–9, 201, 227 ghazal poetry, 13–14, 31–2, 104, 177, 183, 192–4, 199, 204, 208n34 Ghazna, Maḥmūd of, 3 ghill (satisfying revenge), 316 al-Ghīṭānī, Gamāl, 5, 60–77 al-Ghudhāmī, ‘Abdullāh, 104 Gibson, Brian, 44 Giunta, Claudio, 182 Giza, 72 Gnostic knowledge, 89–90 God command of, 90–1, 92 duality of attributes, 92 trap set by, 96 unity with mankind, 91–2 will of, 90–1 wrath of, 92–3 see also Allāh; male god goddesses, 103–17 Googoosh (Fā’iqa Ātashīn), 241, 245 gossip, 63, 69–71, 136–7, 141 government-sponsored works, 237 graciousness, 94

342

343

Index grammar, 27, 28–31 Of Grammatology (Derrida), 297n39 guilt, 140 Gulistān, Ibrāhīm, 135 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 295n12 Gurgānī, 3 Gurgīn, Īraj, 146 Gutas, Dimitri, 229n18 Hadith, 276n18 Ḥāfiẓ, 146, 179–81, 184, 186–7, 201, 243 Haft Paykar (Niẓāmī), 199 Hājar, 124n9 Ḥajjī Khalīfa, 221 hajj pilgrimage, 103–5, 117, 123 Halîlî, 289 Ḥallāj, Ḥusayn Manṣūr, 85, 90–1 Hamdānī, ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt, 85, 90, 94–8, 188 Ḥammuda, ‘Ādil, 80n23 Hamori, Andras, 15, 21, 24 hamziyya poetry, 274n4 ḥaqīqī (“true” or divine) love imagery, 179 ḥā’ radical, 303 harm, intention of, 317 Hassan, Wail, 53 hate stages of, 300–1 synonyms of, 314–19 haughtiness, 94 hawā (passion), 170, 310 Ḥāwī, Īliyā, 16 Ḥawwās, Zāhī, 72 ḥ-b-b root, 302–6 heart, God’s secret place in, 89 heart-mind dichotomy, 20 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 285 hermaphrodites, 263, 264 heroes, 112, 144–5 heterosexuality, 223–4, 309

Hidāyat, Ṣādiq, 246n8 hidden desire, 225 hidden knowledge, 66–7 Hijāz, 159 Ḥikāyāt al-Khabī’a (al-Ghīṭānī), 5, 60–77 Ḥikāyāt al-Mu’assasa (al-Ghīṭānī), 62 Hillman, Michael, 135, 136, 141 ḥiqd (vengefulness), 316 historicity, 158 The History of Sexuality (Foucault), 51–2 Hofstatder, Richard, 68 homoeroticism, 184 homonymy, 203 homosexuality, 4, 60, 77n1, 223, 232n54, 261–2 homosexual panic, 5, 63–4 hopelessness, 157 How the Steel was Tempered (Ostrovsky), 246n3 ḥubb (love), 170–3, 300–19, 310 Ḥubbā (al-‘Ālim), 6, 102–23 humanity, divine attributes of, 88, 91 hunting motif, 31 Ḥusnī, Fārūq, 61, 71, 74–7, 79n23 huyām (intense love), 311 Hyam, Ronald, 51 “I,” lyrical, 179, 184, 190–6, 204 Iblīs. see Satan Ibn Abī Ḥajala, Aḥmad b. Yaḥyā, 17 Ibn al-Anbārī, Abū al-Barakāt, 314 Ibn al-Nadīm, Muḥammad, 221 Ibn al-Rūmī, 5, 13–32 Ibn ‘Arabī, 121–2 Ibn Fāris, 302, 309 Ibn Ḥazm, ‘Alī b. Aḥmad, 5, 8–9, 13, 18, 303 Ibn Khallikān, 158 Ibn Manẓūr, 302, 309 Ibn Naṣr, 218–19

343

344

Index Ibn Qutayba, 175n13 Ibn Sīda, 309 Ibn Sīnā, Abū ‘Alī Ḥusayn ‘Abdullāh, 22, 217 iconoclasm, 250, 253 icy persona, 35n29 idealized beloved, 157, 190, 242 identity, 50, 53, 134, 179, 260 idolization of beloved, 103–4, 242 idol worship, 114 ignorance (jahl), 280n51 Iḥyā’ ‘Ulūm al-Dīn (al-Ghazālī), 227 illness. see disease, love as imagery, religious, 104–5 ‘Imārit Ya‘qūbiyān (al-Aswānī ), 70 immanence, 270 immoral experience of poetry, 273 importance, words expressing, 17–18 “impossibility of the task,” 15–16 improbable body, 263–4 Imru’ al-Qays, 156 inaccessibility of text, 123 incomplete texts, 168 individualism, 6, 91, 133–50 infatuation, 76, 244–5 inkār (repugnance), 315 innocence, 141, 147, 242–3 insatiation, 252 insincerity, 182 intellectual love, 220–1 intention, 308, 314 interceding, 95 intercultural conversations, 2 inter-dependence, 291 interdisciplinary approaches, 1 intertextual relationships, 181 intimacy, 218 intoxication, 250, 251–2 intradiegetic level of text, 194 invective (hijā’), 249 invective poetry, 33n5 inversion, 265

invisible world, 189 involuntary behavior, 18 Iran, 7, 133, 191, 237–45 Iran–Iraq War, 237, 242, 246n3 ‘Irāqī, 186 ‘Īsā, Ibrāhīm, 70 Isaf, 116 Iṣfahān, 166 al-Iṣfahānī, Abū al-Faraj, 158, 164–7 Isḥāq, Abū, 178, 202 Ishmael, 116, 124n9 ‘ishq (passionate love), 171, 215–17, 220, 311 ‘Ishtār, 115 Isma‘īl (Fardī), 246n3 isolation, 135–42 Isrāfīl (archangel), 87 Italian lyric poetry, 182 ‘Izrā’īl (angel of death), 87 Jagonak, Martin, 171 al-Jāḥiẓ, Abū ‘Uthmān, 65, 215 Jahrumī, Amīn al-Dīn, 202 Jalāyir, Aḥmad, 185 Jām-i Jam (Marāgha’ī), 197 Jamīl Buthayna, 6–7, 33n5, 155–74, 313 jawā (love and hate), 8, 311, 319, 321n31 Jawāhir al-Qur’ān (al-Ghazālī), 188–9 Jawāmi‘ al-Ladhdha (‘Alī b. Naṣr al-Kātib), 215–27 jealousy, 65–7, 99n14 Job, patience of, 170 Jurisprudence, Islamic, 7 al-Ka‘ba shrine, 102–23, 125n25 Kamāl of Khujand, 197 Kâmûs-u Türkî, 288 Kāshānī, Maḥmūd, 90 al-Kassim, Dina, 246n6

344

345

Index Kennedy, Philip F., 249, 254, 270, 275n9 Keskin, Neslihan Koç, 295n15 Khan, Ruqayya, 25 “Khāna-yi Matrūk” (Farrukhzād), 133–4 Khartoum, 43 Khātūn, Jahān Malik, 7, 177–205 Khātūn, Pādshāh, 195 Khātūn, Qutlughshāh, 195 Khosravi, Shahram, 246n6 Khujandī, Kamāl, 187 Khusraw, Nāṣir, 201 Khusraw va Shīrīn (Niẓāmī), 198–9 Kilpatrick, Hilary, 165, 167 Kīmīyā-yi Sa‘ādat (al-Ghazālī), 201 Kitāb al-Aḍdād (Quṭrub), 302, 314 Kitāb al-Aghānī (al-Iṣfahānī), 158, 165–7, 171–3 Kitāb al-‘Ayn (al-Farāhīdī), 26 Kitāb al- Ṣinā‘atayn, al-Kitāba wa al-Shi‘r (al-‘Askarī), 171–2 Kitāb al-Ṭawāsīn (Ḥallāj), 91 Kitāb Wafayāt al-A‘yān wa-Anbā ’ Abnā ’ al-Zamān (Ibn Khallikān), 158 knowledge, 66–7, 89–90, 271 Kueny, Kathryn M., 276n18 Kull Rijāl al-Ra’īs (Ḥammuda), 80n23 Kundera, Milan, 237 Kunūz al-Asrār (Kāshānī), 90 kurh (hatred), 315, 317 Kvhājū of Kerman, 187 Labīb, al-Ṭāhir, 105 language excessive character of, 273–4 shifting, 165 Latham, J.D., 174n5 Laylī and Majnūn (Niẓāmī), 152n20 al-Laythī, Mamdūḥ, 72 Lentini, Giacomo da, 182 levels of emotion, 17

Lewis, Bernard, 53, 58n15 lexicons, 301 light metaphor of, 266–9 theory of, 94, 99n31 wine radiating, 260 liminality, 4, 7, 263 The Linguistic Turn (Rorty), 294n7 Lisān al-‘Arab (Ibn Manẓūr), 116, 302, 309 Literary Criticism in Medieval Arabic-Islamic Culture (Ouyang), 174n8 literary theory, 286 see also comparative literature literature, and philosophy, 286–7, 292, 293n4 London, 44, 51–2 longing, 157 Lo Stil Novo (the New Style), 182–3 lost love, 14 Lot, people of, 277n28 love antimony of, 291 antonyms of, 314–19 for beloved’s own sake, 219–20, 227 as blessing, 21–2 chaste, 215, 216, 220–2 conventional, 239 dangerous, 4–5 degrees of, 310 as disease, 2, 5, 14–15, 18 divine, 5, 186, 303 English terms for, 301 excessive, 216–17 for a goal, 219–20 intellectual, 220–1 literary descriptions of, 302 lost, 14 medical conception of, 216–18 metaphysical projection of, 181 mundane, 186, 189–90

345

346

Index love (cont.) mystical, 186–9, 219 natural, 303 profane, 178–9 progression of, 23 psychological definitions of, 302 sacred, 178–9 semantic field of, 300–19 sensual, 217, 220–1 sex detached from, 229n25 simultaneous orgasm and, 224 with soul, 219 spiritual, 219, 303 stages of, 3, 300, 303, 312 in Sufism, 122 symptoms of, 23–4, 31 synonyms of, 309–14 thwarted, 157, 169 treatises on, 188 unreciprocated, 4–5, 14, 31, 216 lover, focus on, 156 A Lover’s Discourse (Barthes), 263, 278n33 love sickness, 229n18 love triangles, 238–9 loyalty, 96–7 Lügât-ı Nâcî, 288 luminosity, 30 lust, 242 lyric poetry, 182–3 macrocosmos, 204 madhhab (religion), 150 “Madonna dir vo voglio” (Lentini), 182 majaj (distaste), 315 majāzī (metaphorical) love imagery, 179 Majnūn Laylā, 32, 158, 313 Making the Great Book of Songs (Kilpatrick), 165 malady. see disease

“The Malady of Love” (Biesterfeldt and Hinrich), 229n18 male god, 115–16 see also God Mālik, Imām, 67 malleability, 269 Manāt, 114–15 mannerisms, 18 al-Maqqah, 115 maqt (resentment), 316 Maqtal al-Rajul al-Kabīr (‘Īsā), 70 Marāgha’ī , Awḥadī, 197 marginal text, 108–9 marriage, 51, 109–11, 138, 151n11, 222–6, 244 al-Marwa, Mount, 103, 105, 124n9 masculine pronouns, 34n12 masculine voice, 179, 196, 198 masculinity appearance and behavior of men, 225 courage, 191 feminized, 246n6 prowess, 145 masculinization of the East, 43 of Europe, 51–2 of linguistic communication, 191 “Ma‘shūq-i Man” (Farrukhzād), 135, 142–50 Massé, Henri, 207n15 master-slave dialectic, 293, 297n39 Mas‘ūdshāh, 178 ma‘şūk (beloved), 8, 286–92, 296n20 McKinney, Robert, 15 meadow, meaning of, 141 Mecca, 103–8, 111, 114–15, 124n9 medical conception of love, 18, 216–18 medicine, wine as, 256 Medina, 105 Mehrez, Samia, 75

346

347

Index melancholy, coitus as treatment for, 229n23, 229n24 memories of beloved, 156 men, appearance and behavior of, 225 metafictional techniques, 71 metaphor, 102–23, 187, 189, 294n7 metaphysical projection of love, 181 meter, 25–7, 32 Michael (archangel), 87 microcosmos, 88–9, 188–9, 204 Middle East, pre-modern, 1 Milani, Farzaneh, 143, 152n13 mind-heart dichotomy, 20 Ministry of Culture, 74–6 Mir’āt al Muḥaqqiqīn (Shabistarī), 89 misogyny, 196–8, 225–6 modernism, 4 Muhammad, Prophet, 91, 94 monorhyme, 22, 27, 29 monotheism, 91, 96, 105, 116 Montgomery, James, 175n13 moon god, 114–15 moon goddess, 106 Moosa, Ebrahim, 31 “moral surgeon” (jarrāḥ-i akhlāqī), 239, 242 morphing of desire, 5 Moses, 91–2 Mu‘allaqa (al-Qays), 156 Mubarak, Hosni, 71 Mubarak, Suzanne, 73 Muḥammad ‘Alī, 75 Mu‘izzī, Amīr, 186 Mu‘jam al-Aḍdād (Ibn al-Anbārī), 314 Al-Mu‘jam al-Wasīṭ, 309 Mu‘jam Maqā’īs al-Lugha (Ibn Fāris), 302, 309 al-Mukhaṣṣaṣ (Ibn Sīda), 309 multiplicity, 274 munā (desire), 170 mundane love, 186, 189–90

Al-Munjid fī al-Mutarādifāt wa al-Mutajānisāt (al-Yasū‘ī), 309 Muqriyya, ʿĀysha, 195 Al-Musawi, Mushin, 78n4 muse, 151n5 musicality, 25–6 Mu‘tazilism, 249, 274n6 al-Muwashshā (al-Washshā’), 216, 222 mysteries, 89 mystical love, 186–7, 189, 219 mystification, 47, 50 Mythologies (Barthes), 279n46 Naila, 116 nails of love, 218–19, 230n30 nakedness, 138, 144 naqama (vengeful resentment), 316 narratives, simultaneous, 108–9 nasīb (introductory section of poem), 14 Nassaar, Christopher S., 49–50 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 75 natural love, 303 nature, 141, 145 navel of the earth, 111, 116, 123 al-Naẓẓām, Ibrāhīm, 249 neighborhood committees, 241 Neimneh, Shadi, 44 nepotism, 72 Neuwirth, Angelika, 32 Nielsen, D., 115 Niẓāmī, 146, 152n20, 198–9 nominative case, 28–9 nonsensical phrases, 62 Noorani, Yaseen, 248, 250, 258, 268 norms, 17, 196 nouns, 306, 308, 313–14, 318 novels, banned, 237 obedience, of women, 226–7 objectification, 47 obscenity, 219

347

348

Index obsession, 24, 241, 244–5 occult power, 67–8 oneness, 91, 120 onomatopoeia, 28 opening line of poem, 16 opposing emotions, 290 opposites, binary, 291 oppression, 92 oral performances, 79n17 orgasm, 224–5, 232n57, 232n64 Orient, sexualized, 41, 50–4 Oriental body, 45–8, 54, 57 Orientalism, 50–5 Orpheus, 173 Ostrovsky, Nikolai, 246n3 Othello (Shakespeare), 56 Otto, Walter, 278n34 Ottoman literature, 8, 285–93 “Out of the Closet” (Al-Samman), 77n1 Ouyang, Wen-Chin, 174n8 over-signification, 265, 272 Oxford University, 43, 50 paganism, 114 panic, homosexual, 5, 63–4 Papan-Matin, Firoozeh, 91 paradox, 15, 19–20, 23, 35n29 “Paranda Murdanīst” (Farrukhzād), 137–8 paranoia, 68 parody, 265 passion of Christ, 170 passive participles, 306, 313–14, 318 “Pāsukh” (Farrukhzād), 134–5 path toward beloved, 120–1 patience, 170 patrons, 15, 166, 199 Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich, 46 Paz, Octavio, 286 pearls, 267 pen names (takhalluṣ), 193–4, 199–202

perception, 92 perseverance, 146 Persian language, 191, 200 persona, literary, 207n23 personality, model conceptions of, 142 phallo-logocentrism, 191 philology, 14, 16–22 philosophy, and literature, 286–7, 292, 293n4 phonetics, 26–7 pilgrimage, 102–6, 117, 123 place disturbed relationship with, 53–4 feminine, 110 sacred, 114, 116 Plato, 2, 171, 217, 278n33, 286 platonic love, 171 “Plato’s Pharmacy” (Derrida), 276n19 play, 264–5 poetic persona, 179, 184, 190–4 poetry biological element of, 198, 204 conventions of, 192–3 immoral experience of, 273 invective, 33n5 as lover, 134 space of, 249 transmission of, 155 The Politics of Friendship (Derrida), 297n39 polyvocal techniques, 71 possession, 41 possessiveness, 5 postcolonial theory, 41, 56 postmodernism, 4, 286, 292 potency, 250, 269 pouring, 267 power, and sexuality, 51–2 praise poetry, 208n34, 248–9 prayer rituals, 106 predicates, 29 pre-Islamic poets, 155–6

348

349

Index pre-Islamic traditions, 123 pre-modern Middle East, 1 presuppositions, 46 pride, 86 private sphere, 46 profane love, 178–9 progression of love, 23 proliferation, 318–19 prosody, 25–6 prowess, masculine, 145 public debate, 291 public image, 50 public sphere, 46 puns, 203–4 pure lifestyle, 215 purification, 112, 241 Qabbānī, Nizār, 107 al-Qālī, Abū ‘Alī Ismā‘īl b. al-Qāsim, 164–7, 171 qaṣīda poetry, 13, 155, 168, 175n13, 184, 193, 279n48 al-Qazwīnī, al-Khaṭīb, 16 qilā (strong hatred), 316 “Queer Effects” (Al-Samman and El-Ariss), 77n1 question and answer method, 287 questioner, 288 Qur’an, 21, 28, 36n59, 86–7, 98n1, 174, 255–7, 276n17, 276n18 Quṭrub, Abū ‘Alī Muḥammad b. al-Mustanīr, 302, 314 rakīb/rakîb(rival), 8, 286–92, 296n21, 297n22 Rakîb’e Dair (Şentürk), 288 realism, 182 reconstruction of texts, 155, 158–60, 164–5, 168, 173 reference works, 164 refined yearning, 216, 222 rejection, 23

religion, 150 religious symbolism, 104–5, 120, 122 Rembert, James A.W., 287 renewed beauty, 20 repetition of names, 22, 119–20 repression, sexual, 52 reproach, 99n14 reproduction, 220 repulsion, 317 respondent, 288 revealing, 29–30 revelation, 25 revenge, 44, 55 revolution etymology of term, 53, 58n15 Iranian, 7, 237–45 Revolution Street (Cheheltan), 237–45 rhetorical terminology, 290, 294n7 The Rhetoric of Sobriety (Kueny), 276n18 rhyme, 22 The Ring of the Dove (al-Andalusī), 2, 4 Risāla fī Kitmān al-Sirr wa Ḥifẓ al-Lisān (al-Jāḥiẓ), 65 Risāla-yi Ṣad Pand, (Zākānī), 197 ritual, 106–7, 110, 117 rivalry, 61, 74, 245, 286 roles of lovers, 2 romantic relationships, 218 Rorty, Richard, 286, 294n6, 294n7 Rowson, Everett, 261, 277n28 Rufus of Ephesus, 229n23 Rūmī, 186 Rūzbihān Baqlī, 85, 90–3 ṣa‘ālīk (brigand) poets, 174n1 ṣabāba (strong love), 311 Sabeans, 114 sacred love, 178–9 sacred territory (ḥaram), 114, 117 sacrifice, 263 sacrilege, 250

349

350

Index Sadat, Anwar, 75 Sa‘dī, 146, 186–7 sadomasochism, 291 ṣafā’ (reciprocated friendship), 170 al-Ṣafā, Mount, 102–5, 124n9 Sahl, Mu‘ādh b., 302 Said, Edward, 48, 52–5, 58n15 sakhaṭ (abhorrence), 315 Salāma, Rajā’a b., 104–5 Salih, Tayeb, 5, 41–57 Sālim, Al-Sa‘īd ‘Abd al-‘Azīz, 115 salons, literary, 15 samā‘ sessions, 184 Samarqandī, Dawlatshāh, 198, 202 Al-Samman, Hanadi, 60, 77n1 Sanā’ī, Ḥakīm, 96–8 Sandler, Rivanne, 151n5 Sanjarī, Siyāmak, 246n5 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 319 Satan (Iblīs) embodiment of sin and evil, 95 God’s lover, 5, 85–98 light of, 94 rival of Adam, 297n26 sympathy for, 90–7 watcher at gate, 94–5 satyrs, 278n34 Saudi Arabia, 4, 6, 123, 159 Sāvajī, Salmān, 202 Savāniḥ (Ghazālī), 89–94, 188, 200–1 scandal literature, 70–1, 77 Scheherazade, 103–4 Season of Migration to the North (Salih), 5, 41–57 secrecy, 25, 64–7, 70, 89 secular cultural field, 75 seduction, 61, 64–5, 69–70, 249–57 Seduction (Baudrillard), 78n10, 264–5 seeds, 120, 303–4

self of author, 192 awareness of, 137, 148 dissolution of, 250 purification of, 112 sacrifice of, 263 self-confidence, 135 self-consciousness, 147 semantic capacities of words, 17 semantic field of love, 300–19 sensuality, 217, 220–1 Şentürk, Ahmet Atillâ, 288 separation, 96, 292 servitude, 292 sex detached from love, 229n25 positive effects of, 217–18 Shabistarī, Shaykh Maḥmūd, 89 shaghaf (passionate love), 310 Shāhnāma (Firdausī), 3, 144 Shahristānī, 297n26 Shāh Shujā‘, 178 Shakespeare, 56 Shams, 115 shana’ān (hate), 315 Sharḥ-i Shaṭḥiyyāt (Rūzbihān), 91 Sharī‘a, 95 al-Sharqāwī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, 72–3 Shawqī, Aḥmad, 107 Shaykh, Sa‘diyya, 121 shifting language, 165 Shiites, 222 shining, 266–7 Sicilian school of poetry, 182–3 sighs, 24–5, 28, 32 signification, 265 silence, 24–5 simplicity, 147, 149 simultaneous narratives, 108–9 simultaneous orgasm, 224 Sīmurgh, 100n41, 139 sin, 95, 249, 257

350

351

Index Sīn, 115–16 sincerity, 182–3 singing, 24–5 Skinner, Quentin, 294n7 slander literature, 69–71 sleeplessness, 23 sociology of sexual relations, 223 Socrates, 222 sodomites (lūṭī), 60, 63–4, 260 solitude, 182 Solomon, 114 sophistry, 256 soul loving, 219 Platonic notions of, 2 sound qualities, 28 space of drunkenness, 269–71 poetic, 249 Spain, 166 spice traders, 113 spiritual love, 219, 303 standards of behavior, 142 Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (Agamben), 278n41 state funding of artists, 75 stereotypes, 42, 54 style, poetic, 180 Sudan, 43 suffering, 17 Sufism, 4–6, 85, 103–6, 118–22, 184, 216 Sulṭānpūr, Sa’īd, 246n5 sun goddess, 114 Sunnis, 222 suspicion, 140 al-Suyūṭī, Jalāl al-Dīn ‘Abd al-Raḥmān, 221, 227 Swift, Jonathan, 287, 295n12 symbolism, religious, 120, 122 Symposium (Plato), 171, 278n33

symptoms of love, 23–4, 31 synonyms of love, 301, 309–14 Tāj al-‘Arūs (al-Zabīdī), 302 Tamhīdāt (al-Quḍāt), 188 “Tanhā Sidāst Ka Mīmānad” (Farrukhzād), 143 Tanpinar, Ahmet Hamdi, 295n15 “Tavalludī Dīgar” (Farrukhzād), 135 tawq (longing love), 311 Ṭawq al-Ḥamāma (Ibn Ḥazm), 18 taym (extreme love), 311 Tehran, 237–45 temporary marriage, 222 temptation, 255–7 text concept of, 286 and culture, 55 inaccessibility of, 123 al-Tha‘ālibī, Abū Manṣūr, 17 theological disputation, 249, 271 The Postcolonial Arabic Novel (Al-Musawi), 78n4 thwarted love, 157, 169 timbre, 27 timelessness, 29–30, 147, 269–70 tradition, 142–5 transcendence, 29–30, 32, 187 transfiguration, 186–90 transformation, 110, 259, 265 transgression, 4, 6, 237, 249–52, 258, 261–2 translation, 160–1, 237 transmission of poems, 155 transvestitism, 8, 264 Treasure Trove, 65 treatises on love, 188 trust, 95 truth, 271–2, 288–90 Turkey, 166 turquoise, 65 tutorial rituals, 110

351

352

Index ‘Udhrī poetry, 33n5, 104, 106, 156–7, 171 Umayyad Spain, 166 unbearable lightness, 268 The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Kundera), 237 underworld, king of, 109–10 union with beloved, 23, 94, 120, 219 unknowable, the, 253, 256, 268 unreciprocated love, 4–5, 14, 31, 216 urban lifestyle, 215 urīdu (I want), 170 ‘Uṣyān-i Khudā (Farrukhzād), 134 Uvays, Shaykh, 185 al-‘Uzza, 114–15 “Vahm-i Sabz” (Farrukhzād), 135, 143 variants, textual, 164–5 verbal forms, 304–6 verbal sounds, 29 violence, 8, 45, 262, 314 virility, 191 virtual insincerity, 183 virtue, 222–3, 231n50 visible desire, 225 visible world, 189 Vīs va Rāmīn (Gurgānī), 4 voyeurs, 8, 66 Wahhabi theology, 6 Waḥīd (Ibn al-Rūmī), 13–32 wajd (passion), 170 wala‘ (obsessive love), 311 walah (lost in love), 311 warrior imagery, 144 washing, ritual, 117 al-Washshā’, Abū Ṭayyib Muḥammad b. Isḥāq, 216, 218–19, 222 water

“love” semantically related to, 304 wine mixed with, 269, 279n46, 279n47 Weintraub, Karl, 142 White, Hayden, 294n7 willful beloved, 157 will of God, 90–1 wine (khamr) abode of, 269–71 erotic-rhetorical function of, 248–74 feminine character of, 227n27, 277n26 as medicine, 256 prohibition of, 276n18 wine poems (khamriyya), 248–74, 274n1 Wine Song (Kennedy), 275n9 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 294n7 women agency, 7 in history of Mecca, 104 obedience of, 226–7 poetry composed by, 195 sacredness of, 122 satisfaction of, 232n64 types of, 224 voices of, 7 wine as feminine, 260 world as woman, 201 wood crafting, 113 Woods, Michelle, 237 world, as woman, 201 worrying, 258 worship, 103, 106–7 wrath, 92–3 written images, 55 wudd (friendliness), 170, 310 “Wujūm” (Abāẓa), 79n23 Wyatt, Daisy, 246n8

352

353

Index Yamūt, Bashīr, 174n5 al-Yasū‘ī, Rafa’īl Naḥla, 309 Yemen, 109, 159 “you,” fictitious, 183–5, 190, 204 Young and Defiant in Tehran (Khosravi), 246n6

al-Zabīdī, 302 Zākānī, ‘Ubayd, 178–9, 197, 202 Zaki, Mona, 76 Zamzam Well, 105, 124n9 Zuroski, Eugenia, 53

353

354